英国新闻听力 月全食体现宇宙最美奇观（在线收听）

Good morning. I was up at 3am, not to write Thought for the Day, but in the hope of seeing a giant blood red moon - and judging by the photos coming into this programme I wasn't the only one. As we have heard, this is produced by a total lunar eclipse, with the Moon near to its minimum distance from the Earth and therefore appearing larger in the sky. The rusty hue is due to the light from the Sun having to pass through the Earth's atmosphere before it illuminates the lunar surface.

Now I don't share the views of a few extreme religious thinkers that this predicts the end of the world, rather I see it as a moment of beauty in the wonder of creation.

These moments of beauty can happen in different ways. This is the hundredth anniversary of a discovery made by Albert Einstein of which he wrote, 'For a few days I was beside myself with joyous excitement'. He was engaged in long and at times tortuous work, trying to understand gravity through the way that matter would distort the geometry of space and time. His joyous excitement came as he worked through the mathematics to solve a decades long puzzle - of the small advance of the perihelion of Mercury, that is, the closest point of the planet to the sun. Einstein found that his theory accounted exactly for this advance in very natural way without the need of other attempted special 'fixes'.

This added to the sense that the universe is intelligible and that intelligibility is characterised by simplicity and beauty in the equations of physics. Indeed the Russian physicist Lev Landau called this General Theory of Relativity the 'most beautiful of theories'.

For those who struggled with equations at school, physics is not an obvious place to experience beauty. In fact, for those of us who have worked in professional science, most of the time it is tedious and frustrating - it's about experiments that don't work, referees of papers that can't see the brilliance of your work, and research students who don't do what you tell them to do. But there are just occasional moments of joyous excitement when beauty breaks through.

Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As a Christian I see the simple, elegant and beautiful scientific laws as a reflection of the creativity of God, while others might find them at least as pointers to deeper questions about the universe. But I also find that making the effort to pause in life to appreciate beauty enhances my humanity - even if that means conquering the lure of the duvet at 3am to glimpse through the frustrating patchy North Eastern fog a most amazing sight.

早上好。我凌晨3点钟就起床了，不是为了写这篇文章，而是希望观赏血红色的圆月——从这个节目收到的照片来看，我并不是唯一的一个。就像我们之前听说的，这是由于月全食造成的，月亮到达距离地球最近的距离，因此在天空中看上去更大。锈色是因为来自太阳的光线必须通过地球大气层，然后才会照亮月球表面。

现在，我不想跟大家分享一些极端的宗教思想家预言世界末日的观点，我只是认为这是创造美丽的奇迹的时刻。

这些美丽的时刻可以以不同的方式发生。这是爱因斯坦一项发现100周年纪念日。他写道：“我独自一人狂喜着。”他一个人从事着长期曲折的工作，他试图通过物质可以扭曲空间和时间几何学的理论来理解重力。当他想出数学方法来解决数十年的谜团时陷入了狂喜——他计算出了水星近日点，该星球距离太阳最近的点。爱因斯坦发现他的理论刚好符合这种自然现象，而不需要进行任何刻意的修正。

这再次表明，宇宙是明白易懂的，这种明白易懂体现在物理学公式的简洁和美感。实际上，俄罗斯物理学家列夫·朗道称“广义相对论”是“最美丽的理论”。

对于那些苦苦挣扎在各种公式中的学生来说，物理学并不是体验美景的好地方。实际上，对于我们从事专业科学的人来说，大部分时间也是枯燥而沮丧的——总是不断失败的实验，不能看到你的才华的证明书，不能按照你说的来做的研究生。但是当出现突破的时候，也时有激动人心的时刻。

当然，旁观者清。作为基督徒，我把自然优雅美丽的科学规律视为上帝创造力的反映。而其他人则认为它们是指向关于宇宙更深刻的问题的线索。但是我还发现，在生活中暂停一下来欣赏美景可以增强人性——即使这意味着凌晨3点在朦胧中起床，望穿一望无际的迷雾来欣赏那一缕光芒。