[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][12.31]

hugeseaUID：190158

关于REBORN FROM THE ASHES组COMMENTS活动的说明&汇总
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1042733-1-2.html

========================================================

Beauty(节选）

By Scott Russell Sanders

Judging from the scientists I know, including Eva and Ruth, and those whom I've read about, you can't pursue the laws of nature very long without bumping into beauty. "I don't know if it's the same beauty you see in the sunset," a friend tells me, "but it feels the same." This friend is a physicist, who has spent a long career deciphering what must be happening in the interior of stars. He recalls for me his thrill on grasping for the first time Dirac's equations describing quantum mechanics, or those of Einstein describing relativity. "They're so beautiful," he says, "you can see immediately they have to be true. Or at least on the way toward truth." I ask him what makes a theory beautiful, and he replies, "Simplicity, symmetry, elegance, and power."

Why nature should conform to theories we find beautiful is far from obvious. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe, as Einstein said, is that it's comprehensible. How unlikely, that a short-lived biped on a two-bit planet should be able to gauge the speed of light, lay bare the structure of an atom, or calculate the gravitational tug of a black hole. We're a long way from understanding everything, but we do understand a great deal about how nature behaves. Generation after generation, we puzzle out formulas, test them, and find, to an astonishing degree, that nature agrees. An architect draws designs on flimsy paper, and her buildings stand up through earthquakes. We launch a satellite into orbit and use it to bounce messages from continent to continent. The machine on which I write these words embodies hundreds of insights into the workings of the material world, insights that are confirmed by every burst of letters on the screen, and I stare at that screen through lenses that obey the laws of optics first worked out in detail by Isaac Newton.

By discerning patterns in the universe, Newton believed, he was tracing the hand of God. Scientists in our day have largely abandoned the notion of a Creator as an unnecessary hypothesis, or at least an untestable one. While they share Newton's faith that the universe is ruled everywhere by a coherent set of rules, they cannot say, as scientists, how these particular rules came to govern things. You can do science without believing in a divine Legislator, but not without believing in laws.

I spent my teenage years scrambling up the mountain of mathematics. Midway up the slope, however, I staggered to a halt, gasping in the rarefied air, well before I reached the heights where the equations of Einstein and Dirac would have made sense. Nowadays I add, subtract, multiply, and do long division when no calculator is handy, and I can do algebra and geometry and even trigonometry in a pinch, but that is about all that I've kept from the language of numbers. Still, I remember glimpsing patterns in mathematics that seemed as bold and beautiful as a skyful of stars.

I'm never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty. Language can create its own loveliness, of course, but it cannot deliver to us the radiance we apprehend in the world, any more than a photograph can capture the stunning swiftness of a hawk or the withering power of a supernova. Eva's wedding album holds only a faint glimmer of the wedding itself. All that pictures or words can do is gesture beyond themselves toward the fleeting glory that stirs our hearts. So I keep gesturing.

"All nature is meant to make us think of paradise," Thomas Merton observed. Because the Creation puts on a nonstop show, beauty is free and inexhaustible, but we need training in order to perceive more than the most obvious kinds. Even fifteen billion years or so after the Big Bang, echoes of that event still linger in the form of background radiation, only a few degrees above absolute zero. Just so, I believe, the experience of beauty is an echo of the order and power that permeate the universe. To measure background radiation, we need subtle instruments; to measure beauty, we need alert intelligence and our five keen senses.

Anyone with eyes can take delight in a face or a flower. You need training, however, to perceive the beauty in mathematics or physics or chess, in the architecture of a tree, the design of a bird's wing, or the shiver of breath through a flute. For most of human history, the training has come from elders who taught the young how to pay attention. By paying attention, we learn to savor all sorts of patterns, from quantum mechanics to patchwork quilts.

This predilection brings with it a clear evolutionary advantage, for the ability to recognize patterns helped our ancestors to select mates, find food, avoid predators. But the same advantage would apply to all species, and yet we alone compose symphonies and crossword puzzles, carve stone into statues, map time and space. Have we merely carried our animal need for shrewd perceptions to an absurd extreme? Or have we stumbled onto a deep congruence between the structure of our minds and the structure of the universe?

I am persuaded the latter is true. I am convinced there's more to beauty than biology, more than cultural convention. It flows around and through us in such abundance, and in such myriad forms, as to exceed by a wide margin any mere evolutionary need. Which is not to say that beauty has nothing to do with survival: I think it has everything to do with survival. Beauty feeds us from the same source that created us. It reminds us of the shaping power that reaches through the flower stem and through our own hands. It restores our faith in the generosity of nature. By giving us a taste of the kinship between our own small minds and the great Mind of the Cosmos, beauty reassures us that we are exactly and wonderfully made for life on this glorious planet, in this magnificent universe. I find in that affinity a profound source of meaning and hope. A universe so prodigal of beauty may actually need us to notice and respond, may need our sharp eyes and brimming hearts and teeming minds, in order to close the circuit of Creation

sunflower_irisUID：2720580

沙发~
Useful Stuff
Judging from the scientists I know, including Eva and Ruth, and those whom I've read about, you can't pursue the laws of nature very long without bumping into beauty.
The most incomprehensible thing about the universe, as Einstein said, is that it's comprehensible.
How unlikely, that a short-lived biped on a two-bit planet should be able to gauge the speed of light, lay bare the structure of an atom, or calculate the gravitational tug of a black hole.
I spent my teenage years scrambling up the mountain of mathematics. Midway up the slope, however, I staggered to a halt, gasping in the rarefied air, well before I reached the heights where the equations of Einstein and Dirac would have made sense.
I'm never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty.
"All nature is meant to make us think of paradise," Thomas Merton observed.
Have we merely carried our animal need for shrewd perceptions to an absurd extreme? Or have we stumbled onto a deep congruence between the structure of our minds and the structure of the universe?
By giving us a taste of the kinship between our own small minds and the great Mind of the Cosmos, beauty reassures us that we are exactly and wonderfully made for life on this glorious planet, in this magnificent universe.
COMMENT
This essay like a breeze among all the economical and political reports. It reminds me of flowery, blue sky, singing birds and sunshine in the cold winter night.

Generation after generation, scientists have drawn a beautiful picture of the order and power that permeate the universe through a simple, symmetrical, elegant and powerful way. The mechanics and theories toward truth of all subjects bring delight to us. We can see the world outside more clearly, and recognize the power, meaning of our lives in the incomprehensible universe.

Besides, we have enjoyed the treasure of nature. Have you ever seen a flower blooming? Have you ever heard a bird singing? Have you ever tasted a sun-sweet berry? If you have done, you can figure out the meaning of beauty by your own experience.

However, to perceive the beauty in mathematics or physics, to architect in a flower or a bird, we need training to pay attention. It is not a lack of beauty of life, it is our lack of discovery, said Auguste Rodin. We are all on an irreversible journey from birth to death. We keep running due to we have goals to pursue. But we run so fast that forget the beauty sight on the wayside.

I always think about when we are old and looking back, we will see the tracks we lived. At that time, our wins and losses once seem so important to us will fade away, the plans and to-do lists will shrivel to irrelevance. What we remember must be the beauties in our lives. Maybe the place we met our Mr./Mrs. Right, the moment we looked up at a skyful of stars, or once we fell asleep on grass in a sunny spring afternoon.

hugeseaUID：190158

这么快就沙发占上了啊，郁闷，刚刚我电脑挂了
我也接着占上，马上写comments
====================================================================================

Judging from the scientists I know, including Eva and Ruth, and those whom I have read about, you cannot pursue the laws
of nature very long without bumping into beauty.
bump into: (infml.) to meet sb. by chance
If you try to study the law of nature, very soon you will encounter beauty.
The study of the law of nature will inevitably lead to the discovery of beauty.

Here calls for me this thrill on grasping for the first time Dirac’s equations describing quantum mechanics, or those of Einstein
describing relativity.
Dirac: 1902-1984, British mathematician and physicist. He shared a 1933 Nobel Prize for new formulations of the atomic theory.
quantum mechanics:
量子力学
他给我讲述第一次领悟狄拉克量子力学方程式以及爱因斯坦相对论方程式时的兴奋。

The author lists two paradoxical examples: (1) the most incomprehensible about the universe is that it is comprehensible;
(2) we are a long way from understanding everything, but we do understand a great deal about how nature behaves
Why nature should conform to theories we find beautiful is far from obvious.
conform to: to obey a rule, law, ect.; to agree with or match
far from: almost the opposite of sth. or of what is expected
远非；几乎相反
It is not obvious at all why nature should follow those theories that we regard as beautiful.

How unlikely, that a short-lived biped on a two-bit planet should be able to gauge the speed of light, lay bare the structure of an
atom, or calculate the gravitational tug of a black hole.
short-lived biped: here refers to human being
two-bit planet: here refers to the earth
a short-lived biped on a two-bit planet: human beings whose life-span is limited and who inhabit a very insignificant planet: the earth
gauge: v. to measure sth. accurately 测量
lay bare: reveal暴露, 揭发, 展开
居住在一颗普通星球上的一种生命短暂的两足动物竟能够计算光速、列出原子结构或计算黑洞引力，这是否难以想象？

puzzle sth. out: to find the answer to a difficult or confusing problem by thinking carefully 琢磨出……的答案

Midway up the slope, however, I staggered to a halt, gasping in the rarefied air, well before I reached the heights where the
equations of Einstein and Dirac would have made sense.
登到山坡的一半时，我摇摇晃晃的停下来，呼吸稀薄的空气，这时，距离我能够理解爱因斯坦或狄拉克的方程式的
高度还相差很远。

Still, I remember glimpsing patterns in mathematics that seemed as bold and beautiful as a skyful of stars.
然而，我依然记得匆匆瞥见的数学排列，醒目美丽，如满天繁星。

words and photos inadequate to convey the feeling experience of beauty
I’m never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty.
Paraphrase:Whenever I try to describe beauty, I find how ineffective, how pale language is. No language can convey adequately our
experience of beauty.
Q: What, according to the author, can pictures or words do?
A: At best pictures or words only serve to make us recall the beautiful things or scenes that have moved or inspired us.

All that pictures or words can do is gesture beyond themselves toward the fleeting glory that stirs our hearts. So I keep gesturing.
Q: What is meant by “I keep gesturing”?
A:The author means that he keeps writing, as he considers words as gestures. And in writing on, he keeps pointing toward those special
feelings he identifies with beauty.

Becausethe Creation puts on a nonstop show, beauty is free and inexhaustible,but we need training in order to perceive more
than the most obvious kinds.
Paraphrase:Since the birth of the universe, everything in it has revealed its wonder continuously. Beauty is obvious and open for
everyone to see andit is unlimited. No one can say he/she has seen all the beautiful things. But in order to see beauty in more subtle forms,
we need to be trained.

Even15 billion years or so after the Big Bang, echoes of that event stilllinger in the form of background radiation, only a few
degrees above absolute zero.
原始大爆炸已过了150亿年左右，大爆炸的痕迹仍以背景辐射的形式存留在宇宙中间，只比绝对零度高几度。

Just so, I believe, the experience of beauty is an echo of the order and power that permeate the universe.
因此，我相信对美的感受是对宇宙中无处不在的秩序与能量的共鸣。

Q: What does “this predilection” refer to?
A: It refers to recognition of patterns through paying attention.

Have we merely carried our animal need for shrewd perceptions to an absurd extreme?
animal need: biological need or evolutionary need
Paraphrase: Has our ability to find patterns in nature been the result of only meeting our biological need and going to an extreme?

Or have we stumbled onto a deep congruence between the structure of our minds and the structure of the universe?
Paraphrase: Ordoes it mean that accidentally we have come to a stage of perceivingharmony between the working of our minds
and the working of theuniverse?

It reminds us of the shaping power that reaches through the flower stem and through our own hands.
(1) What is the shaping power of the flower stem?
The flower stem provides nourishment and produces flowers. That is its shaping power.
(2) What is the shaping power of our own hands?
With our hands, we build, we paint, we design, we carve. That is the shaping power of our hands.

I find in that affinity a profound source of meaning and hope.
affinity: here refers to the close relationship between our small minds and the great Mind of the Cosmos

A universe so prodigal of beauty may actually need us to notice and respond, may need our sharp eyes and
brimming hearts and teeming minds, in order to close the circuit of Creation.
prodigal: extremely abundant, wasteful
brimming: overflowing
teem: to be full
brimming hearts: hearts filled with strong emotion (to the point of running over the edge)
teeming minds: minds full of ideas
Q: What is meant by “to close the circuit of Creation”?
A: God created beauty for man, and created man to appreciate the beauty.

splendidsunUID：2723757

God~~这么早~~

AdelineShenUID：2630498

Having finished reading the beautiful essay, I feel too hungry to write more. So my decision is to go to sleep soon and my comment will come when I wake up in the morning~good night dear~

qxn_1987UID：2610437

Judging from the scientists I know, including Eva and Ruth, and those whom I've read about, you can't pursue the laws of nature very long without bumping into beauty. "I don't know if it's the same beauty you see in the sunset," a friend tells me, "but it feels the same." This friend is a physicist, who has spent a long career deciphering what must be happening in the interior of stars. He recalls for me his thrill on grasping for the first time Dirac's equations describing quantum mechanics, or those of Einstein describing relativity. "They're so beautiful," he says, "you can see immediately they have to be true. Or at least on the way toward truth." I ask him what makes a theory beautiful, and he replies, "Simplicity, symmetry, elegance, and power."

Why nature should conform to theories we find beautiful is far from obvious. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe, as Einstein said, is that it's comprehensible. How unlikely, that a short-lived biped on a two-bit（微不足道的，廉价的） planet should be able to gauge the speed of light, lay bare the structure of an atom, or calculate the gravitational tug of a black hole. We're a long way from understanding everything, but we do understand a great deal about how nature behaves. Generation after generation, we puzzle out formulas, test them, and find, to an astonishing degree, that nature agrees. An architect draws designs on flimsy paper, and her buildings stand up through earthquakes. We launch a satellite into orbit and use it to bounce messages from continent to continent. The machine on which I write these words embodies hundreds of insights into the workings of the material world, insights that are confirmed by every burst of letters on the screen, and I stare at that screen through lenses that obey the laws of optics first worked out in detail by Isaac Newton.

By discerning patterns in the universe, Newton believed, he was tracing the hand of God. Scientists in our day have largely abandoned the notion of a Creator as an unnecessary hypothesis, or at least an untestable one. While they share Newton's faith that the universe is ruled everywhere by a coherent set of rules, they cannot say, as scientists, how these particular rules came to govern things. You can do science without believing in a divine Legislator, but not without believing in laws.

I spent my teenage years scrambling up the mountain of mathematics. Midway up the slope, however, I staggered to a halt, gasping in the rarefied air, well before I reached the heights where the equations of Einstein and Dirac would have made sense. Nowadays I add, subtract, multiply, and do long division when no calculator is handy, and I can do algebra and geometry and even trigonometry in a pinch（在紧要关头，必要时）, but that is about all that I've kept from the language of numbers. Still, I remember glimpsing patterns in mathematics that seemed as bold and beautiful as a skyful of stars.

I'm never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty. Language can create its own loveliness, of course, but it cannot deliver to us the radiance we apprehend in the world, any more than a photograph can capture the stunning swiftness of a hawk or the withering power of a supernova. Eva's wedding album holds only a faint glimmer of the wedding itself. All that pictures or words can do is gesture beyond themselves toward the fleeting glory that stirs our hearts. So I keep gesturing.

"All nature is meant to make us think of paradise," Thomas Merton observed. Because the Creation puts on a nonstop show, beauty is free and inexhaustible, but we need training in order to perceive more than the most obvious kinds. Even fifteen billion years or so after the Big Bang, echoes of that event still linger in the form of background radiation, only a few degrees above absolute zero. Just so, I believe, the experience of beauty is an echo of the order and power that permeate the universe. To measure background radiation, we need subtle instruments; to measure beauty, we need alert intelligence and our five keen senses.

Anyone with eyes can take delight in（乐于） a face or a flower. You need training, however, to perceive the beauty in mathematics or physics or chess, in the architecture of a tree, the design of a bird's wing, or the shiver of breath through a flute. For most of human history, the training has come from elders who taught the young how to pay attention. By paying attention, we learn to savor all sorts of patterns, from quantum mechanics to patchwork quilts.

This predilection brings with it a clear evolutionary advantage, for the ability to recognize patterns helped our ancestors to select mates, find food, avoid predators. But the same advantage would apply to all species, and yet we alone compose symphonies and crossword puzzles（纵横拼字谜）, carve stone into statues, map time and space. Have we merely carried our animal need for shrewd perceptions to an absurd extreme? Or have we stumbled onto a deep congruence between the structure of our minds and the structure of the universe?

I am persuaded the latter is true. I am convinced there's more to beauty than biology, more than cultural convention. It flows around and through us in such abundance, and in such myriad forms, as to exceed by a wide margin any mere evolutionary need. Which is not to say that beauty has nothing to do with survival: I think it has everything to do with survival. Beauty feeds us from the same source that created us. It reminds us of the shaping power that reaches through the flower stem and through our own hands. It restores our faith in the generosity of nature. By giving us a taste of the kinship between our own small minds and the great Mind of the Cosmos, beauty reassures us that we are exactly and wonderfully made for life on this glorious planet, in this magnificent universe. I find in that affinity a profound source of meaning and hope. A universe so prodigal of beauty may actually need us to notice and respond, may need our sharp eyes and brimming hearts and teeming minds, in order to close the circuit of Creation.


Comments:

I am astound at the article since it is so beatuiful, compelling, and vivid, at least so in my personal poinion.

Admittedly, we live in a world full of a beauty that breaks through every through pore of God’s own earth. We know that this is so, but all too often we turn a blind eye to this, which is so easily be ignored. So we need training to perceive the beauty through paying more attention. Only through this way, can we learn to savor all sorts of patterns of beauty, “from quantum mechanics to patchwork quilts.”

adammaksimUID：2675466

bump into  碰巧遇到

two-bit  adj. 廉价的，微不足道的

lay bare  暴露，开发

tug v.用力拉 n.牵引

bounce 反弹？ 是说卫星发射的波被反弹回来吧

I stare at that screen through lenses obey the laws of optics first worked out in detail by Issac Newton.  戴了个眼镜都可以说得这么复杂。。。

hand of God The Hand of God, or Manus Dei in Latin,[1] is a motif in Jewish and Christian art, especially of the Late Antique and Early Medieval periods, when depiction of Jehovah or God the Father as a full human figure was considered unacceptable. The hand, sometimes including a portion of an arm, or ending about the wrist, is used to indicate the intervention in or approval of affairs on Earth by God, and sometimes as a subject in itself.

in a pinch =if necessary

I'm never aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty.

apprehend = to grasp with the understanding

To measure background radiation, we need subtle instruments; to measure beauty, we need alert inetlligence and our five keen senses.很多好句子

flute n.长笛

savor vt. 品尝

patchwork quilts  花格被子。。。

brimming hearts and teeming minds  brim =盈满  teem=充满

comments:

This is such a beautiful literature as its title. Instead of describing a concrete beauty, with his passion and wisdom the author presents us a inspiring journey discovering the beauty of the laws of nature. After reading this poetry-like article, the first thing come to my mind is the famous Occam's razor principle which claim the simplest explanation or strategy tends to be the best one. Einstein's Mass-energy equation E=m*c^2 and Newton's Second Law F=a*m are both the best interpretation of Occam's razor and the "Simplicity, symmetry, elegance and power."

As a person interested in physics, I cannot agree more with the author's view. I think the beauty of the laws of nature can be appreciate by people just like those great art works. Why nature should conform to those beautiful laws? It sounds much like a philosophical question instead of a scientific one. The most well-known response maybe the Anthropic Theory states that the laws and constants work together so harmony just because we exist. However, I have to admit nature is not always so elegant in any scale. When we extend out vision into the microcosm of atom and electron, what we find is not order but a chaotic world dominated by randomness.

Whatever when reading this article I really feel something beautiful. That is enough.

doodaUID：2712643

Comment:
Comment:
This prose must be written by a mathematician or physicist，even be a combination of the two disciplines. The author tried to describe the beauty of nature science and the root cause why mankind have such a ability to find the beauty.

According to the writer, the beauty of the nature has such a attribute of “simplicity, symmetry, elegance and power”. It did like that when you look into some physics or mathematical equations especially when you deduct a physics equation from one form to the other. The writer cites some of the samples like architecture designing, satellite communication and computer science to express that we have understand lots of nature laws and must be explore more in the future.
On the other hand, I feel the author sometime is a little bit subjective and even mentalism. “Or have we stumbled onto a deep congruence between the structure of our minds and the structure of the universe” said the author. I totally agree with that we need to be trained to feel the beauty of science but we shall not be so boasted to say that we are burn to have the kinship of mind with cosmos. In spite of this, the writer did make a masterly work with a scientist mind and an imaginative prose.

Highlights:

• thrill激动
• quantum mechanics
• （Why nature should conform to 符合
  遵照theories 【we find beautiful】） is far from远非 obvious. The most incomprehensible不能理解的
  高深莫测的 thing about the universe, as Einstein said, is that it's comprehensible.
• two-bit廉价的, 微不足道的
• We launch a satellite into orbit and use it to bounce messages from continent to continent.
  真是物理学家能够运用的描述。
• discern辨别
  觉察
  了解
• notion概念
  观念
• hypothesis假设
• 
  scrambling攀爬 up
• slope斜坡
• I'm never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty
• radiance光辉
• stunning极富魅力的
• withering
  枯萎
  摧毁
• inexhaustible无穷无尽的
• savor尝到
  闻到
• Have we merely carried our animal need for shrewd精明的 perceptions感知 to an absurd extreme? Or have we stumbled onto a deep congruence一致
  符合
  全等 between the structure of our minds and the structure of the universe?我们仅仅是将动物性的敏捷感知能力的需要带到了极致
  还是
  我们已经蹒跚着到了深层次的天人合一的境界？（限于水平，不知翻译是否正确，请大家指正。）
  
• by a wide margin广泛的回旋余地
• kinship相似
  一致
  亲属关系
• affinity密切关系
  相似性
• prodigal挥霍
  浪费
  

plukaUID：2721764

NOTE
Judging from the scientists I know, including Eva and Ruth, and those whom I've read about, you can't pursue the laws of nature very long without bumping into beauty.

Why nature should conform to theories we find beautiful is far from obvious. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe, as Einstein said, is that it's comprehensible. How unlikely, that a short-lived biped on a two-bit planet should be able to gauge the speed of light, lay bare the structure of an atom, or calculate the gravitational tug of a black hole. We're a long way from understanding everything, but we do understand a great deal about how nature behaves. Generation after generation, we puzzle out formulas, test them, and find, to an astonishing degree, that nature agrees.

You can do science without believing in a divine Legislator, but not without believing in laws.（这一句很喜欢）

in a pinch（在紧要关头，在必要时）

I'm never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty. Language can create its own loveliness, of course, but it cannot deliver to us the radiance we apprehend in the world, any more than a photograph can capture the stunning swiftness of a hawk or the withering power of a supernova. Eva's wedding album holds only a faint glimmer of the wedding itself. All that pictures or words can do is gesture beyond themselves toward the fleeting glory that stirs our hearts. So I keep gesturing.

Anyone with eyes can take delight in a face or a flower.

COMMENT

Ineffable, limitless, endless. That's what this delicate essay have rouses in my heart: something so immense that pervades evey corner of the universe--yet so tiny that unveils itself from every atom and dust.  My tongue is too clumsy to utter a thing like that. Yet my mind shivers while staring at the those words,  being flooded with unutterable feelings brought by mixture of numerous hints, vague and fleeting that all I can capture are the notion of freedom and order. 

Once I saw a signature in a BBS( a music forum) read "beauty of iron" (有铁一般的美，不知道这样翻合不合适). I was struck with an description like iron for music. The will, order and unrivaled power of music suddenly hits me. Today I read this article, chewing the words of scientists, and find out that the thrilling power comes from a perfect combination of freedom and order, which allows us to explore the beauty and curbs us from deviation. 

A little ashamed, though touch beauty indeed in scientific masterpieces, I didn't feel much of it in my daily major. Perhaps it is because I haven't reach that stage yet. Perhaps one day when I really know the order, I will feel free, and then the beauty.

Thx hugesea again for delivering us so elegant an essay, hug~

zhengchangdianUID：2563082

阵地占:lol

AdelineShenUID：2630498

Beauty(节选）

By Scott Russell Sanders

Judging from the scientists I know, including Eva and Ruth, and those whom I've read about, you can't pursue the laws of nature very long without bumping into(to encounter especially by chance) beauty. "I don't know if it's the same beauty you see in the sunset," a friend tells me, "but it feels the same." This friend is a physicist, who has spent a long career deciphering what must be happening in the interior of stars. He recalls for me his thrill on grasping for the first time Dirac's equations describing quantum mechanics, or those of Einstein describing relativity. "They're so beautiful," he says, "you can see immediately they have to be true. Or at least on the way toward truth." I ask him what makes a theory beautiful, and he replies, "Simplicity, symmetry, elegance, and power."

Why nature should conform to theories we find beautiful is far from obvious. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe, as Einstein said, is that it's comprehensible. How unlikely, that a short-lived biped on a two-bit planet should be able to gauge the speed of light, lay bare the structure of an atom, or calculate the gravitational tug of a black hole. We're a long way from understanding everything, but we do understand a great deal about how nature behaves. Generation after generation, we puzzle out(苦苦思索而弄清楚或解决） formulas, test them, and find, to an astonishing degree, that nature agrees. An architect draws designs on flimsy paper, and her buildings stand up through earthquakes. We launch a satellite into orbit and use it to bounce messages from continent to continent. The machine on which I write these words embodies hundreds of insights into the workings of the material world, insights that are confirmed by every burst of letters on the screen, and I stare at that screen through lenses that obey the laws of optics first worked out in detail by Isaac Newton.

By discerning patterns in the universe, Newton believed, he was tracing the hand of God. Scientists in our day have largely abandoned the notion of a Creator as an unnecessary hypothesis, or at least an untestable one. While they share Newton's faith that the universe is ruled everywhere by a coherent set of rules, they cannot say, as scientists, how these particular rules came to govern things. You can do science without believing in a divine Legislator, but not without believing in laws.

I spent my teenage years scrambling up the mountain of mathematics. Midway up the slope, however, I staggered to a halt, gasping in the rarefied air, well before I reached the heights where the equations of Einstein and Dirac would have made sense. Nowadays I add, subtract, multiply, and do long division when no calculator is handy, and I can do algebra and geometry and even trigonometry in a pinch, but that is about all that I've kept from the language of numbers. Still, I remember glimpsing patterns in mathematics that seemed as bold and beautiful as a skyful of stars.

I'm never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty. Language can create its own loveliness, of course, but it cannot deliver to us the radiance we apprehend in the world, any more than a photograph can capture the stunning swiftness of a hawk or the withering power of a supernova. Eva's wedding album holds only a faint glimmer of the wedding itself. All that pictures or words can do is gesture beyond themselves toward the fleeting glory that stirs our hearts. So I keep gesturing.

"All nature is meant to make us think of paradise," Thomas Merton observed. Because the Creation puts on a nonstop show, beauty is free and inexhaustible, but we need training in order to perceive more than the most obvious kinds. Even fifteen billion years or so after the Big Bang, echoes of that event still linger in the form of background radiation, only a few degrees above absolute zero. Just so, I believe, the experience of beauty is an echo of the order and power that permeate the universe. To measure background radiation, we need subtle instruments; to measure beauty, we need alert intelligence and our five keen senses.

Anyone with eyes can take delight in a face or a flower. You need training, however, to perceive the beauty in mathematics or physics or chess, in the architecture of a tree, the design of a bird's wing, or the shiver of breath through a flute. For most of human history, the training has come from elders who taught the young how to pay attention. By paying attention, we learn to savor all sorts of patterns, from quantum mechanics to patchwork quilts.

This predilection（prejudise) brings with it a clear evolutionary advantage, for the ability to recognize patterns helped our ancestors to select mates, find food, avoid predators. But the same advantage would apply to all species, and yet we alone compose symphonies and crossword puzzles, carve stone into statues, map time and space. Have we merely carried our animal need for shrewd perceptions to an absurd extreme? Or have we stumbled onto(偶然碰到，恰巧碰到） a deep congruence between the structure of our minds and the structure of the universe?

I am persuaded the latter is true. I am convinced there's more to beauty than biology, more than cultural convention. It flows around and through us in such abundance, and in such myriad forms, as to exceed by a wide margin any mere evolutionary need. Which is not to say that beauty has nothing to do with survival: I think it has everything to do with survival. Beauty feeds us from the same source that created us. It reminds us of the shaping power that reaches through the flower stem and through our own hands. It restores our faith in the generosity of nature. By giving us a taste of the kinship between our own small minds and the great Mind of the Cosmos, beauty reassures us that we are exactly and wonderfully made for life on this glorious planet, in this magnificent universe. I find in that affinity a profound source of meaning and hope. A universe so prodigal of beauty may actually need us to notice and respond, may need our sharp eyes and brimming hearts and teeming minds, in order to close the circuit of Creation

AdelineShenUID：2630498

Questions:

By discerning patterns in the universe, Newton believed, he was tracing the hand of God. Scientists in our day have largely abandoned the notion of a Creator as an unnecessary hypothesis, or at least an untestable one. While they share Newton's faith that the universe is ruled everywhere by a coherent set of rules, they cannot say, as scientists, how these particular rules came to govern things. You can do science without believing in a divine Legislator, but not without believing in laws.

I'm confused by this paragraph, especially the first highlight sentence here.

Even fifteen billion years or so after the Big Bang, echoes of that event still linger in the form of background radiation, only a few degrees above absolute zero.

What does the author mean by " only a few degrees above the absolute zero" ? I am confused about it.

about the circuit of Creation. Thanks to hugesea.

A universe so prodigal of beauty may actually need us to notice and respond, may need our sharp eyes and
brimming hearts and teeming minds, in order to close the circuit of Creation.
prodigal: extremely abundant, wasteful
brimming: overflowing
teem: to be full
brimming hearts: hearts filled with strong emotion (to the point of running over the edge)
teeming minds: minds full of ideas
Q: What is meant by “to close the circuit of Creation”?
A: God created beauty for man, and created man to appreciate the beauty.

Since I am interested in the auther Scott Qussell, I search the name by google and find an interview with him, which makes me excited to know that he has just finished a book about environment protection and he is a professor of  Indiana University.

I’ve had some great teachers over the years, but none quite like Scott Russell Sanders, the gentle guru of Bloomington, Indiana, and a leading light of Midwestern environmentalism. To call him articulate doesn’t begin to do justice. He exudes a sort of intellectual clarity, in both his works of non-fiction and fiction and in his teaching at Indiana University. (As a former student, I’m a thoroughly biased source.)
Sanders’ book Staying Put offers a countercultural vision of what it means to live rooted in a place—not far from Wendell Berry country, geographically or philosophically. A Private History of Awe charts his development-of-conscience growing up on a military base during the civil rights and Vietnam eras. It’s one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read.
His new book, A Conservationist Manifesto (released this week), presents a host of arguments for why we’re better off thinking of ourselves as citizens and stewards than consumers in the face of ecological disaster. Here’s our recent phone conversation about the book.
Q. What led you to write A Conservationist Manifesto?
A. For the first time in human history, we are causing damage to the entire living system of the planet, and we know that we are doing so. We don’t have models for how to respond, because none of our ancestors ever had to contend with damage on this scale. I’m trying to identify some of the sources we possess within our spiritual and intellectual traditions, and within science and art, for responding in creative ways to our present environmental predicament.
Q. You do a lot of describing a civic “good life”—through describing what you love best about Bloomington, through describing the work of unsung conservationists, and in your essay that responds to [James Howard] Kunstler’s Geography of Nowhere with a “Geography of Somewhere.” Why do you take this on?
A. We live in a society that places so much emphasis on private wealth that we forget how important the common wealth—the realm of shared natural and cultural goods—is for our happiness, our wholeness, and our well-being. Advertising addresses the isolated individual, but we don’t exist in isolation. We exist as members of relationships, within families, communities, neighborhoods, and workplaces. I write about that communal dimension of our existence because the private dimension is more than adequately dealt with by the popular media.
Q. Sure. It seems like an artistic challenge as well to make successful towns and societies as compelling as dysfunctional ones.
A. None of us wants to live in the midst of trouble, but we do want to read about it and watch it on screen. It’s easier to make trouble and failure artistically captivating. So there is this paradox. I faced a similar challenge in my book A Private History of Awe, where I wrote about an enduring and loving marriage. It’s a lot harder to engage people in reading about something that works well over a long period of time than to engage them with something that breaks down in catastrophic and sensational ways.
Most environmental news describes breakdown of one sort or another. Of course, it’s crucial for us to be aware of such news. At the same time, we need to know about the creative and promising responses that people are making, the various “arks” people are building to carry what we love and what we need through this time of troubles.
Q. You write about settling in southern Indiana in 1971 and trying to be a conscientious citizen since then. How have you seen the environmental movement, or attitudes toward conservation, change in the Midwest over that time?
A. During my nearly 40 years here in southern Indiana I have seen a rising concern about the preservation of forests, the restoration of wetlands, the cleansing of rivers, and the healing of communities.  As I travel around the Midwest, I meet people everywhere who are involved with farmers’ markets, with land trusts, with community-supported agriculture, with schoolyard gardens, and with other efforts to protect and restore portions of the natural world. Every community I visit has organizations devoted to looking after the land and waters, fostering organic gardening, reducing carbon emissions, or other environmental causes. I find that very encouraging.
The central section of A Conservationist Manifesto focuses on Indiana, because this is the place I know most deeply. For the benefit of readers who live elsewhere and who may think of the Midwest as short on wild beauty and environmental consciousness, I wish to call attention to the natural history of my home region and to the conservation efforts underway here.
Q. Your vision about how we ought to live in relation to the natural world stands very much in the tradition of Henry Thoreau, John Muir, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and such. And you make it pretty clear in your writing that you’re working from within that tradition. I’m curious about how you make your message your own.
A. Well, certainly I have drawn on the great tradition of American nature writing, and I honor those predecessors. But I also feel that I’m doing something different. That tradition was created primarily by men who explored nature in solitude. They made excursions into the natural world, lived beside ponds or climbed trees in the midst of storms or canoed wild rivers, and then returned to write about the experience. I treasure their work.  But I am not solitary.  I write about living in the midst of family, community, and human structures.  I see the natural world not as a wild place out there, but as the matrix from which we arise and in which we dwell.  We breathe it, drink it, eat it, and wear it; we are sustained by nature with every heartbeat.
Among our contemporaries, Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, in particular, have written powerfully about human relationships embedded within nature.  They exemplify the sort of writer I’ve tried to be, more fully than such earlier figures as Thoreau or Muir.
Q. I want to ask about reverence and irreverence. You make a case for sort of rediscovering reverence—in dealing with the natural world, in dealing with other humans—Grist tries to make a case for irreverence in approaching deadly serious topics. What gives?
A. Reverence is a profoundly important attitude. Not toward ourselves or our work, but toward the power that we see manifest in the natural world and that we feel moving within us.  Reverence toward that shaping power seems to me the deepest and truest emotion the universe calls for. That awareness runs through A Private History of Awe, as well as A Conservationist Manifesto.  We need to recover a sense of the ultimate value and beauty of wildness, including the wildness that courses through us as human beings.
While we honor the universe, we need to maintain a healthy irreverence toward ourselves.  We need to challenge, to question, in some cases to mock, to look harder at our works, postures, and sayings. Grist has attracted readers who might be put off by the sense of frenzy and righteousness that can creep into environmental writing (including my own). So that’s where irreverence comes in.
Q. What do you make of the so-called “moderate” Congressional Democrats, ones like Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, your representative, Baron Hill, and others who have suggested they may force Obama to slow down or water down renewable energy measures and capping carbon emissions? What do you think of the whole “moderate” or “centrist” terminology?
A. They’re not moderate, nor centrist, nor conservative. Insofar as they are endorsing the status quo, which is ruining the planet, they are extremists.  They refuse to recognize how radically our society needs to change. They seem to feel that we can cope with global-scale damage by making little changes around the edges of our lives. They’re not moderate; they’re timid. We need more courage and vision from all of our leaders, at the local, state, and national levels, and we need those qualities from Republicans as well as Democrats.
The word “conservative” ought to have some connection to the word “conserve.”  If you’re going to call yourself conservative, you ought to be clear about what it is you want to conserve.  Many conservatives, if they’re honest, will say, “I want to conserve as much money as possible in private hands, and I want to protect every opportunity to increase that private wealth, regardless of the cost to society or planet.” If we keep treating the accumulation of money by individuals and corporations as the highest good, we will continue to degrade Earth’s living systems, and we will leave a sadly diminished world for future generations. That’s as immoral a path as I can imagine.
Q. Thanks. What have I missed?
A. Some people come across A Conservationist Manifesto and say, “That title seems confrontational.” Maybe it is, I reply, but so is every billboard, every TV advertisement, every speech calling for endless growth, every Hummer on the highway, every assault on the Endangered Species Act, every call for drilling in wildlife refuges. If we plead, “Don’t forget that we share the planet with millions of other species, that we are degrading the living conditions for all beings including ourselves, that we are betraying future generations”—if we say all of that mildly and meekly, we have no chance of being heard in our cultural cacophony. We need to be forceful in challenging the ruinous path we’re on and the media and ideology that keep pushing us along that path. I hope that A Conservationist Manifesto is written in a measured, thoughtful, lucid way. But I also hope the book conveys a sense of ethical and practical urgency. Right now, anything less than urgency is inadequate to our situation.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

Comment:

I feel lucky to come across this beautiful essay with fluently flowing language and a brimming heart of the beauty of science and nature, especially when I search the author Scott Russel with Google and bump into a seemingly connection between the author and myself. He is a professor of the Indiana University and he has just finished writing a book named A Conservationist Manifesto focusing on environmental protection.Indiana university ranks first in the research on public policy of environmental management in America. There are beautiful forests and shining sunlight, which share the beauty of the nature to the most. If I have the chance to go to Indiana(although my dream unviversity is not there), I hope to meet Professor Russel and share with him my understanding of the beauty of science and nature. I'm looking forward to coming of that lovely special day.

Reading about the beauty of law and the power of nature in Russel's eyes, a strong feeling of emotion flushed into my minds. I love this expression of "close the circuit of creation." God created the beauty of nature. The beautiful nature nurtures human. And human beings embrace nature with their born sense of appreciation. The universe is incomprehensible because of the unlimitation of beauty. Beauty is a mysterious thing, which arouses our emotion and creation, which incentives us to search deeper into the heart of the earth, which makes us recoganize how weak we are when facing the power of nature and how strong we are when trying to disvocer the law. That is a way of paradox the beauty of nature want to cast upon us.

I am always eager to appreciate the beauty in this somewhat impetuous world nowadays, when money and status is placed first in most people's lives, when the beauty of environment is damaged by economic growth, when the beauty of love is replaced by jelousy, when the beauty of trust is substituted by misconception.

Beautiful sunlight penetrates into my room while I am typing this illogical, maybe a little bit emotional comment. A new year is coming and I hope everyone in the earth can try to sense the beauty of nature and love. In most cases you do not need to be trained to sense the beauty. All you should do is to close your eyes, listen to your heart and breath the clean air mixed with the  fragrance of sunlight. You will soon feel that the beauty of the planet is walking toward you.~

Thanks to Bela for correcting some minus mistakes in this comment~MUA~

hugeseaUID：190158

Questions:

Questions:

By discerning patterns in the universe, Newton believed, he was tracing the hand of God. Scientistsin our day have largely abandoned the notion of a Creator as anunnecessary hypothesis, or at least an untestable one. Whilethey share Newton's faith that the universe is ruled everywhere by acoherent set of rules, they cannot say, as scientists, how theseparticular rules came to govern things. You can do science without believing in a divine Legislator, but not without believing in laws.

I'm confused by this paragraph, especially the first highlight sentence here.

AdelineShen 发表于 2009-12-31 13:22

By discerning patterns in the universe, Newton believed, he was tracing the hand of God.
牛顿认为，辨明，认知宇宙的结构模式，就能探索上帝造物的秘密。
（牛顿创立了经典物理学后，觉得自己已经弄清宇宙的模式，晚年，他转为研究神学。还有，牛顿的经典物理学是严格的决定论的）

Scientistsin our day have largely abandoned the notion of a Creator as anunnecessary hypothesis,
or at least an untestable one.
当今的科学家们， 早已将上帝是造物主一说抛至脑后，视其为不必要的虚妄的假说； 或者至少认为上帝这一说无从证实。

Whilethey share Newton's faith that the universe is ruled everywhere by acoherent set of rules, they cannot say,
as scientists, how theseparticular rules came to govern things.
尽管他们（当今的科学家们）认同牛顿的这一观点--宇宙万物无处不由一套连贯严整的法则来主宰，但是作为科学家，他们也讲不清
这些特定法则是如何主宰宇宙万物的。

You can do science without believing in a divine Legislator, but not without believing in laws.
我们从事科学研究，可以不相信上帝是自然界的立法者（这一假说），但是绝不能不相信主宰宇宙的规律法则的存在。

不知道这样说，是不是能弄清楚点啥

hugeseaUID：190158

Questions:

Even fifteen billion years or so after the BigBang, echoes of that event still linger in the form of backgroundradiation, only a few degrees above absolute zero.

What does the author mean by " only a few degrees above the absolute zero" ? I am confused about it.

AdelineShen 发表于 2009-12-31 13:22

Even15 billion years or so after the Big Bang, echoes of that event stilllinger in the form of background radiation, only a few
degrees above absolute zero.
原始大爆炸已过了150亿年左右，大爆炸的痕迹仍以背景辐射的形式存留在宇宙中间，只比绝对零度高几度。

这个是我前面说的。

嗯，看到你说作者提“只比绝对零度高几度”难理解。我去翻阅了一些资料。

资料上讲，应该做这样的理解：
大爆炸遗迹在空间以背景辐射的形式存留。背景辐射是一种电磁波，其辐射能量很微弱，但稳定而且无明显波动，
所以作者明确写出辐射能量在绝对零度以上几度（事实上，是绝对零度以上3度）。

所以我把上面一句话改译为：
经过了大约一百五十亿年，宇宙大爆炸的余波仍然以微弱的背景热辐射形式存在，其辐射温度低到
比绝对零度略高出几度而已。