《原文MyFriend爱因斯坦》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《原文MyFriend爱因斯坦（3页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、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 essence of Albert Einstein in a single word, I would choose simplicity. Perhaps an anecdote will help. Once, caught in a downpour, he took off his hat and held it und
2、er his coat. Asked why, he explained, with admirable logic, that the rain would damage the hat, but his hair would be none the worse for its wetting. This knack for going instinctively to the heart of a matter was a secret of his major scientific discoveries - this and his extraordinary feeling for
3、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 directors dismay, Einstein asked for an impossible sum: it was far too small. The director
4、 had to plead with him to accept a larger salary.I was in awe of Einstein, and hesitated before approaching him about some ideas I had been working on. 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.
5、I entered his office and found him seated at a table, calculating and smoking his pipe. Dressed in ill-fitting clothes, his hair characteristically awry, he smiled a warm welcome. His utter naturalness at once set me at ease.As I began to explain my ideas, he asked me to write the equations on the b
6、lackboard so he could see how they developed. Then came the staggering - and altogether endearing - request: “Please 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.Collaborating with Einstein was an u
7、nforgettable experience. In 1937, the Polish physicist Leopold Infeld and I asked if we could work with him. He was pleased 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.T
8、he 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 ourselves up against a seemingly insuperable difficulty, he would stand up, put his pipe on the table, and say in his quaint English, “I
9、 will 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 of concentration, no furrowing of the brow - only a placid inner
10、 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 ourselves for not having thought of it. But the magic had been performed
11、invisible in the depths of Einsteins mind, by a process we could not fathom.Einstein was an accomplished amateur musician. We used to play duets, he on the violin, I at the piano. One day he surprised me by saying Mozart was the greatest composer of all. Beethoven “created“ his music, but the music
12、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 Universe, waiting to be revealed.It was this very Mozartean simplicity that most characterized Einsteins methods. His 1905 theory of relativity, for example, was
13、built on just two simple assumptions. One is the so-called principle of relativity, 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 se
14、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 these assumptions, by
15、itself, was so plausible as to seem primitively obvious. But together they were in such violent conflict that a lesser 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
16、peacefully side by side, provided we gave up cherished beliefs about the nature of time.Science is like a house of cards, with concepts like time and space at the lowest level. Tampering with time brought most of the house tumbling down, and it was this that made Einsteins 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
