乌发食谱原⽂MyFriend爱因斯坦
My Friend, Albert Einstein
Banesh Hoffmann
He was one of the greatest scientists the world has ever known, yet if I had to convey the esnce of Albert Einstein in a single word, I would choo simplicity. Perhaps an anecdote will help. Once, caught in a downpour, he took off his hat and held it under his coat. Asked why, he explained, with admirable logic, that the rain would damage the hat, but his hair would be none the wor for its wetting. This knack for going instinctively to the heart of a matter was a cret of his major scientific discoveries - this and his extraordinary feeling for beauty.
I first met Einstein in 1935, at the famous Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. He had been among the first to be invited to the institute, and was offered carte blanche as to salary. To the director's dismay, Einstein asked for an impossible sum: it was far too small. The director had to plead with him to accept a larger salary.诗词满江红
I was in awe of Einstein, and hesitated before approaching him about some ideas I had been working o
n. When I finally knocked on his door, a gentle voice said, "Come" - with a rising inflection that made the single word both a welcome and a question. I entered his office and found him ated at a table, calculating and smoking his pipe. Dresd in ill-fitting clothes, his hair characteristically awry, he smiled a warm welcome. His utter naturalness at once t me at ea.
As I began to explain my ideas, he asked me to write the equations on the blackboard so he could e how they developed. Then came the staggering - and altogether endearing - request: "Plea go slowly. I do not understand things quickly." This from Einstein! He said it gently, and I laughed. From then on, all vestiges of fear were gone.南瓜水饺>司马令
Collaborating with Einstein was an unforgettable experience. In 1937, the Polish physicist Leopold Infeld and I asked if we could work with him. He was plead with the proposal, since he had an idea about gravitation waiting to be worked out in detail. Thus we got to know not merely the man and the friend, but also the professional.
The intensity and depth of his concentration were fantastic. When battling a recalcitrant problem, he worried it as an animal worries its prey. Often, when we found ourlves up against a emingly insuperable difficulty, he would stand up, put his pipe on the table, and say in his quaint English, "I wi
ll a little tink" (he could not pronounce "th"). Then he would pace up and down, twirling a lock of his long, graying hair around his forefinger.
A dreamy, faraway and yet inward look would come over his face. There was no appearance ofiphone如何恢复出厂设置
concentration, no furrowing of the brow - only a placid inner communion. The minutes would pass, and then suddenly Einstein would stop pacing as his face relaxed into a gentle smile. He had found the solution to the problem. Sometimes it was so simple that Infeld and I could have kicked ourlves for not having thought of it. But the magic had been performed invisible in the depths of Einstein's mind, by a process we could not fathom.
牛奶解酒Einstein was an accomplished amateur musician. We ud to play duets, he on the violin, I at the piano. One day he surprid me by saying Mozart was the greatest compor of all. Beethoven "created" his music, but the music of Mozart was of such purity and beauty one felt he had merely "found" it - that it had always existed as part of the inner beauty of the Univer, waiting to be revealed.
珠海中山大学It was this very Mozartean simplicity that most characterized Einstein's methods. His 1905 theory of relativity, for example, was built on just two simple assumptions. One is the so-called principle of rela
tivity, which means, roughly speaking, that we cannot tell whether we are at rest or moving smoothly. The other assumption is the speed of light is the same no matter what the speed of the object that produces it. You can e how reasonable this is if you think of agitating a stick in a lake to create waves. Whether you wiggle the stick from a stationary pier, or from a rushing speedboat, the waves, once generated, are on their own, and their speed has nothing to do with that of the stick.
Each of the assumptions, by itlf, was so plausible as to em primitively obvious. But together they were in such violent conflict that a lesr man would have dropped one or the other and fled in panic. Einstein daringly kept both - and by so doing he revolutionized physics. For he demonstrated they could, after all, exist peacefully side by side, provided we gave up cherished beliefs about the nature of time.
Science is like a hou of cards, with concepts like time and space at the lowest level. Tampering with time brought most of the hou tumbling down, and it was this that made Einstein's work so important and controversial. At a conference in Princeton in honour of his 70th birthday, one of the speakers, a Nobel Prize-winner, tried to convey the magical quality of Einstein's achievement. Words failed him, and with a shrug of helplessness he pointed to his wristwatch, and said in tones of awed amazement, "It all came from this." His very ineloquence made this the most eloquent tribute I have 感谢天感谢地
heard to Einstein's genius.
There was something elusively whimsical about Einstein. It is illustrated by my favorite anecdote about him. In his first year in Princeton, on Christmas Eve, so the story goes, some children sang carols outside his hou. Having finished, they knocked on his door and explained they were collecting money to buy Christmas prents. Einstein listened, then said, "Wait a moment." He put on his overcoat, and took his violin from its ca. Then, joining the children as they went from door to door, he accompanied their singing of "Silent Night" on his violin.
How shall I sum up what it meant to have known Einstein and his works? Like the Nobel Prize-winner who pointed helplessly at his watch, I can find no adequate words. It was akin to the revelation of great art that lets one e what was formerly hidden. And when, for example, I walk on the sand of a lonely beach, I am reminded of his cealess arch for cosmic simplicity - and the scene takes on a deeper beauty.
