万物简史 第169期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(12)
His famous equation, E =mc 2 , did not appear with the paper, but came in a brief supplement that followed a few months later. As you will recall from school days, E in the equation stands for energy, m for mass, and c 2 for the speed of light square
万物简史 第170期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(13)
You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 x 10 18 joules of potential energyenough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you
万物简史 第171期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(14)
Physicists as a rule are not overattentive to the pronouncements of Swiss patent office clerks, and so, despite the abundance of useful tidings, Einsteins papers attracted little notice. Having just solved several of the deepest mysteries of the univ
万物简史 第172期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(15)
In 1907, or so it has sometimes been written, Albert Einstein saw a workman fall off a roof and began to think about gravity. 1907年，反正有时候书上是这么写的，有个工人从房顶上掉了下来，爱因斯坦就开始考虑引力的问
万物简史 第173期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(16)
With his pipe, genially self-effacing manner, and electrified hair, Einstein was too splendid a figure to remain permanently obscure, 爱因斯坦常手拿烟斗，和蔼可亲，不爱露面，一头乱发，真是个非凡人物。这样的人物不可
万物简史 第174期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(17)
When a journalist asked the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington 有一位记者问英国天文学家阿瑟爱丁顿， if it was true that he was one of only three people in the world who could understand Einsteins relativity theories, 他是不是
万物简史 第175期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(18)
Howeverand heres the thingpeople on the train would have no sense of these distortions. 然而问题就在这里车上的人并不觉得自己变了形。 To them, everything on the train would seem quite normal. 在他们看来，车上的一切似乎
万物简史 第176期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(19)
The most challenging and nonintuitive of all the concepts in the general theory of relativity is the idea that time is part of space. Our instinct is to regard time as eternal, absolute, immutablenothing can disturb its steady tick. In fact, accordin
万物简史 第177期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(20)
Every object that has mass creates a little depression in the fabric of the cosmos. 凡有质量的物体在宇宙的底垫上都能造成一个小小的凹坑。 Thus the universe, as Dennis Overbye has put it, is the ultimate sagging mattress. 因此
万物简史 第178期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(21)
Coincidentally, at about the time that Einstein was affixing a cosmological constant to his theory, at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, an astronomer with the cheerily intergalactic name of Vesto Slipher (who was in fact from Indiana) was taking sp
万物简史 第179期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(22)
Slipher was the first to notice this effect with light and to realize its potential importance for understanding the motions of the cosmos. Unfortunately no one much noticed him. The Lowell Observatory, as you will recall, was a bit of an oddity than
万物简史 第180期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(23)
This was more than a little odd, for Hubbles life was filled from an early age with a level of distinction that was at times almost ludicrously golden. At a single high school track meet in 1906, he won the pole vault, shot put, discus, hammer throw,
万物简史 第181期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(24)
In 1919, now aged thirty, he moved to California and took up a position at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles. Swiftly, and more than a little unexpectedly, he became the most outstanding astronomer of the twentieth century. 1919年，他已
万物简史 第182期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(25)
Hubble's luck was to come along soon after an ingenious woman named Henrietta Swan Leavitt had figured out a way to do so. Leavitt worked at the Harvard College Observatory as a computer, as they were known. Computers spent their lives studying photo
万物简史 第183期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(26)
We now know that Cepheids throb as they do because they are elderly stars that have moved past their main sequence phase, in the parlance of astronomers, and become red giants. The chemistry of red giants is a little weighty for our purposes here (it
