Expelled, But I Rewrote Physics

Chapter 003

Once the meeting ended, Kevin Shaw left the conference room with Daniel Hayes and headed downstairs.

The door had barely closed behind them when the room relaxed into that familiar post-meeting atmosphere found in every research group: people loosening their posture, voices dropping into less formal tones, and restrained professional expressions giving way to personal reactions.

A lean doctoral student let out a quiet scoff.

“He actually said our preliminary experiment might be wrong?”

It was Samuel Lowell, the doctoral student under Professor Brooks who had snapped back at Daniel during the meeting. Now that the newcomer was out of earshot, the contempt in his voice became even less concealed.

Another doctoral student beside him nodded and joined in. “He looks barely out of college. Early twenties, at most. He heard half the discussion and immediately started pointing fingers. That’s bold.”

Or ignorant, the tone implied.

“People are allowed to speak freely when we’re trying to find the source of a problem,” Professor Fly said casually. He did not sound offended, only mildly reflective. Then he turned to Professor Brooks with visible curiosity. “But hold on. You said he used to be Kevin Shaw’s doctoral student at Frankenston University? Then why is Professor Shaw talking as if he’ll be joining our project here? A doctoral student from Frankenston University can’t just casually participate in our project, can he?”

“I know the story,” Professor Brooks said, with the expression of someone who had been holding onto an interesting piece of gossip and was now deciding how much to share. “Kevin Shaw mentioned it to me yesterday. The kid’s planning to come here and continue his PhD.”

“Transfer?” someone asked. “That’s not easy to process administratively.”

“Not a transfer,” Professor Brooks said. “He was expelled.”

The room fell still for a second.

A PhD student?

Expelled?

And at his age, it obviously couldn’t be for exceeding the maximum enrollment period.

Several people exchanged glances. Curiosity sharpened immediately. Academic circles loved nothing more than the collision of talent and scandal.

Seeing their expressions, Professor Brooks lowered his voice. “I’m only telling you this because it’ll come out sooner or later. Don’t spread it around carelessly.” He paused, then continued. “It was because of an experimental paper. Frankenston University decided the data in the paper had been fabricated and moved directly to expel him. But Professor Shaw thinks very highly of the student.”

He shook his head and sighed with a kind of conflicted admiration. “I have to say, Frankenston University really does produce remarkable people. A physics doctoral student in his early twenties... that’s not something you see every day.”

They discussed the matter for a bit longer, but, as was often the case in labs, gossip could only hold the room’s attention for so long. Before long, the group drifted back to the problem that actually mattered to their work.

The preliminary experiment.

Every person in the room had confidence in it. That confidence had not been built casually. It was based on months of work, repeated measurements, calculations, internal cross-checking, and the emotional investment that always accompanied a result important enough to be called a breakthrough.

And yet the mismatch remained.

The follow-up validation work and subsequent analysis simply did not line up with what the earlier result should have implied. That was an objective fact.

So where exactly had the discrepancy entered?

Most of them still leaned toward the view that the stanene growth experiment itself must have gone wrong somewhere. Maybe the procedure had not been perfectly standardized. Maybe some environmental factor had interfered. Maybe the instrumentation in one stage of testing had introduced deviation. Maybe there had been subtle contamination. Maybe some parameter, seemingly trivial, was exerting an outsized effect.

They circled through possibility after possibility.

Still no conclusion.

Downstairs, meanwhile, Kevin Shaw brought Daniel Hayes into his office.

“Sit.”

He dragged over a chair for Daniel, then dropped heavily into his own office chair with the exhausted force of a man who had been fighting technical problems, administrative pressure, and other people’s flawed reasoning for too many hours in one day. Stretching both arms overhead, he let out a long breath.

“Busy morning,” he muttered.

Then he rubbed at his temple and sighed. “The experiment isn’t giving us what it’s supposed to, and no one can pin down why.”

He paused for a moment, then looked up again. “Earlier, when you said the preliminary experiment might be the issue—did you actually have a specific idea, or were you just making a general point?”

Daniel touched the back of his head and smiled in a modest, almost sheepish way.

“I only understood the broad outline.”

That part was true.

“From a normal reasoning perspective, if the predicted result and the actual result don’t match, then either the current experiment has a problem, or the earlier experiment—or the analysis based on it—has a problem.”

He spread his hands slightly. “The current experiment sounds like it’s been done very carefully, right? So if you eliminate the obvious option, that leaves the earlier work.”

“That logic is fair enough,” Kevin Shaw admitted.

He pursed his lips, thought for a second, then slowly shook his head. “But the preliminary experiment was done a long time ago, and it’s been treated as the biggest achievement since the project began. The experiment itself, the data, the analysis—the whole team signed off on it. People trust it.”

Daniel’s expression turned more serious.

“No one likes to question a result that matters. I understand that,” he said. “But right is right, and wrong is wrong. If the contradiction won’t go away, then the only rational thing is to go back and reexamine everything from start to finish. Carefully. Step by step. Maybe then the real problem will show itself.”

He stopped there.

There was no point saying more.

He had not yet formally joined the research group. His understanding was still incomplete, limited to the general content of the project rather than the full operational and technical details. Even if True Perception had already told him that the preliminary experiment was wrong, he could not point to the exact broken link in the chain. Not yet.

Kevin Shaw sat in thought for a while, clearly turning the idea over in his head. But eventually he let the topic drop, perhaps because the issue was too large to resolve in one offhand conversation, perhaps because he had other urgent matters to settle first.

Instead, he shifted to Daniel’s admission.

“Your enrollment will happen in March,” he said. “I applied to the university for two openings. When the time comes, you’ll just go through the normal procedures along with the other incoming doctoral students.”

It made sense. A doctoral student who had been expelled from one university was, institutionally speaking, no longer continuing a previous enrollment. If he followed Kevin Shaw to Ivystate University, then legally and administratively, he would have to enter through a fresh admission process.

“Once you’re officially enrolled,” Kevin Shaw continued, “you’ll join the new project under me. Metamaterials—you already know the broad area, so I don’t need to explain the field itself. The difference here is in the research direction. We’re focusing mainly on thermoelectric materials and stanene.”

Daniel listened and nodded. He understood both directions well enough.

Thermoelectric materials, in simple terms, were materials capable of converting heat directly into electrical energy. It was the kind of field that combined practical promise with difficult materials science—highly attractive in theory, endlessly demanding in execution.

Stanene, meanwhile, was a two-dimensional material made of a single layer of tin atoms. As a topological insulator, its edge states were theoretically capable of achieving perfect conductivity at room temperature. In the long run, it was one of those materials that kept showing up in discussions about the future of electronic devices—possibly even as a successor to graphene in certain applications, if enough of the theory could be realized experimentally.

Kevin Shaw opened a drawer, took out a thick stack of printed materials, and handed them over.

“Start with these. Get yourself prepared in advance. They cover the theoretical framework and mathematical foundation tied to the project.”

He tapped the stack. “Two of them are overseas research papers. Pay special attention to those.”

Then he added, “And spend extra time on the computational analysis side. I want you to understand that part more thoroughly.”

He leaned back in his chair and said, “Professor Fly’s group is specifically responsible for the computational work. What I want is for you, together with the others, to independently verify the results they provide. If the data gets checked twice from different angles, we’ll have stronger confidence in it.”

Daniel accepted the papers and skimmed the titles. His heart moved a little faster.

This was good.

Very good.

Outwardly, he only nodded and said, “I’ll go through them carefully.”

Then Kevin Shaw chuckled and added, half teasing, “Earlier you said the preliminary experiment might be wrong. If you somehow manage to prove through computation that there’s a data issue in that earlier work, then you’d be handing us the answer directly.”

It was clearly meant as a joke.

After all, Professor Fly’s group had a strong reputation. Their computational work, especially the calculations and analysis tied to the preliminary experiment, had already been checked multiple times. In ordinary terms, the chance of finding a glaring mistake there seemed extremely low.

Daniel’s math background was good. More than good, really.

But finding the flaw in a result that an established research group had already rechecked over and over? That sounded like the kind of thing people said lightly because they did not actually expect it to happen.

Daniel, however, took the idea seriously.

In fact, he thought it was very likely the right direction.

If True Perception said the preliminary experiment was wrong, then the error was probably not some mystical accident hiding in the air. More likely, it was embedded somewhere in the chain of data handling, modeling, interpretation, or analysis. That was where a wrong conclusion most often disguised itself as a solid one.

He kept those thoughts to himself.

For a while, the office fell quiet.

Then Kevin Shaw’s expression changed slightly. The joking tone vanished. He was silent for a long moment before speaking again.

“As for that earlier experiment and the paper... don’t keep dwelling on it for now.”

His voice was steady, but the concern underneath it was obvious.

“If the paper stays on Web of Science, then it stays. I checked this morning. Frankenston University is probably going to issue a public notice on their side.” He paused, then said more gently, “Try not to keep replaying it in your head. Once the online attention moves on, people will stop caring.”

He was worried.

Not just about the expulsion itself, though that alone was already severe enough. There was also the flood of online ridicule and hostility. It was a textbook case of internet dogpiling—the kind that mixed moral outrage, pseudo-expertise, mockery, and the thrill ordinary people took in watching someone get publicly crushed.

On one side, Daniel had been dragged through online humiliation.

On the other, he had been publicly expelled by Frankenston University.

And he was still only in his early twenties.

A young man who had, until recently, advanced smoothly and almost exceptionally through the academic system. Someone like that might be brilliant, but brilliance did not automatically come with emotional resilience. A person who had never really been tested by life could break in ways outsiders failed to anticipate.

Daniel could see all of this in Kevin Shaw’s eyes.

He listened seriously, then answered with equal sincerity.

“Professor Shaw, thank you.”

He meant it.

“Don’t worry. I’ve already thought it through.”

He gave a light, easy smile. “I can still continue my PhD under you. Compared with that, the rest really isn’t worth obsessing over.”

It was a deliberately relaxed answer, but it was not false.

In one sense, he truly had thought it through. He was no longer merely the original Daniel—the young academic whose mind had been cornered by scandal, institutional abandonment, and despair until he chose the river. He carried another life’s fatigue, another life’s hardening, another life’s bitter understanding of what actually mattered.

A public scandal was painful.

Expulsion was humiliating.

But as long as the road ahead still existed, none of it was terminal.

Kevin Shaw smiled too, visibly relieved.

“Good. Seeing you like this, I’m less worried.”

Then he asked, more casually, “What about life outside the lab? Any pressure there? We won’t be able to arrange campus housing for you right away, so you’ll have to rent a place off campus. If you run into any problems, come to me.”

He was talking about money, of course.

Daniel understood immediately. This was not empty politeness. It was the kind of quiet support a real mentor offered without making a student feel pitied.

Daniel stood up, patted his pocket, and said with a grin, “I don’t eat much, and I don’t spend much. I’m not carrying a fortune, but I’ve got enough for now.”

Kevin Shaw nodded. “That’s good.”

Then he added, “Once you’re enrolled, help me take some of the teaching load too. Teaching students has always been my weak point.”

Daniel slapped his chest lightly and said, “No problem. Leave it to me.”

That arrangement would benefit him in more than one way. Kevin Shaw disliked teaching, and Daniel helping with that work would likely mean an additional teaching stipend. In academic life, that was another form of care—practical, unsentimental, and very real.

After the conversation ended, Daniel left the Applied Electromagnetics Laboratory.

The first thing he did was look for a place to live.

The Youth Hostel was fine for a night or two, but not for the long term. If he wanted stability, he needed an actual rental. Since money was tight, shared housing was the natural option.

He spent the late morning and much of the afternoon looking at places.

One was too expensive for what it offered.

Another was filthy enough to make him feel tired just standing in the doorway.

A third might have been tolerable physically, but the roommate had the kind of personality that made Daniel instinctively understand future misery without needing further evidence.

By five in the afternoon, he arrived at yet another listing. This one was near the faculty apartments on the east side of the university. Over the phone, he had been told it was a three-bedroom unit, with the other two rooms occupied by women. The sublessor was one of them.

One man, two women.

In daily life, that kind of arrangement could certainly create awkward moments. But Daniel’s needs were simple. He was not searching for lifestyle perfection. He wanted a clean place to sleep, work, and survive.

The door opened.

Both women were home.

One had fair skin and a slightly curvier figure, with a ponytail that gave her a polished, urban-professional look. The other was a little shorter, wearing square-framed glasses, cropped pants, and a short top in a style that made her look more casual, more academic, and a little trendy.

“So you’re the one?” the woman in cropped pants asked, standing by the door and looking him up and down. “The physics graduate student?”

“Yes.”

Daniel nodded. Under their scrutiny, he had the distinct feeling he was walking into an interview.

That amused him.

So he smiled first and took control of the rhythm before they could.

“Master’s from Frankenston University,” he said evenly. “I’m coming here for a PhD in March. Physics, electromagnetics direction.”

He added, “You said on the phone you wanted someone studying at Ivystate University, preferably a graduate student. I’m not formally enrolled yet, but I will be soon, so I should meet the requirement. Or are you only looking for female tenants?”

The two women exchanged a glance.

The curvier one spoke first. “Either is fine.”

Daniel nodded as if that settled the matter and continued, “Then I qualify. Mind if I come in and take a look? I still need to decide whether the place fits my expectations.”

The woman in cropped pants seemed momentarily thrown off. The tempo of the conversation had shifted in a direction she had not anticipated. She looked reflexively at the other woman.

The other woman said, “Come in.”

Daniel stepped inside and looked around carefully.

It was a standard three-bedroom, one-living-room apartment. The room nearest the door was the one being rented out—a small room, maybe around eighty-five square feet. Inside was a single bed and a cabinet. The room was undeniably small, but it was clean, and there was just enough space beside the bed for a compact desk.

Taking the rent, the environment, and the location together, it was actually pretty decent.

“Not bad,” Daniel said, nodding with visible approval. “Small, but clean.”

Then, still in the same calm, appraising tone, he asked, “And what about you two? What do you do? If we’re going to be future roommates, I should know who I’m living with. Let’s introduce ourselves.”

Again the women exchanged a look.

Then, perhaps because he sounded so natural and matter-of-fact, they actually did it.

The curvier woman was Lily Ann, twenty-seven years old, a law PhD student.

The woman in cropped pants was Melissa Ken, twenty-five years old, a mathematics PhD student.

Daniel listened, nodded, and continued as though this were the most ordinary thing in the world.

“All right. That’s roughly enough for a first impression. I’m reasonably satisfied with the place.” He looked at them. “What about you? Any questions for me?”

They looked at each other again.

Then both shook their heads.

“Good,” Daniel said at once. “Then let’s talk terms. Is there a rental agreement? Is the payment structure one-month deposit and three months’ rent, or some other arrangement?”

He kept going without pause.

“When can I move in?”

“Any private house rules I should know in advance? Shared rentals work better when that kind of thing is made explicit—like whether partners are allowed over, quiet hours, kitchen use, visitors, cleaning schedules... better to clarify than create awkwardness later.”

“And what about utilities?”

“And internet?”

“And who handles repairs if something breaks?”

One question followed another, and soon the entire interaction had inverted.

Lily Ann and Melissa Ken found themselves answering dutifully, one after the other, almost as if they were the applicants and he was the one deciding whether to accept them.

By the time they watched their possible future roommate leave, the two women remained standing there for a moment, slightly dazed, before finally turning to each other.

“Wait,” Melissa Ken said. “Weren’t we supposed to be screening him? Why did it feel like we got screened instead?”

“Seriously,” Lily Ann said. “How did we just agree to that so smoothly?”

Then a beat later, another thought hit them.

“Hold on. He said he’s coming for a physics PhD, right? A PhD?”

“He doesn’t look old.”

“He looks barely in his early twenties.”

“At that age, already doing a PhD?”

The two of them stared at each other.

Then Melissa Ken frowned and said the most natural conclusion aloud.

“He’s not lying to us, is he?”