Envelope of Papers Manuscripts Marked with Red Words (Nothing is final)

2015年09月28日

Qian Xuesen is a great scientist, and the scientific fields he had been engaged in and his achievements are scattered like an array of stars. He is often regarded as a talent, but the public only believes in achievements and genius, but fail to observe his endless, unsurpassable efforts.

After graduating from his doctorate degree, Qian Xuesen became one of researchers of Caltech. In order to solve the problem of shell distortion (called “buckling” in terms of mechanics) caused by the high-speed flying of aircrafts, Qian Xuesen began to study solid mechanics, and dug into shell theory with his teacher Von Kármán.

They discussed the framework of the physical model together, set up corresponding mathematical models, and solved equations, analysed calculation data and prepared diagrams. They worked out results through repeated derivations and calculating, and verified them by virtue of experiments. It is easier said than done, and the whole derivation process was very arduous, because they had to observe the buckling experiment in the lab for each critical procedure, constantly modified the frame model, even making a completely new start, and could not stop until they obtained precise results.   

In 1941, when writing the paper “Cylindrical Shell Axial Buckling”, Qian Xuesen revised it five times and used more than 700 pages of manuscripts to make calculations. The final version was published in the US Aeronautics Journal with only 10 pages. The calculated data were precise to eight digits after the decimal point. You know, in the days without the emergence of calculator, reaching such precision necessitated an extremely huge workload.

Qian Xuesen sighed with relief to see the final version of the papers determined. He wrote a big word “Final” on the surface of the envelope that contained the manuscripts. While he was to put it away, Qian Xuesen suddenly came to realize, “Final” also referred to “end”. However, there was no end to the exploration of science and truth. The road to explore science and truth was endless.

Therefore, he took the envelope, added two words after the word “Final” and formed a sentence “Nothing is final” with additional three exclamation marks. He wanted to remind himself to not be sluggish, make continuous efforts and strive for further improvement.

This story might be the most famous anecdote of Qian Xuesen, because almost all the biographies and stories about Qian Xuesen mention it. However, there is just one original copy of “Nothing is final”, which is collected by the Qian Xuesen Library to display, and is the most important treasure of the library. When seeing this envelope and thinking of its background story, a feeling would come to the mind of many visitors: genius truly cannot be without ninety-nine percent perspiration.