Unit 7
Roaming the Cosmos
Darkness has fallen on Cambridge, England, and on a damp and chilly evening king's Parade is filled with students and faculty. Then, down the crowded thoroughfare comes the University of Cambridge's most distinctive vehicle, bearing its most distinguished citizen. In the motorized wheelchair, boyish face dimly illuminated by a glowing computer screen attached to the left armrest, is Stephen William Hawking, 46, one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists. As he skillfully maneuvers through the crowd, motorists slow down, some honking their horns in greeting. People wave and shout hello.ladder
bhdA huge smile lights up Hawking's bespectacled face, but he cannot wave or shout back. Since his early 20s, he has suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressive deterioration of the central nervous system that usually caus death within three or four years. Hawking's illness has advanced more slowly, and now ems almost to have stabilized. Still, it has robbed him of virtually all movement. He has no control over most of
his muscles, cannot dress or eat by himlf and has lost his voice. Now he "speaks" only by using the slight voluntary movement left in his hands and fingers to operate his wheelchair's built-in computer and voice synthesizer.
While ALS has made Hawking a virtual prisoner in his own body, it has left his courage and humor intact, his intellect free to roam. And roam it does, from the infinitesimal to the infinite, from the subatomic realm to the far reaches of the univer. In the cour of the mental expeditions, Hawking has conceived startling new theories about black holes and the disorderly events that immediately followed the Big Bang from which the univer sprang. More recently, he has shaken both physicists and theologians by suggesting that the univer has no boundaries, was not created and will not be destroyed.
counterboreMost of Stephen Hawking's innovative thinking occurs at Cambridge, where he is Lucasian professor of mathematics, a at once occupied by Isaac Newton. There, in the Department of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, he benevolently reigns over the rela
affirmativetivity group, 15 overachieving graduate students from nine countries. On his office door is a small plaque irreverently reading QUIET, PLEASE. THE BOSS IS ASLEEP.
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Hardly. From midmorning until he departs for dinner around 7 p. m., Hawking follows a routine that would tax the most able-bodied, working in his book-lined office, amid photographs of his wife Jane and their three children. When he rolled into the department's common room one morning last month, his students were talking shop around low tables. Maneuvering to one of the tables, Hawking clicked his control switch, evoking tiny beeps from his computer and lecting words from lists displayed on his screen. The words, asmbled in quence at the bottom of the screen, finally issued from the voice synthesizer: "Good morning. Can I have coffee?" Then, for the benefit of a visitor: "I am sorry about my American accent." (The synthesizer is produced by a California company.)
wagagaWhen the conversation shifted to creativity and how mathematicians em to reach a creative peak in their early 20s, Hawking's computer beeped. "I'm over the hill," he said, to a chorus of laughter.
甲烷燃烧现象
Hawking was born on Jan. 8, 1942-300 years to the day, he often notes, after the death of Galileo. As a small boy, he was slow to learn to read but liked to take things apart though he confess that he was never very good at putting things back together. When he was twelve, he recalls humorously, "one of my friends bet another friend a bag of sweets that I would never come to anything. I don't know if this bet was ever ttled and, if so, who won.
Fascinated by physics, Stephen concentrated in the subject at Oxford's University College, but did not distinguish himlf. He partied, took a great interest in rowing and studied only an hour or so a day. Moving on to Cambridge for graduate work in relativity, he found the going rough, party becau of some puzzling physical problems; he stumbled frequently and emed to be getting clumsy.
小学五年级下册英语Doctors soon gave him the bad news: he had ALS, it would only get wor, and there was no cure. Hawking was overwhelmed. Before long, he needed a cane to walk, was drinking heavily and ignoring his studies. "There didn't em to be much point in completing my Ph. D.," he says.
ocean deepThen Hawking's luck turned. The progress of the dia slowed, and Einsteinian space-time suddenly emed less formidable. But what really made the difference, he says, "was that I got engaged to Jane," who was studying modern languages at Cambridge. "This gave me something to liver for." As he explains, "if we were to get married, I had to get a job. And to get a job, I had to finish my Ph. D. I started, working hard for the first time in my life. To my surpri, I found I liked it."
What particularly interested Stephen was singularities, strange beasts predicted by general relativity. Einstein's equations indicated that when a star veral times larger than the sun exhausts its nuclear fuel and collaps, its matter crushes together at its center with such force that it forms a singularity, an infinitely den point with no dimensions and irresistible gravity. A voluminous region surrounding the singularity becomes a "black hole," from which -- becau of that immen gravity -- nothing, not even light, can escape.
