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1、Steven Weinberg: Four golden lessonsNATURE | VOL 426 | 27 NOVEMBER 2003 | When I received my undergraduate degree about a hundred years ago the physics literature seemed to me a vast, unexplored ocean, every part of which I had to chart before beginning any research of my own. How could I do anythin
2、g without knowing everything that had already been done? Fortunately, in my first year of graduate school, I had the good luck to fall into the hands of senior physicists who insisted, over my anxious objections, that I must start doing research, and pick up what I needed to know as I went along. It
3、 was sink or swim. To my surprise, I found that this works. I managed to get a quick PhD though when I got it I knew almost nothing about physics. But I did learn one big thing: that no one knows everything, and you dont have to. Another lesson to be learned, to continue using my oceanographic metap
4、hor, is that while you are swimming and not sinking you should aim for rough water. When I was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1960s, a student told me that he wanted to go into general relativity rather than the area I was working on, elementary particle physics, b
5、ecause the principles of the former were well known, while the latter seemed like a mess to him. It struck me that he had just given a perfectly good reason for doing the opposite. Particle physics was an area where creative work could still be done. It really was a mess in the 1960s, but since that
6、 time the work of many theoretical and experimental physicists has been able to sort it out, and put everything (well, almost everything) together in a beautiful theory known as the standard model. My advice is to go for the messes thats where the action is. My third piece of advice is probably the
7、hardest to take. It is to forgive yourself for wasting time. Students are only asked to solve problems that their professors (unless unusually cruel) know to be solvable. In addition, it doesnt matter if the problems are scientifically important they have to be solved to pass the course. But in the
8、real world, its very hard to know which problems are important, and you never know whether at a given moment in history a problem is solvable. At the beginning of the twentieth century, several leading physicists, including Lorentz and Abraham, were trying to work out a theory of the electron. This
9、was partly in order to understand why all attempts to detect effects of Earths motion through the ether had failed. We now know that they were working on the wrong problem. At that time, no one could have developed a successful theory of the electron, because quantum mechanics had not yet been disco
10、vered. It took the genius of Albert Einstein in 1905 to realize that the right problem on which to work was the effect of motion on measurements of space and time. This led him to the special theory of relativity. As you will never be sure which are the right problems to work on, most of the time th
11、at you spend in the laboratory or at your desk will be wasted. If you want to be creative, then you will have to get used to spending most of your time not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientific knowledge. Finally, learn something about the history of science, or at a minimum t
12、he history of your own branch of science. The least important reason for this is that the history may actually be of some use to you in your own scientific work.For instance, now and then scientists are hampered by believing one of the oversimplified models of science that have been proposed by phil
13、osophers from Francis Bacon to Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. The best antidote to the philosophy of science is a knowledge of the history of science. More importantly, the history of science can make your work seem more worthwhile to you. As a scientist, youre probably not going to get rich. Your fri
14、ends and relatives probably wont understand what youre doing. And if you work in a field like elementary particle physics, you wont even have the satisfaction of doing something that is immediately useful. But you can get great satisfaction by recognizing that your work in science is a part of histo
15、ry. Look back 100 years, to 1903. How important is it now who was Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1903, or President of the United States? What stands out as really important is that at McGill University, Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy were working out the nature of radioactivity. This wor
16、k (of course!) had practical applications, but much more important were its cultural implications. The understanding of radioactivity allowed physicists to explain how the Sun and Earths cores could still be hot after millions of years. In this way, it removed the last scientific objection to what many geologists and paleontologists thought was the great age of the Earth and the Sun. After this, Christians and Jews either had to give up belie
