Translator: Dreamscribe
In physics, energy exists in many forms, but in real-world systems, it most commonly manifests as heat.
So it was only inevitable that Seo-ha, while completing his theory, found his thoughts turning to the problem of heat.
'For heat to be dissipated most efficiently, what kind of structure would a material need to have?'
The most common solution for heat dissipation was increasing surface area. But that ca with spatial constraints.
In reality, heat does not travel along a single path.
Conduction, convection, and radiation all act simultaneously, and if a bottleneck forms in even one of them, overall efficiency drops dramatically.
'Theoretically, it should be possible.'
Seo-ha thought of the Encyclopedia Collection.
Structures in nature that dissipate heat best.
The trabecular skeleton of coral, the alveoli of mammalian lungs, the reticulate venation of leaves. All of them maximize surface area while never confining flow to a single direction. Their microscopic branching structures are designed to inherently avoid bottlenecks.
"Fractal (Fractal * a form in which a single pattern repeats endlessly at different scales)."
A structure that maintains the sa properties regardless of scale.
If every possible path for heat movent were left open, the heat could be made to flow on its own toward the direction of least resistance, in other words, toward the point of minimum energy.
"Now this is interesting."
Seo-ha broke into a grin.
In the sense that it selects the fastest path to equilibrium within given conditions, the movent of heat was essentially no different from an energy optimization problem.
'Then what properties would the tal need to have?'
Swish.
Matter always seeks to move toward its most comfortable state. Expressed mathematically, that would be the point where the gradient equals zero, the global minimum. But in real-world systems, countless local minima exist, and heat easily becos trapped there. That is when bottleneck phenona appear.
"To solve this...."
As Seo-ha trailed off, a question shot out from one side of the conference room.
"Hold on!"
Jane raised her hand.
They were in the main conference room of the Materials Science departnt, where the professor and postdocs sat in a semicircle around Seo-ha. The mont word spread that Seo-ha had co, everyone had dropped what they were doing and rushed over.
"I understand the idea of getting trapped in a local minimum. But isn't it unrealistic to say you can solve that with a material?"
The postdoc next to her nodded in agreent.
"Heat doesn't move like a math equation. Real tals aren't that obedient."
Jane adjusted her glasses.
"Fractal structures are sothing you see in living organisms. tals have clear processing limitations. Even if you create a microscopic branching structure, it'll just get blocked at the interface."
Seo-ha nodded.
The conference room fell silent for a mont.
"Right. So I'm not saying we should create a fractal in tal. I ant we should spread the heat across the whole body the way a fractal does."
Seo-ha walked to the whiteboard and picked up a pen.
Swish.
"The problem isn't the shape. It's the nature of the path."
He drew a diagram of how tal conducts heat.
Then he pointed to a single arrow at the boundary.
"Heat transfer is blocked here. But heat wants to move. It was simply that there was no physical path past the interface. While researching Minimum Energy Theory, I found that satisfying certain conditions could solve this problem."
'Solve it?'
The professor's eyebrows twitched.
Heat generation was the single greatest obstacle in semiconductor fabrication. The higher the integration density, the more heat each individual transistor produces, growing at an exponential rate.
Even with heat sinks, fans, and even liquid or nitrogen cooling, the limits had always been clear. If this could be solved....
'Clock speed limits would disappear.'
"Hrrk!"
The professor let out a deep groan.
Everything he had built up over his career in semiconductor processing knowledge was being turned upside down at once. Designs abandoned because of heat, performance trimd away under the pretense of ensuring stability.
Perhaps none of that would need to be sacrificed anymore.
He looked urgently at Seo-ha and asked.
"What are those conditions?"
"You eliminate the boundaries that block heat transfer.
So that energy flows smoothly through the interior of the tal."
The engineers' expressions darkened.
"..position Gradient."
FGM (Functionally Graded Material).
One of the most difficult tals to produce.
It required designing and implenting disparate material properties with no discontinuity, making it a monuntal challenge from the very start.
In that it tolerates not even the slightest adjustnt error, its fabrication difficulty was the highest tier.
"Yes. An alloy where the composition (Composition * elental ratio) changes gradually, a structure where subtly different states of alloy coexist continuously."
The professor snapped to attention.
"Then the heat would...."
Seo-ha produced his data as if he had been waiting for that very question.
"I have the results of my calculations right here. Please create a tal that satisfies these conditions.
In this alloy, every ti heat moves, it can always find a better state to move toward.
An alloy that satisfies the minimum energy conditions. Theoretically, it is the tal that accumulates the least heat of any material in existence."
Flip.
The professor's eyes moved rapidly as they scanned the pages.
He was one of the world's foremost authorities in the field of tals, yet it took him no small amount of ti to comprehend the docunts Seo-ha had presented.
Everyone held their breath as they watched him.
'Good Lord!'
His eyes widened and his breathing grew rapid.
Seo-ha, drawing on fractal-based thinking, had designed functions in which the thermal conductivity, the coefficient of thermal expansion, and the electrical resistance within a tal all varied continuously as a function of position.
In this structure, heat always encountered a path of lower resistance as it moved, never becoming trapped in a local minimum. The very points where bottlenecks, stress concentrations, and hot spots would form had been eliminated at their source.
Where the end lay, or whether an end even existed at all, no one could say. Yet Seo-ha had solved it.
The professor stared at Seo-ha with a dazed look in his eyes.
Seo-ha misread his expression.
"Was this too difficult a request? In that case, maybe the tallurgical Engineering departnt would...."
"No!"
The professor cried out urgently.
He was a gentleman who rarely showed emotion, so the postdocs flinched in surprise.
"We can do it! No, we absolutely must!"
The function for designing the optimal thermal conductivity ratio in tals; because this was a structure that made workaround designs impossible, it was a patent destined to beco the industry standard.
Before long, the entire semiconductor industry, worth thousands of trillions, would be hanging on this.
"Really? Thank you."
Seo-ha's face lit up, and he stood and bowed deeply.
"Given the sensitive nature of this matter, it would be best to draft a contract first."
The deans of the two departnts gathered.
Whitman had been enjoying himself lately, eting with other departnts more often thanks to Seo-ha. And from a position of overwhelming advantage, no less.
At a eting attended by the legal team and the technology transfer office, equity shares and the scope of rights were determined.
"The Materials Science side's share will be this much."
The head of the legal team wrote down the figure.
"That's fine with us."
It was the bare minimum, yet there was surprisingly no objection. The technology for producing FGM was certainly important, but the core of the patent did not lie there.
Seo-ha was, of course, also present. He turned the pages of the docunts in silence.
'I didn't complete this theory alone.'
His hand reached the last page.
Swish.
Seo-ha signed.
'Team Apex'
Financial freedom,
Through this, Seo-ha hoped his team mbers would gain the opportunity to make freer choices.
* * *
The Dean's Office of the Mathematics Departnt,
A cup of chamomile tea sat before Seo-ha.
Clink.
"Thank you."
"Don't ntion it. These days, thanks to you, I feel as though I've gone back to my youth."
Whitman chuckled in his low voice.
His eyes sparkling, he spent a good while asking Seo-ha how things had been.
The team mbers were deep in preparing their papers. Minimum Energy Theory had undergone its final revisions and would soon be the first to be published in Science.
After that, the three of them would still need to prepare follow-up papers. They were, quite literally, overwheld with work in the best possible way.
"Take a look at this."
Slide.
Seo-ha picked up the docunt Whitman held out.
"Huh?"
[Patent Application]
-Dynamical conditions guaranteeing the existence and convergence of a global minimum energy solution in multi-path energy transfer systems.
A question surfaced in Seo-ha's eyes.
"Didn't we decide to just release this openly?"
"We did."
Whitman nodded.
"But this is...."
"'There is no patent on sunlight.' Do you happen to know who said that?"
Seo-ha shook his head.
"It was Dr. Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine. He turned down the enormous sums pharmaceutical companies offered and released his patent for free.
As a result, the incidence of polio today has fallen to roughly one percent of pre-Salk levels. How many lives do you suppose that decision saved?"
Seo-ha listened in silence.
"After you all left, I discussed this with many people. And this is the conclusion we reached."
"B-but."
"A number of professors shared the sa view. The consensus was that your theory is like sunlight. No advanced industry of the future will be able to avoid it."
Whitman paused to collect his breath.
"The choice you made was as noble as Dr. Salk's. But please, do not underestimate human malice.
If you do not own it, thieves will inevitably appear. Even if you release it for free, there will be attempts to distort it or file derivative patents, claiming they thought it was open theory."
It was a form of violence Seo-ha had never even imagined.
His mouth fell open.
Whitman had left the royalty field on the last page of the patent application blank. When Seo-ha saw it, he hesitated before speaking.
"Do we have to charge money?"
"Ownership alone accomplishes nothing. Enforcent cos from licensing agreents. This is a asure to protect everyone."
Seo-ha gave a resolute nod, as though he had made up his mind, and picked up the pen.
Swish.
「One Cent.」
Whitman watched Seo-ha for a long ti as he filled in the amount, signed, and walked out.
"As an adult, I'm sorry."
For failing to build a better world.
The fact that this was the only way he could protect a young scholar's purity weighed on him deeply.
But this, too, was sothing he had to do, as an adult who cared about him.
* * *
A few days later, the news spread faster than anyone had imagined.
It was industry, not academia, that moved first.
At first, there was confusion.
Legal teams at each company picked up the patent docunts and stared at one another's faces.
They checked the number, double-checked the unit, and reread the sentence again and again.
「One Cent.」
"Is this a typo?"
"No, it's USD 0.01."
"That's basically free?"
But the mont they turned to the next page, their expressions changed.
The MIT legal team was a group well-versed in handling patents. What was written there was a set of brief and unambiguous provisions.
-This license requires adherence to the minimum energy convergence conditions without modification.
-Filing of derivative patents that compromise, weaken, or circumvent the conditions of this theory is prohibited. However, separate patents for implentations, materials, structures, and processes that faithfully satisfy the above conditions shall be recognized.
-Users who do not agree to these terms shall not be granted a license.
Only then did everyone understand.
This was not a cheap patent.
"So the one cent is an admission fee, essentially."
The head of legal at a semiconductor company murmured.
"Exactly. It's not about money. It's a signature agreeing to the order he created."
Companies could not profit from patents that modified the theory.
They could not muddy the market with sches like deliberately degrading performance. With just these few lines, he had put an end to the "workaround design competition" that had been industry practice for decades.
"Isn't this a monopoly?"
Soone fud.
"No, it's the opposite. He made it so no one can monopolize."
And so the industry began to call this patent by a new na.
'SH's 1 Cent Law.'
Using the theory was free.
But now there was a law they all had to follow.
*****
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