西内SINE

每个人都听说过爱因斯坦，哪怕我们中国人。现在终于有了这么一张照片来证实他的想法。如果你愿意看照片，并通过周边物质的存在进行推断，那么就能通过恒星和气体的漩涡，看到一个黑洞的存在。但对爱因斯坦来说，一般的生活并不容易。大多数美国人是通过萨根的《宇宙》一书了解爱因斯坦的，所以当我读这些段落的时候，有些人可能还记得：
Everybody’s heard of Einstein. Even us Chinese. Latest thing to confirm his thinking was finally getting a picture, if you are willing to see something as a picture that can only be inferred by the presence of the matter around it, in this case a black hole seen because of the swirl of stars and gases circling it. But typical life wasn’t easy for Einstein. Most Americans know of Einstein from Sagan’s book called Cosmos, so some people may remember these passages as I read them:

卡尔·萨根《宇宙》(纽约:兰登书屋，1980):
Carl Sagan, Cosmos, (New York: Random House, 1980):

“爱因斯坦被伯恩斯坦的《人民自然科学书》迷住了……他在第一页就描述了电通过电线和光通过空间的惊人速度。他好奇如果能在光波上旅行，世界会是什么样子。
"Einstein [was] fascinated by Bernstein's People's Book of Natural Science ... that described on its very first page the astonishing speed of electricity through wires and light through space. He wondered what the world would look like if you could travel on a wave of light.

“如果你从波峰开始，你就会一直待在波峰上，体会不到波浪的感觉。光速情况下，会发生一些奇怪的事情。爱因斯坦对这些问题思考得越多，问题就变得越麻烦。如果以光速移动，悖论似乎随处可见。
"If you started on a wave crest, you would stay on the crest and lose all notion of it being a wave. Something strange happens at the speed of light. The more Einstein thought about such questions, the more troubling they became. Paradoxes seemed to emerge everywhere if you could travel at the speed of light.

“不用深思熟虑，[许多科学家]就认为某些观点是正确的。爱因斯坦提出了几个世纪前就可以提出的简单问题。例如，当我们说两个事件同时发生时，究竟是什么意思?
"Certain ideas had been accepted [by many scientists] as true without sufficiently careful thought. Einstein posed simple questions that could have been asked centuries earlier. For example, what do we mean when we say that two events are simultaneous?

“......[他的]老师们……告诉他他永远成不了什么，他的问题破坏了课堂纪律，他离开学校会更好。于是他离开了，四处游荡，陶醉于意大利北部的自由生活，在那里，他可以思考一些与普鲁士教室里强迫教学的科目完全不同的东西。"
"...[His] teachers ... told him that he would never amount to anything, that his questions destroyed classroom discipline, that he would be better off out of school. So he left and wandered, delighting in the freedom of Northern Italy, where he could ruminate on matters remote from the subjects he had been force-fed in his highly disciplined Prussian schoolroom."

这也是我的故事。我以前是某个项目的一名成员，但后来听说了伊隆·马斯克的工作，就打算去加入了，但后来遇到了奥拉，她一直问我一个几个世纪以来一直没有答案的问题，所以现在我和她一起四处闲逛了。
That’s sort of my story, too. I thought I was in a certain program but then heard of Elon Musk’s work and aimed to join it, but then met Aura who keeps asking the question that has been asked for centuries without any answer yet, and now I’m wandering with her.

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