爱因斯坦的真爱
[美]马克思•仇恩
Ten years is a long, long time in publishing, but it’s time well spent waiting for Dennis Overby’s Einstein in Love. Overbye is deputy science editor of The New York Times and wrote Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos. A fly-on-the-wall account of modern cosmologists’ epic struggle to make sense of the Universe, that book ranks as one of the best popular science books ever written. A decade on, Overbye’s subject is Albert Einstein.
在出版界,10年是一段漫长的过程,但是为了等待丹尼斯•奥弗拜的作品《恋爱的爱因斯坦》却是值得的。奥弗拜是《纽约时报》科技版的副总编,并且著有《环宙孤心》一书。作者在书中以管中窥豹式的描述讲述了现代宇宙学家们为了让人们认识宇宙而做出的巨大努力。这本书一出世就成了科技类书籍的畅销书之一。10多年来,奥弗拜的写作主题是:爱因斯坦。
To Overbye it was a revelation to hear the God-like Einstein descried as “a philanderer, a draft dodger, a flirt, a hustler, an artist, an errant son, an egregious poet, and a scuffling physicist”. “So the old boy had some juice in him after all,” realized Overbye, and resolved to concentrate on Einstein’s disreputable early years.
对奥弗拜来说,听到圣人般的爱因斯坦被别人描述为“一个情场高手、一位艺术家、一个不孝子、一位杰出的诗人和一个scaffing physicist”,完全是一种意外。
“这么说这个老男孩毕竟是有些故事的啊”,奥弗拜认识到,他下决心集中精力研究爱因斯坦不光彩的青年时期。
The cover of Einstein in Love features a photograph of a young Einstein and a young Maric, implying that this is their love story. But, says Overbye, throughout his life Einstein was in love with only one thing: physics. The world thus gained the general theory of relativity—a sublime illumination of the ultimate nature of gravity, space and time—but it was a terrible misfortune for the women in his life.
《恋爱中的爱因斯坦》的封面是一张年轻的爱因斯坦和年轻的玛丽克的合照,这本书是讲他们的恋爱故事。但是,奥弗拜说,终其一生,爱因斯坦只钟情于一件事情:物理学
世界也因此获得了相对的大体内容——一束耀眼的光芒明亮了重力、太空、空间的最终性质——但此时对他生命中的女人来说却是个很大的不幸。
Maric’s life is heartbreakingly sad. A Serb raised near Belgrade, she was born with a congenitally dislocated hip—a condition today easily corrected in childhood. It condemned Maric to lameness. Desperate to be a physicist—an extraordinary ambition in a woman of her time ---she arrived at Zurich’s Federal Polytechnic School in October 1990. There her “world line crossed a certain Albert Einstein’s.
玛丽克的身世令人心碎的难过,生长在靠近贝尔格莱德的一个塞尔维亚家庭,她天生臀部关节脱臼——这种病现在在儿童期很容易治愈,使得玛丽克不得不瘸着走路。立志要成为一个科学家——一个在她成年时的伟大抱负——1990年10月,她来到了苏黎士联邦工艺学校,在那儿她的生命线和爱尔伯特•爱因斯坦的一些交汇在了一起。
As a woman, the odds were of course stacked against her. To succeed, Maric needed to have a lot of talent and a lot of luck---the kind of luck Marie Sklodowska had when she found an equal partner in Pierre Curie. But not only did Maric find an equal, she fell in love with a light so blindingly bright that she was plunged into the deepest shadow as her dreams withered and died.
作为一个女人,机遇总是不利于她的。为了多年来,玛丽克需要更多的才能和更多的幸运——这种幸运就像玛丽•斯卡洛多斯卡发现了与她志两道合的合伙人皮埃尔•居里。后来玛丽克不公找到了与她志同道合的人,而且她爱上了那道耀眼的光芒,并且全身心的投入到他的背后,她的梦想也随之枯萎、消失了。
主帖获得的天涯分:0
楼主发言:1次 发图:0张 | 添加到话题 |