When Dong Yue, the youngest nuclear physicist at the national laboratory, catches Qin Li, a teacher, rushing into a radiation zone with a homemade tokamak in her arms, his thirty years of faith in reason begin to crumble. This high school physics teacher can turn Maxwell's equations into rap. Like a powerful laser that cannot be diffracted, she pierces the protective shield of his meticulous calculations. She modifies a particle accelerator without permission to demonstrate heart-shaped electron clouds to her students, and he has to trap this force of chaos with a superconducting magnet. She derives the formula for love on the lab blackboard, and he silently erases her incorrect parameters and replaces them with Bayesian probabilities. It isn't until Qin Li discovers the secret Dong Yue has locked in a lead box that everything changes: 108 unsent love letters, each one inscribed with the decay period of a radioactive isotope.
“So you've been calculating the half-life until we meet all along.” She slips a ring made of plutonium-239 onto her ring finger. “From now on, the binding energy of our union will be greater than all the cosmic rays in the universe.”
