经济学人逝者 || 天体物理学家琼·费曼

原文:http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzU1MDQwNTgzMg==&mid=2247491816&idx=1&sn=44abe565febf193a99bc14635274efd3&chksm=fba3b34fccd43a592a78667319a45f3bd56d905d2321940baba1eb23e50e7b4082b0105a8c05#rd

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Obituary: Joan Feynman

逝者:琼·费曼

英文部分选自经济学人20200918期逝者版块

Obituary: Joan Feynman

逝者:琼·费曼


Getting to know the Sun

探知太阳


Joan Feynman, astrophysicist, died on July 22nd, aged 93

天体物理学家琼·费曼于722日逝世,享年93岁。


In the dusty Spanish town of Tordesillas in 1494, Spain and Portugal divided the unclaimed world between them. The moment is famous. Less well known is that around 1963, she at Columbia, he at Caltech, Joan Feynman and her brother Richard divvied up the universe. She took auroras, the Northern and Southern Lights that shimmer through the night sky in the highest latitudes. He, nine years older and fast becoming a world star in physics, took all the rest, which was fine with her.


1494年,在尘土飞扬的西班牙小镇托尔德西里亚斯,西班牙和葡萄牙两国瓜分了新世界。那是历史上的著名时刻。而不那么为人所知的是,1963年左右,在哥伦比亚大学的琼·费曼,和她在加州理工学院的哥哥理查德,两人划分了宇宙。琼选了极光,即高纬度地区夜空中一闪而过的北极光和南极光。而年长琼九岁的理查德——当时正迅速崛起为物理学世界之星,选了其他所有,琼也欣然接受。


The arrangement was serious. When, many years later, Richard was asked to look into auroras, he said he would have to ask Joan’s permission. She said no. They were hers, and besides, he had started the fascination. One night when she was small he dragged her out of bed, made her get dressed and took her to the golf course in Far Rockaway, near their house. Auroras did not normally come down to lower latitudes, but here was one. As she stared at a sky that was dancing with red, gold and green lights, he told her that no one knew how they happened, which was true back then. The mystery, with the lights, lodged in her head for good.


这个协定是来真的。多年后,有人让理查德研究极光,理查德说他必须征得琼的同意。琼拒绝了。极光是她的,而且正是理查德让她开始对极光痴迷。那是儿时的一个夜晚,理查德把睡梦中的琼拽下床,让她穿好衣服,带她去了家附近法洛克卫的高尔夫球场。极光通常不会在低纬度地区出现,但在那里可以看到。当她凝视着那片红、金、绿光交融起舞的天空,他告诉她,没有人知道极光是怎么发生的,当时确实如此。这个谜,连带这片光,永远印在了她的脑海中。


After years of looking into it, she found the answer. Auroras happened when particles from the solar wind, the stream of free electrons and heavy ions flowing out of the Sun, penetrated the magnetosphere that protected the Earth. The magnetic fields of the Earth and the solar wind, bound in different directions, intersected, and the colours were caused by solar particles colliding with oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. During coronal mass ejections, when huge flares of material were flung out of the Sun at speeds of up to 1,500km a second, auroras increased in frequency and range on the Earth. The faster the speed, the greater the geomagnetic disturbance.


经过多年的研究,她终于找到了答案。从太阳涌出的自由电子和重离子组成的粒子流称作太阳风。当太阳风的粒子穿过保护地球的磁层时,就产生了极光。地球磁场和太阳风,各自朝着不同的方向,然后相交;太阳粒子与地球高层大气中的氧和氮碰撞,产生了色彩。日冕物质抛射过程中,当巨大的耀斑以高达1500公里/秒的速度从太阳喷出时,地球上极光发生的频率和范围都会增大。喷射速度越快,地磁扰动程度越大。


注:

1. 日冕物质抛射(coronal mass ejection)是巨大的、携带磁力线的泡沫状气体,在几个小时中被从太阳抛射出来的过程。表现为在几分钟至几小时内从太阳向外抛射一团日冕物质(速度一般从每秒几十公里到超过每秒1000公里),使很大范围的日冕受到扰动,从而剧烈地改变了白光日冕的宏观形态和磁场位形。日冕物质抛射是日冕大尺度磁场平衡遭到破坏的产物,日冕物质抛射破坏了太阳风的流动,产生的干扰会影响到地球,甚至引发悲剧结果。 

2.地磁扰动/地磁暴:A geomagnetic disturbance (GMD), also known as a geomagnetic storm, is a major event in Earth’s magnetosphere. It’s caused by a very efficient transfer of energy from solar wind into the space environment surrounding Earth. 


Her studies expanded, fuelled by data sent back by Explorer 33 in 1966, to cover as much as possible of the Sun’s behaviour: its 11-year sunspot cycles, its 88-year Gleissburg cycles, its strange peaks and troughs of activity. Most usefully for the Space Age, she found that coronal mass ejections could be detected by the presence of helium in the solar wind. They also came in groups. If these storms could to some extent be predicted, spacecraft could be designed to resist them better. In short, that night walk in childhood had led her to a lifetime of considering the interplay between the Earth and its giant, vital, fluctuating star: a star it faced with its magnetosphere flattened on the day-side like a shield, while on the night-side of Earth the magnetosphere relaxed, with a wide, long, open tail. That shape, too, she had discovered.


1966“探索者33”传回的数据的推动下,她的研究进一步扩展,尽可能多地囊括了太阳的行为:11年的太阳黑子周期,88年的格莱斯堡周期,太阳活动奇特的高峰期和低谷期。对太空时代最有价值的是,她发现太阳风中的氦可以用来检测日冕物质抛射。而日冕物质抛射也是成群出现的。如果可以对这些风暴进行一定程度的预测,宇宙飞船就可以设计得更能抵抗风暴。简言之,童年的那次夜行指引她一生去思索地球和它巨大、关乎生命又变幻不定的恒星之间的相互作用:面向太阳,地球日半球的磁层变得扁平如盾牌;而在夜半球一侧,磁层则放松下来,变成一条又宽又长没有尽头的尾巴。这个形状也是她发现的。

Yet she might never have done any of this work. At every turn people tried to put her off science as a career. Women couldn’t do it, her mother said. Their brains were too feeble. At Syracuse University, where her thesis was on absorption of infra-red radiation in crystals, she was told to write one on cobwebs, more useful for cleaning her house. When she tried, after graduating, to place an ad in the New York Times for a research job, she was told only men could do so, in the men’s section.


然而她原本可能永远无法完成以上任何工作的。人生的每个节点,都有人想让她退出科学事业。女人不能从事科学工作,她妈妈说。女人的大脑太脆弱。她在锡拉库扎大学写的论文是关于晶体中红外辐射的吸收,那时别人跟她说不如写一篇关于蜘蛛网的文章,还更有助于她打扫房子。毕业后,她尝试着在《纽约时报》上登广告找研究工作,但却得知只有男人可以这么打广告,在男人相关的版面里。


Marriage and children therefore seemed inevitable as well as desirable, but full-time housewifery drove her to misery and then depression. Science was her life. Now it seemed mostly confined to her kitchen, observing how long it took to heat the baby food, or showing her elder son, as she baked, how to mix an acid with a base in a bottle to get an explosion. There were shades of her upbringing here, in a family jumping with curiosity, where everything—a napkin rolling across the table, a bug on a leaf, the wonder that the heavy waffle-iron was made of atoms—had been investigated. The how and why of everyday science still delighted her, but even part-time research was hard to fit in. And all the while the shining Sun reminded her what she should be working on.


因此,结婚生子看上去不仅是可取的选择,而且不可避免。但是当全职家庭主妇让她十分痛苦、进而抑郁。科学是她的生活。而现在她能接触的科学基本就局限在了她的厨房里,她会观察多长时间才能热好婴儿餐,或者在烘焙时给长子演示如何在瓶中混合酸和碱产生爆炸。这里有她儿时家庭教养的影子:她的家人对一切充满好奇,什么都可以调查研究一番,比如滚过桌子的餐巾纸,叶子上的甲虫,以及沉重的松饼铛是由原子构成的这等奇事。家常科学中的如何和为何仍然让她感到开心,但即便是兼职研究也很难融进她的生活。而一直以来,头顶灿烂的阳光都在提醒着她应该投身什么事业。


The one person who had always encouraged her was Richard. Though she constantly doubted herself, ready to shrink into some background role, he told her to aim for the top. As soon as she could talk he had challenged her with sums and made her his assistant in his bedroom-lab, to throw switches and hold her finger in a spark-gap to feel the little shock. Bringing her water at night, he would whirl the glass around to show the magic of centrifugal force. On her 14th birthday, feeding her fascination with the night sky, he gave her a college textbook on astronomy. It was hard going, but on page 407 came a revelation as good as the aurora, or almost. Below a figure of a spectrum was a reference to a work by Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin on stellar atmospheres—a woman, a married woman at that, doing science. So the world was not closed to her. It could open. She just had to persist and, over 60 years, she did.


唯一一个一直在鼓励她的人是理查德。尽管琼总是怀疑自己、想要退到某些幕后角色里,但是理查德告诉她要追求顶尖目标。她刚学会讲话,理查德就要求她学算术,后来让她在他的卧室实验室做小助手,让她扳动开关,再将她的手指放到火花间隙感受轻微的电击。理查德晚上给她端水时会转动水杯,向她展示离心力的神奇。琼14岁生日时,为满足她对夜空的痴迷,理查德给了她一本天文学的大学课本。这本书深奥难懂,但是第407页出现了一份启示,跟极光一样美好,或者说几近一样美好。在一幅光谱图下面,文字提到了塞西莉亚·佩恩-加波希金关于恒星大气的著作——一名女性、而且还是一名已婚女性,在从事科学工作。科学的大门并未向她关闭,她仍可以开启它。她只需坚持下去,而在60多年里,她确实坚持下去了。


Increasingly she was interested not simply in the science of Earth-Sun relations, but in their history. From 1985, working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, she studied observations of auroras from ancient China and medieval Europe, when people feared they portended war, famine, the return of spirits or the work of devils. She consulted records, kept methodically for centuries, of water levels in the Nile, to trace the impact of the Sun on the climate of north Africa. Though the Sun was in a historically stable phase, and had been for billions of years, to her eye it still showed considerable, often strange, variation—variation which, she thought, might explain the relative tardiness of Homo sapiens to take up agriculture, waiting until, round 10,000bc, the climate stabilised.


逐渐地,琼的研究兴趣不仅局限于地日关系,还扩展到了它们的历史。从1985年起,她在加利福尼亚州帕萨迪纳的喷气推进实验室,研究中国古代和欧洲中世纪的极光观测记录。那时人们担心极光是战争、饥荒、亡灵回归或者恶魔作恶的凶兆。琼查阅几个世纪以来保存有序的尼罗河水位记录,追溯太阳对北非气候的影响。尽管太阳处于历史平稳期,并且已在数十亿年间保持稳定状态,但是在琼看来,太阳仍然表现出了相当大的、不可思议的变化——她认为这些变化可能会解释为什么智人相对较晚才开始从事农耕,一直等到约公元前一万年气候稳定了才开始耕种。


To those who asked why, in her late 80s, she went on researching, her answer was partly that she still had plenty of questions. How, for example, did the Sun end up with a cycle of 88 years? And why did it act in the unexpected ways it did? The beauty of auroras was beguiling. But with one extra-high-speed ejection, as it had shown from time to time, the Sun could disable Earth’s communications. And it was also possible, with only a small bout of laziness, that it could turn the golf course in Far Rockaway—that golf course where Richard had told her, “Nobody knows”—back into the ice rink it had been 12,000 years before.


有人问琼,为什么快90岁了还坚持研究工作。她回答说,部分原因是她仍然有很多问题。例如,为什么太阳的活动周期就是88年?为什么太阳表现出它这种出人意料的活动方式?极光美得迷人,但是太阳只需一次超高速日冕物质抛射——这种情况时有发生——就能中断地球通信。而同样有可能的是,太阳只需稍微偷下懒,就可以将法洛克卫的高尔夫球场变回到一万两千年前冰场的模样。正是在这个高尔夫球场,理查德曾告诉她“没有人知道极光是怎么发生的”。


翻译组:

Ronnie,动物保护主义者

Alex,不务正业的理工男

Kemay,决心练好笔译的未来口译员


校对组:

Fiona,口笔译小菜鸟,胡粉Lenka

Qianna,追求专业的非英专,很讲逻辑,英伦摇滚迷

Rachel Zhang,学理工科,爱跳芭蕾,热爱文艺的非典型翻译




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观点|评论|思考


本次感想

Lucia,英语专业学生,经济学人爱好者

著名天体物理学家琼·费曼Joan Feynman在太阳风粒子和太阳风场、地日系统以及磁层物理学的研究上做出了重要贡献。她探究了极光原理,将一生的热情都奉献给了太阳!然而,女性科学家在成功之前似乎总避不开当时世俗羁绊的磨练,凭借永不言弃和热情追求的毅力,她们才能摆脱束缚,有所成就。

琼与哥哥理查德在父亲的影响下,从小对科学知识产生了浓厚的兴趣。8岁那年,母亲却对她说:“女人不能研究科学,因为她们的大脑不适合”。这不免让琼·费曼对自己的能力产生怀疑,但她没有停止对科学的喜爱。直到14岁,哥哥送她一本《天文学》教材,当读到“根据塞西莉·佩恩-加波施金Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin)的研究……”,“塞西莉”这个女性的名字给了她信心,她相信女性可以研究科学,此后才能坚持不懈,追寻自己的研究事业。

我国清朝时期,有一位学贯中西、通晓天文地理的女性科学家王贞仪(1768—1797),她撰写出《月食解》一文,精辟地阐述了月食发生、月食和月望以及食分深浅等知识,“通星象,精历算,工诗文,通医理”,潜心研究天文,一丝不苟。在“女子无才便是德”的封建世俗下,她不屈不挠、坚持开辟科学道路始信须眉等巾帼,谁言儿女不英雄是她抵制封建伦理的宣言。在女性应“唯命是从”的社会风气下,她不仅博览中西群书,还敢于质疑西洋传入的天文学知识,“西历虽至密,亦未能言概准”。她长年坚持夜观天象,日算星辰,亲自动手制造仪器、做实验,为中华民族科学发展史贡献出巨大力量。

女科学家”这一称呼引起越来越多的关注与讨论,在不断开明的社会发展中,更加平等的环境为女性的科学研究或事业发展减少了压力与束缚。


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