-
果然有机
The Beauty of
Science
科学之美
1)Judging from the scientists I
know,including
Eva and Ruth,and those
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 along career deciphering what
must be
happening in the interior of
lls for me
this thrill on grasping for
the first time Dirac’s
equations
describing quantum mechanics,or those
of Einstein describing
relativity.“They’re so
beautiful,”hesays,“you can see
immediately they
have to be at least
on the way toward
truth.”I ask him what
makes a theory beautiful,and
he
replies,”Simplicity,symmetry,elegance,and
power.”
从我认识的科学工作
者（包
括伊娃和鲁斯）及我从书中读
到的科学家来看，只要去探
寻
自然法则，用不了多久，就能
与美不期而遇。一位朋友说，<
/p>
“我不敢肯定这就是夕阳西下
那种美，但感觉上两者是相同
的。”这位朋友是物理学家，
长期致力于破译天体内部的变
化。他回想起第一次领悟狄拉
克的量子力学方程式和爱因斯
坦相对论等式时的兴奋感，
“它
们太美了，你一眼就可
看出它
们必定是正确，或至少接近正
确。”当我问及什么能使理
论
变得美丽时，他回答说：“简
单、对称、优雅、力量。”
2)Why
nature should conform to theories we
find beautiful is far from most
incomprehensible thing about the
universe,asEinsteinsaid,is that it’s
ikely,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
b
lack ’realong way from
under
-standing
everything,but we do understand a great
deal
about how nature behaves.
< br>自然界为何会与令我们觉得美的理
论相一致？这问题远未明了。正如
爱因斯坦所言，宇宙最不可理解之
处就在于它是可以理解的。人类，
这种生活在一个微不足道的星球上
的两足动物，历史并不久远，竟能
测算光速，揭示原子结构，并估算
黑洞的万有引力，这是多么不可思
议啊。我们远未能通晓万物，但我
们确已对自然界的运作规律所
知甚
多。