Sir Isaac Newton was a towering genius in the history of science, he knew he was a genius, and he didn’t like wasting his time. Born on Dec. 25, 1642, the great English physicist and mathematician rarely socialized or traveled far from home. He didn’t play sports or a musical instrument, gamble at whist or gambol on a hor. He dismisd poetry as “a kind of ingenious nonn,” and the one time he attended an opera he fled at the third act. Newton was unmarried, had no known romantic liaisons and may well have died, at the age of 85, with his virginity intact. “I never knew him to take any recreation or pastime,” said his assistant, Humphrey Newton, “thinking all hours lost that were not spent on his studies.”
艾萨克·牛顿爵士是科学史上的伟大的天才，他自己也知道这一点，所以他不愿意浪费他的时间。牛顿生于1642年12月25日，这个伟大的英格兰物理学家和数学家甚少社交或者出远门。他不做运动，不玩乐器，不赌博，不骑马。他摒弃诗歌，视之为“精致的废话”，他有一次去听歌剧，在第三幕的时候就退席了。牛顿终身未婚，从未有过罗曼史，在他85岁辞世的时候，很可能还是童贞之身。“我从未听闻过他有任何消遣娱乐活动，” 他的助手汉弗莱·牛顿说，“那样用来做研究的时间就被白白浪费掉了。”
No, it wasn’t easy being Newton. Not only did he hammer out the universal laws of motion and gravitational attraction, formulating equations that are still ud today to plot the trajectories of space rovers bound for Mars; and not only did he discover the spectral properties of light and invent calculus. 大智若愚
最佳贡献奖颁奖词Sir Isaac had a whole other full-time career, a parallel intellectual passion that he kept largely hidden from view but that rivaled and sometimes surpasd in intensity his devotion to celestial mechanics. Newton was a rious alchemist, who spent night upon dawn for three decades of his life slaving over a stygian furnace in arch of the power to transmute one chemical element into another.
不，做牛顿并不容易。不仅是因为他发现了三大运动定律和万有引力定律，构想出至今仍在被沿用来计算火星运行轨迹的方程式；也不仅是因为他发现了光谱的特性，发明了微积分。艾萨克爵士还有一份不为众人所知的全职事业，他在上面投入的激情，与他在所热爱的天体力学上投入的相同，甚至有时候更多。牛顿是一名真正的炼金术士。一位花了三十年的光阴，彻夜守候在阴暗的熔炉前，寻找把一种化学物质变成另一种的力量。
Newton’s interest in alchemy has long been known in broad outline, but the scope and details of that moonlighting enterpri are only now becoming clear, as science historians gradually analyze and publish Newton’s extensive writings on alchemy — a million-plus words from the Newtonian archives th
at had previously been largely ignored.
牛顿对炼金术的兴趣，世人早已有所了解，但是这项兼职事业的范围和细节直到现在，才随着科学史
学家逐渐地分析和公布牛顿在炼金术上的大量手稿 -- 来自以前被忽略的牛顿的存档文件中的一百多万字 -- 而变得清晰起来。
探求的近义词Speaking last week at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, William Newman, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University in Bloomington, described his studies of Newton’s alchemical oeuvre, and offered insight into the central mystery that often baffles contemporary Newton fans. How could the man who vies in surveys with Albert Einstein for the title of “greatest physicist ever,” the man whom James Gleick has aptly designated “chief architect of the modern world,” have been so swept up in what looks to modern eyes like a medieval delusion? How could the ultimate scientist have been emingly hornswoggled by a totemic psuedoscience like alchemy, which in its commonest rendering is described as the desire to transform lead into gold? Was Newton mad — perhaps made mad by exposure to mercury, as some have propod? Was he greedy, or gullible, or stubbornly blind to the truth?
上周在加拿大安大略省滑铁卢的圆周理论物理研究所上发表的讲话中，印第安纳大学科学史和科学哲学教授William Newman描述了他对牛顿炼金术作品所做的研究，而且对经常给当代牛顿的爱好者们造成困扰的主要谜题提出了深刻地见解。一个在“史上最伟大的物理学家”的民意调查里与爱因斯坦并肩，一个被James Gleick称之为“现代社会的首席设计师”的人，怎么会深陷在现代人眼中的中世纪的
妄想里？一个终极科学家怎么会看上去像是被炼金术这种图腾伪科学所迷惑，而对这种伪学科最常见的描述是把铅变成黄金的欲望？牛顿是疯了吗 -- 就像某些观点所说的，也许因长期接触汞所导致？还是他贪心，过于轻信或者顽固地对事实视而不见？
In Dr. Newman’s view, none of the above. Sir Isaac the Alchemist, he said, was no less the fierce and uncompromising scientist than was Sir Isaac, author of the magisterial Principia Mathematica. There were plenty of theoretical and empirical reasons at the time to take the principles of alchemy riously, to believe that compounds could be broken down into their basic constituents and tho constituents then reconfigured into other, more desirable substances.
在Newman博士看来，以上猜测都是错的。作为炼金术士的艾萨克爵士，他说道，和作为权威的数学原理的作者的艾萨克爵士比起来不呈多让。在当时，有许多理论上和经验主义上的原因使得人们严肃对待炼金术，去相信复杂的化合物可以分解成基本的成分，然后重新组合成其他想要的物质
。
努力拼搏的成语Miners were pulling up from the ground twisted bundles of copper and silver that were shaped like the stalks of a plant, suggesting that veins of metals and minerals were proliferating underground with almost florid zeal.
矿工们从地底的矿脉中带上的形状像植物根茎的铜银混生矿，表明金属和矿物在地底繁荣地增长着。
Pools found around other mines emed to have extraordinary properties. Dip an iron bar into the cerulean waters of the vitriol springs of modern-day Slovakia, for example, and the artifact will emerge agleam with copper, as though the dull, dark particles of the original had been elementally reinvented. “It was perfectly reasonable for Isaac Newton to believe in alchemy,” said Dr. Newman. “Most of the experimental scientists of the 17th century did.”
在其他矿脉附近发现的水池像是蕴含着异常的特性。举个例子，在现在的斯洛伐克，把一根铁条浸入硫酸盐泉里蔚蓝的水中，它会生成闪亮的铜，就像是原本那些晦暗的黑色的颗粒被彻底改造了。“这使得艾萨克牛顿有着充分地理由相信炼金术，”Newman博士说，“就像17世纪里大多数的实验科学学家那样。”
Moreover, while the alchemists of the day may not have mastered the art of transmuting one element into another — an ordeal that we have since learned requires rious equipment like a particle accelerator, or the belly of a star — their work yielded a bounty of valuable spinoffs, including new drugs, brighter paints, stronger soaps and better booze. “Alchemy was synonymous with chemistry,” said Dr. Newman, “and chemistry was much bigger than transmutation.”
再者，虽然当时的炼金术士没能掌握将一种元素转变成其他元素的方法 -- 我们后来得知那需要很苛刻的条件，需要一些不寻常的设备，像是粒子加速器或者是在星球内部 -- 但是他们的成果衍生了许多副产品，像是新的药物，更明亮的涂料，效果更好的香皂以及更好的酒。“炼金术在当时就等同于化学，”Newman博士说，“而化学比单纯的元素转换有用多了。”
For Newton, alchemy may also have proved bigger than chemistry. Dr. Newman argues that Sir Isaac’s alchemical investigations helped yield one of his fundamental breakthroughs in physics: his discovery that white light is a mixture of colored rays, and that a sunbeam prismatically fractured into the familiar rainbow suite called Roy G. Biv can with a lens be resolved to tidy white sunbeam once again. “I would go so far as to say that alchemy was crucial to Newton’s breakthroughs in optics,” said Dr. Newman. “He’s not just passing light through a prism — he’s resynthesizing it.” Consider this a ca of “technology transfer,” said Dr. Newman, “from chemistry to physics.”
对牛顿而言，炼金术也许也比化学更有用。Newman博士相信，艾萨克爵士的
炼金研究帮助他在一项物理学取得基础性的突破：他发现了白光是多种有色光线的混合，而日光通过棱镜可以折射出像彩虹一样的七种颜色，它们通过透镜可以再次重组为白色日光。“我可以很肯定地说炼金术对牛顿在光学上的突破起到了很关键的作用，”Newman博士说。“他不仅仅是让光线通过棱镜 -- 他还重新合成了它。”可以把这看作是一个”技术转移“的案例，Newman博士说，“从化学到物理。”
The conceptual underpinning to the era’s alchemical fixation was the idea of matter as hierarchical and particulate — that tiny, indivisible and mipermanent particles come together to form ever more complex and increasingly porous substances, a notion not so different from the reality revealed by 20th-century molecular biology and quantum physics.
那个时代的炼金术所坚持的基本概念是认为物质是分层的，是由粒子构成的 -- 由那些细微的，肉眼不可见的，非永久的粒子聚集在一起组成更加复杂和日益混合的物质，这个说法和20世纪分子生物学和量子物理所揭示的事实没什么差别。
With the right solvents and the perfect reactions, the rearchers thought, it should be possible to reduce a substance to its core constituents — its corpuscles, as Newton called them — and then prompt the corpuscles to adopt new configurations and programs. Newton and his peers believed it was possible to prompt metals to grow, or “vegetate,” in a flask. After all, many chemical reactions were known to leave lovely dendritic residues in their wake. Dissolve a pinch of silver and mercury in a solution of nitric acid, drop in a lump of metal amalgam, and soon a spidery, glittering “Tree of Diana” will form on the glass. Or add iron to hydrochloric acid and boil the solution to dryness. Then prepare a powdery silicate mix of sand and potassium carbonate. Put the two together, and you will have a silica garden, in which the ruddy ferric chloride ris and bifurcates, ris and bifurcates, as t
桥用英语怎么读
成方圆简历hough it were reaching toward sunlight and bursting into bloom.
使用合适的溶剂和完美的化学反应，研究者认为，是可以把一种物质分解成它的核心成分 --牛顿称之为微粒 -- 然后将它们重新组合成新的形式的。牛顿和他的同伴们认为金属是可以在烧杯里种植，或“像植物般生长”的。毕竟，许多当时已知的化学反应会留下如同树枝般的残留物。例如在硝酸中溶入微量的银和水银成为硝酸银溶液，丢进一块合金，会在玻璃杯里生成闪闪发亮的“月神之树”。又或者将铁放入盐酸中，然后将溶液加热变成结晶。然后准备一些用沙子和碳酸钾混合而成的硝酸盐粉末，把它们放在一起，你会得到一个硅花园，你会看到红色的氯化铁拔地而起，不断生长，就像是在阳光照射下开花
我爱校园作文。
Add to this the miners’ finds of tree- and rootlike veins of metals and alchemists understandably concluded that metals must be not only growing underground, but ripening. Hadn’t twined ores of silver and lead been found? Might not the lead be halfway to a mature state of silverdom? Surely there was a way to keep the disinterred metal root balls sprouting in the lab, coaxing their fruit to full succulent ripeness as the noblest of metals — lead into silver, copper to gold?白的诗句
再加上矿工们发现的"植物" -- 像植物根茎状的金属矿脉，炼金术士们理所当然地就得出结论：金属不
仅在地底下生长，还会成熟。不是发现过银和铅的混生矿吗？有没可能铅就是银的半成熟体？真的有方法可以让这些挖掘出来的金属根茎球在实验室里继续生长，就像成熟多汁的果实一样变成贵金属 -- 从铅变成银，从铜变成金？
Well, no. If mineral veins sometimes remble botanical illustrations, blame it on Earth’s molten nature and fluid mechanics: when en from above, a branching river also looks like a tree.
事实并非如此。如果矿脉有时候表现出像植物的形式，那只能怪地球的熔融性质和流体力学了：当我们在高处往下看，一条有分支的河流看起来也像是一棵树。
Yet the alchemists had their triumphs, inventing brilliant new pigments, perfecting the old — red lead oxide, yellow arnic sulfide, a little copper and vinegar and you’ve got bright green verdigris. Artists were advid, forget about mixing your own colors: you can get the best from an alchemist. The chemistry lab replaced the monastery garden as a source of new medicines. “If you go to the U.K. today and u the word ‘chemist,’ the assumption is that you’re talking about the pharmacist,” said Dr. Newman. “That tradition goes back to the 17th century.”
尽管如此，炼金术士还是获得了许多成就，他们创造了色彩鲜艳的天然色素，使原来的色素更完美 -- 红色的氧化铅，黄色的硫化砷，少许铜加上醋，你就会得到明亮的绿色的铜绿。艺术家们被告知不用
再自己辛辛苦苦调配颜色了：你们可以找炼金术士获得最好的颜色。化学实验室取代了修道院成为了新的药物的来源。“如果你在今日的英国使用 ‘chemist’ 这个词，人们会以为你指的是药剂师，”Newman博士说道。“这是17世纪流传下来的传统。”
Alchemists also became expert at spotting cas of fraud. It was a renowned alchemist who proved that the “miraculous” properties of vitriol springs had nothing to do with true transmutation. Instead, the water’s vitriol, or copper sulfate, would cau iron atoms on the surface of a submerged iron rod to leach into the water, leaving pores that were quickly occupied by copper atoms from the spring.
炼金术士同时也变成了打假专家。曾经有一名著名的炼金术士
