[分享] 每日一星！爱因斯坦

tomatoeggsUID: 82073

Physicist: Albert Einstein
物理学家——阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦
The scientific touchstones of the modern age――the Bomb, space travel, electronics, quantum(量子) physics----all bear this imprint.
The name echoes through the language: It doesn’t take an Einstein. A poor man’s Einstein. He is no Einstein. In this busy century, dominated like no other by science---and exalting, among the human virtues, braininess, IQ, the ideal of pure intelligence --- he stands alone as our emblem of intellectual power. We talk as though humanity could be divided into two groups: Albert Einstein and everybody else.
这个名字一直在我们的语言中回响：“这不需要爱因斯坦。”“这算不上爱因斯坦。”“他绝不是爱因斯坦。”在这个前所未有的为科学所统治的繁忙的世纪——在人类美德中推崇博学、智商、和纯智慧的理想的世纪——他作为我们智力的象征卓然独立。说起来人类似乎可以分为两组：阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦和其他所有的人。
He discovered, just by thinking about it, the essential structure of the cosmos. The scientific touchstones of our age---the bomb, space travel, electronics---all bear his imprint.

tomatoeggsUID: 82073

真不好意思，现在正式宣布重新启动每日专栏，那么先让“每日一星”发发光芒吧。

Physicist: Albert Einstein     (2)  

The time had come. The Newtonian world view was fraying at the edges. (牛顿式的世界亟待更新。) The 19th century had pressed its understanding of space and time to the very limit. Everyone believed in the ether(乙醚), that mysterious background substance of the whole universe through which light waves supposedly traveled, but where was the experimental evidence for it? Nowhere, as Einstein realize. He found it more productive to think in terms of reference--- because these could move along with a moving ovserver. Meanwhile, a few imaginative people were already speaking of time in terms of a fourth dimension---H.G. Wells(英国作家，主要作品《时间机器》、《星际战争》等), for example, in his time-obsessed science fiction. Humanity was standing on a brink, ready to see something new.


It was Einstein who saw it. Space and time were not apples and oranges, he realized, but mates---joined , homologous(生物同源),inseparable. “Hence force space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade away into mere shadows,” said 海尔曼努Minkowski（俄裔德国科学家，研究数论及四维时空几何，提出时空的新概念，为相对论奠定数学基础），a teacher of Einstein’s and one of relativity’s first champions. “and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality. “ Well, we all know that now. “ Space-time,” we knowingly call it. Likewise energy and matter: two faces of one creature. E=mc*2(不好意思，平方不知道如何表示), as Einstein memorably announce.

feier521UID: 109747

蛋蛋，罚酒三杯！
呵呵，“西红柿炒鸡蛋”，好的下酒菜啊！

angeikimUID: 4857

欢迎归队 :D

tomatoeggsUID: 82073

最初由 feier521 发表
[B]蛋蛋，罚酒三杯！
呵呵，“西红柿炒鸡蛋”，好的下酒菜啊！ [/B]

吃了我你就惨啦！

tomatoeggsUID: 82073

Albert · Einstein

    All this was shocking and revolutionary and yet strangely attractive, to the public as well as to the scientists. The speed of light; the shifting perspective of the observer---it was heady fare. A solar eclipse in 1919 gave English astronomer Arthur Eddington(英国天文学家、物理学家，相对论、宇宙论等领域的先驱) the opportunity to prove a key prediction of relativity: that starlight would swerve measurably as it passed through the heavy gravity of the sun, a dimple in the fabric of the universe. Light has mass. Newspapers and popular magazines went wild. More than 100 books on relativity appeared within a year. Eistein claimed to be the only person in his circle not trying to win a $5,000 [I]Scientific American[/I] prize for the best 3,000-word summary (“I don’t believe I could do it”).


The very name relativity fueled the fervor, for accidental and wholly unscientific reason. In this new age, recovering from a horrible war, looking everywhere for originality and novelty and modernity, people cold see that absolutism was not good. Everything had to be looked at relative to everything else. Everything---for humanity’s field of vision was expanding rapidly outward, to planets, stars, galaxies.

Einstein had conjured the whole business, it seemed. He did not invent the “thought experiment,” but he raised it to high art: [I]Imagine twins, wearing identical watches; one stays home, while the other rides in a spceship near the speed of light… [/I] Little wonder that from 1919, Einstein was---and remains today---the world’s most famous scientist.

In embracing Einstein, our century took leave of a prior universe and an erstwhile God. The new versions were not so rigid and deterministic as the old Newtonian world. Einstein’s God was no clockmaker, but he was the embodiment of reason in nature---“subtle but malicious he is not.” This God did not control our actions or even sit in judgment on them. (“Einstein, stop telling God what to do,” Niels Bohr(丹麦物理学家)finally retorted.) This God seemed rather kindly and absent-minded, as a matter of fact. Physics was freer, and we too are freer, in the Einstein universe. Which is where we live.