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Zhou Heng, a well-known expert in fluid mechanics and Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is a highly respected person at Tianjin University.

He was admitted to Tianjin University in 1946, at the time of the victory in the Anti-Japanese War and the reconstruction of the university, and graduated in 1950. Over the past 70 years, Prof. Zhou Heng has been committed to the front line of scientific research. Although he is nearly 90 years old, over the past two years he has guided young teachers to carry out research on new aerodynamic problems related to hypersonic vehicles, and has proposed research directions and ideas which are both new initiatives at home and abroad. Zhou has gone abroad for study, but all of his achievements were made in China, which explains why he claims to be a "native expert".

I had heard of Prof. Zhou and his achievements over many years. The first time I had the honor of meeting him was at the 120th anniversary of Tianjin University, when, as a representative of teachers, he told the alumni from all over the world about the ups and downs of this first modern university in China. I met Prof. Zhou again during the third Tianjin University Conference on Science and Technology. I hoped to understand his ideas on how to promote the scientific development of TJU, as this old scientist has been concerned about this issue for years and had given suggestions to the university leaders many times. It is this vigor and energy that this 89-year-old man has for the development of the nation and the university that concerns him.

Our interview began with the “Five-Orientations” issue and proceeded to discuss the reasons why TJU, as a science-based university, should attach importance to the combination of science and engineering and basic research, what is basic research, and how we make appropriate evaluation of talent and their research results. In the warm sunshine, Prof. Zhou Heng talked eloquently, as he expressed his thoughts on science and the future of our university.

Abandoning the “Five Orientations” and developing a proper evaluation system

Q: Professor Zhou, you’ve just reached 89, and the age of 90 is approaching. I found that you paid special attention to innovation and that most of your lectures and courses were about innovation. Could you tell us why?

A: It is impossible to construct a modernized country and to meet people’s need for a better life without innovation. In America, there is a creative spirit in the development of its products. For example, it may take the same time to produce a product in America and developing countries, but high-tech American products are of higher value. Furthermore, although many developing countries have a cost advantage in their labor force, most of the work is simple repetitive labor, such as assembly work in a factory with low productivity per unit of time. What’s more, there remains a lot of problems to be solved in China’s economy, such as the imbalance in regional economic development and the difficulties in helping peasants to get out of poverty. To deal with these problems, we need technological innovation to make our products more competitive and more valuable. Besides the economy, we must pay special attention to national defense and other strategic needs.

Q: You said that the "Focus only on five respects" is harmful, so how does it harm the selection of new innovative talent?

A: The evaluation standard is like the baton. If the baton guides people in a wrong direction, they will make a lot of effort going the wrong way. What criteria do you use to estimate results and quality talent to decide the direction of development? The disadvantages of the "Focus only on five respects" are quite obvious. It is pointless to repeat that some people have forgotten the first principles of scientific research and innovation, and that publishing papers in high-level journals has become the primary goal of these people.

President Xi used the word stereotype to describe the problems in the evaluation of education, which shows the embedded nature of these problems, the degree of the harm, and the difficulty in trying to solve them. The "Five Focuses " is the easiest way of evaluation. To put it bluntly, it only takes some counting, and no scientific talent is needed. You can program or design a formula and apply it. Three digits after the decimal point can be retained so there is no debate about the result. Everything can be estimated with numbers. It is now necessary to reform the evaluation system to identify talent in scientific research and evaluate their achievements in a correct and proper way which is qualitative to a certain extent, but which is open to question and can cause controversy.

You may have noted that starting from February 2018, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council jointly issued a notice to change the talent evaluation mechanism and the evaluation system for scientific research results. In July 2018, the State Council announced that it would improve the evaluation and incentive system to make it more conducive to innovation, optimize the program of integrating talent in the field of science and technology, effectively streamline titles, carry out an investigation and application of scientific and technological expertise, prohibit the direct connection between titles and material benefits, solve the problems of "Focuses only on papers, titles and academic diplomas” and establish an evaluation system oriented towards the quality of creativity and the practical contribution to be made.

In fact, I have been talking about this issue with several good friends in the field of mechanics for years. I have written several articles, asking for changes in the criteria and methods of scientific research evaluation. And now I can finally see the results. The Central Committee has now taken action, which is not only because of us, but also because of the joint efforts of many insightful people.

Q: Your life has been spent at TJU, and now you are about to come to your 90s. Having witnessed years of development of this university, what do you think is the most urgent problem now?

A: To reform the evaluation system. This is critical because if not, the university will be left behind.

How to evaluate? Here is a typical example. The teacher of Hsue-Shen Tsien’s teacher, a German scientist named Prandtl presented a paper at an international mathematics conference in 1904. There were only six pages in total, of which the core contents only took up one page. Prandtl had done a very simple experiment: he sprinkled bits of wood on the surface of the water in the sink and put a sheet on the water. He found that when the sheet was pulled, the bits of wood close to the sheet would follow it, and the bits of wood further away would not, which indicated that viscosity only works in a thin layer near the sheet, and it wouldn’t work beyond that layer. What is more, the faster the sheet was pulled, the thinner the layer was. According to this experiment, he proposed in the paper submitted to the mathematics conference that outside the thin layer, the fluid can be regarded as non-adhesive, and that in the layer, a term can be removed from the hydrodynamic equation, because the complete equation could not be solved at the time (now it can be solved with a computer), and it might be solved by removing the term. At that time, Prandtl was just a 29-year-old associate professor of engineering at Universit？t Hannover. He had no fame at all, especially in mathematics. But at this mathematics conference, Klein, a well-known mathematics professor at the University of G？ttingen in Germany, admired him and suggested that the university employ Prandtl and set up the Institute of Applied Physics and Fluid Mechanics for him. This institute later became a research center for aviation fluid physics, making incomparable contributions to the development of aviation at that time.

The following reasons can well explain why Klein was able to recognize a talented person.

First of all, he was a patriot and an advocate of the combination of science and technology. He visited an exposition in the United States around 1897 when there were innovators such as Edison who had invented many new devices. At the time, the United States and Germany were two rising countries. Klein found that the United States had the advantages of large area, abundant resources and strong creativity, while Germany only possessed a small area and population as well as fewer resources. However, Germany was more advanced in science. At that time, the center of science was in Europe. Germany made good use of this advantage to promote the development of technology using science. Therefore, although Klein was a mathematician, he was very concerned about the application of mathematics.

Secondly, Klein was familiar with the leading edge of technological development at that time. He knew that the leading field was aviation technology, because the American Wright brothers just had a test-flight of the world's first powered aircraft in 1903. He also knew the situation of fluid mechanics and the main barriers to applying it in practice. The recognition that the key to using fluid mechanics to deal with the technical problems was his accurate insight into Prandtl's work.

Thirdly, he was able to judge whether the method proposed by Prandtl was mathematically feasible. Whether the method was consistent with the needs of national development, whether it was at the forefront of scientific and technological development and whether the specific practices were correct or feasible. These were the keys to the correct evaluation of the achievement. Scientific researchers and achievements should be assessed according to representative results, and the quality of results, originality and the actual contribution to economic and social development should be highlighted. Klein found that Prandtl was a typical example.

But now it is not realistic to find experts like Klein, because science is divided into more branches, and there are more and more kinds of technology. It is not easy to find a person who knows several fields like Klein. Therefore, new methods are needed in the new era. I was asked to write an article making specific suggestions on how to evaluate talent and achievements in colleges and universities for the journal Science and Society published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is said that the article got high praise after it was published, and I was asked to compress it into 2000 words. Now it has been submitted to the Central Office and other national institutions through a national high-end think tank—the Institutes of Science and Development, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Enhancing basic research through the combination of science and engineering

Q: I was once lucky to have the chance to attend your lecture and your words that "the combination of science and engineering is the right direction" left a deep impression on me. Why did you say that?

A: The combination of science and engineering was first proposed by Klein who discovered the gift of Prandtl. He thought that only by combining science and engineering and promoting development with science could Germany compete with the United States at that time.

The relationship between science and technology is very complex. In fact, for a long time, science and technology were separate. Technology has a much longer history than science. For example, the Zhaozhou Bridge was built based on the experience of artisans more than 1300 years ago. Because early engineering techniques were relatively simple, no systematic science was needed.

However, a turning point arrived with the development of the aviation industry in the early 20th century. Technology alone was not enough to support the development of aviation. There was no way to test new aircraft because they would fall from the sky if not designed properly. As a result, science was urgently required, in that we first needed to find the theoretical rule before developing the technology. The combination of science and engineering began from that time, which was marked by the establishment of the Institute of Applied Physics and Fluid Mechanics at the University of G？ttingen. Prandtl was appointed the head of the institute. Since then, Germany has gradually developed into the center of aviation technology in the world. Through the study of fluid mechanics related with aviation, The University of G？ttingen promoted the development of both aviation and hydrodynamics. In 1929, Caltech of the California Institute of Technology invited Theodore von Kármán, Prandtl's student and Hsue-Shen Tsien’s teacher, to bring G？ttingen's approach to the United States.

The combination of science and engineering is a process of gradual understanding. Nowadays all comprehensive universities in the world are combining science and engineering together, and the difference is only a matter of quality. Chinese universities have yet to improve their integration of science and engineering. Therefore, the central government began to formally propose that basic research should be strengthened.

Q: What is basic research, why should we put stress on it, and what would it bring?

A: According to the division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the natural sciences include physics, chemistry, geosciences, and biology, of which only physics and chemistry are basic sciences. Therefore, my personal understanding is that the combination of science and engineering is actually to strive to find and solve the key problems in technology at the physical or chemical level. For example, to develop aviation, it is necessary to study how the aircraft can have lift force and how big the resistance is, which should be calculated in advance. This is how basic science supports the development of technology.

The success of the Institute of Applied Physics and Fluid Mechanics of the University of G？ttingen illustrates that the development of a certain technology through research in physical and chemical issues is a win-win approach to basic science and technological development.

Q: What is the ideal combination of science and engineering, how to realize it and what could it bring to the university?

A: On the one hand, facing complex engineering and technical problems, we should solve the core scientific problems as much as possible, including research models which are proposed from practical problems and have been simplified. On the other hand, we must develop scientific theory to apply to practical problems.

How can we combine science and engineering together? Let’s take an example. Both China and the United States are developing hypersonic vehicles. Hypersonic speed is 5 times as great as the speed of sound, about six thousand kilometers per hour. The hypersonic vehicle can be an unpowered or powered glider. When it is flying at a high altitude, the air is relatively thin, and the experimenters found that there was an error in the calculation of the aerodynamic force by the conventional method. We thought that this was because we did not take the effect of thin air into account. Therefore, at present our research team is making efforts to correctly consider the thin air effect so that the predicted aerodynamic forces can be closer to reality.

In fact, I had an experience of unconsciously combining science and engineering in the 1970s, when several institutes in China were developing pneumatic gyroscopes, which is a core component of important navigation instruments. However, all of them only paid attention to technical research and the progress was very slow. Occasionally, I was asked to cooperate with a factory in Jiujiang to solve the problem. I stayed in the factory for a long time (two times a year, one and a half months at a time), understood the structure of the gyroscope which was totally different from the gyroscopes in the textbooks at the time), got familiar with the experienced workers and finally got to the core mechanical issue. Referring to the latest information at the time, and including some innovations, finally, after more than a year, I had a breakthrough, which caused a sensation in this field. If I had not gone into the matter deeply, I wouldn't have known what scientific issues were involved. And if I had been satisfied with making estimations from existing knowledge, it would have been impossible to figure out the problem.

Q: Tianjin University has strengths in its engineering, and it takes patience to be devoted to science, so how do we persuade young people to concentrate on scientific research in such an efficiency-oriented environment?

A: This is a misunderstanding, a typical thought separating science and engineering that relates to their mutual development. I’m not very familiar with other fields so I’ll take an example of mechanics. The most basic theories of mechanics are the three basic laws of mechanics proposed by Newton. Everyone learned about it in high school, but with these three laws, it is impossible to solve many practical problems. It is in the process of conducting mechanical research with practical problems that the field of mechanics research is expanding, thus forming the current huge mechanical system.

People often have the wrong idea that basic research is pure science, pre-eminent to technological study. As a matter of fact, the progress of basic science needs to involve technology and practical needs. Therefore, we should take the initiative to find new problems in other technical fields, which is also the major way to develop basic science. Landau, a famous theoretical physicist of the Soviet Union and Nobel Prize winner in physics, produced a set of books on theoretical physics with his students, which is world-famous. From only four initial volumes it has now been expanded to ten volumes, three of which are about mechanics, including a lot of content related to the development of technology.

Many new discoveries in mechanics were the product of combining theory with technology after World WarⅡ. For example, Britain made the world's first civil jet, but it disintegrated in the air soon after flying. Through research, it was found that the disintegration of the aircraft was caused by constant changes of the internal and external pressure of the aircraft. The continuous pressure and decompression during launching and landing led to the damage. Scientists developed fracture mechanics and damage mechanics during the case study. In conclusion, the combination of basic science and technology will not hinder scientific progress. On the contrary, it is an important approach to develop basic science.

Attaching great importance to technology

Q: What is hard technology?

A: Today I brought a pen here and with which I’d like to talk about hard technology. This pen is very common, which was given to me when I visited Japan in 1992, but still works after 26 years. You can have a try. Some of our pens may not work after several months. What does this indicate? They have carefully studied the way that ink flows out and the composition of the ink. I think this is an example of hard technology.

According to my understanding, hard technology is a relative concept compared to "soft technology". The object of hard technology research is material, while that of soft technology research is non-material, such as data, information and so on. Hard technology is the foundation of all technology. Without it, nothing can be achieved. Compared with the United States, China is a little backward in soft technology, but the gap in hard technology remains large in the aspects such as chips, aero engines, precision machine tools.

In addition to the relatively weak basic research I have mentioned before, the research on hard technology needs to be strengthened at TJU. For the School of Mechanical Engineering that I work in, machine work and precision mechanical parts are the foundation of all machinery. Our university needs to be innovative in this regard.

Q: Why should we develop hard technology and what will it bring to the university and the whole nation?

A: It is the foundation of all technology. Without hard technology, soft technology cannot develop. For example, without a supercomputer, artificial intelligence can't develop.

On December 6, Premier Li Keqiang presided over the first meeting of the National Science and Technology Leading Group. One of the proposals is worthy of our attention. Li said that the strategic layout of science and technology innovation should be better integrated into the overall national development, facing modernization, focusing on break-through key technologies, nurturing and stimulating new energy, and promoting a deep integration of technology and economy. Basic research is the source of the scientific system. It is necessary to increase long-term stable support for basic research, guide enterprises and society to increase investment, highlight "hard technology" research, and strive to achieve more original results.

China attaches great importance to the development of hard technology. In the future, we must focus on the combination of science and engineering and research on hard technology. Otherwise, after a few years, Tianjin University is likely to fall behind other universities. TJU’s “Emerging Engineering Education” must be combined with soft and hard technology. That is to say, it must be combined with the corresponding hard technology. For example, recently, TJU and many hospitals have joined forces to develop medical engineering and medical science. For medicine, how to develop new drugs and devices is the "hard technology", and TJU should contribute in these areas.

Q: What advice do you have for TJU's technological developing direction and the concept of technological development?

A: TJU should take the path of combining science and engineering, encouraging basic researchers to enter the field of engineering technology and cooperate with engineers and technicians. Science plays a service role in this relationship. It is easier for people studying science to approach engineering. Basic science is a systematic science that requires a large amount of systematic knowledge. I used to study water conservancy. After graduating from college, I attended higher calculus for a year, and learned a lot of things by myself. After enriching myself with a lot of basic scientific knowledge, I was able to turn to basic research.

In terms of engineering technology, we should either solve key technical problems or solve major problems. For the former, it is necessary to start with relevant scientific problems, whereas for the latter, we need to address comprehensive problems which need to be fixed through collaborative innovation.

The combination of science and engineering should be reflected not only in the composition of the research team, but also in the path of development. For example, collaborative innovation that we often talk about involves multiple disciplines, and it is a goal-oriented innovation. It is not spontaneous but dependent on top-level design. Three groups were established during the development of the atomic bomb— the groups in charge of principles, experiments and projects. Top-level design can be modified step by step, but it must be integrated with the procedure.

Besides, we need to change the “baton”, develop a better evaluation mechanism, and discard the "Five-Orientation" model. With a better evaluation mechanism, we can better stimulate the innovative potential and enthusiasm of young people.

In this new era, the earlier we push reform to the forefront, the earlier our university can be included in the “Double First-class” program.

Q: What do you think TJU should be like?

A: The TJU of my dreams is abundant with expertise and achievement. A university is a place to train talented people to produce new knowledge, and I hope that TJU can be such a university. This is the most important task of a university and a responsibility to fulfill for the nation, isn’t it?