行乞黄金忠告

2021年1月11日发(作者：孙树本)
要点：
1. 人生也有涯,而知也无涯, 不必要做到全知全能;
2. 未知的天地更广阔;
3. 在平静的海洋中灵感的浪花才能显现;
4. 以史为鉴,可以知得失
Scientist: Four golden lessons STEVEN WEINBERG Steven Weinberg is in the Department of Physic
s, the University of Texas at Austin, Texas 78712, USA. This essay is based on a commencement
talk given by the author at the Science Convocation at McGill University in June
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 an
y research of my own. How could I do anything without knowing everything that had already bee
n done? Fortunately, in my first year of graduate school, I had the good luck to fall into the han
ds 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 was sink or swim. To my surprise, I fo
und that this works. I managed to get a quick PhD — though when I got it I knew almost nothi
ng about physics. But I did learn one big thing: that no one knows everything, and you don't ha
ve to.
Another lesson to be learned, to continue using my oceanographic metaphor, is that while you ar
e swimming and not sinking you should aim for rough water. When I was teaching at the Massac
husetts Institute of Technology in the late 1960s, a student told me that he wanted to go into g
eneral relativity rather than the area I was working on, elementary particle physics, because 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 t
ime the work of many theoretical and experimental physicists has been able to sort it out, and p
ut everything (well, almost everything) together in a beautiful theory known as the standard mod
el. My advice is to go for the messes — that's where the action is
My third piece of advice is probably the 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 doesn't matter if the problems are scientifically important — they hav
e to be solved to pass the course. But in the real world, it's 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 Abraha
m, were trying to work out a theory of the electron. This was partly in order to understand why
all attempts to detect effects of Earth's motion through the ether had failed. We now know that t
hey 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 discovered. It took the ge
nius 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 that you spe
nd in the laboratory or at your desk will be wasted. If you want to be creative, then you will ha
ve to get used to spending most of your time not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocea
n of scientific knowledge.
Finally, learn something about the history of science, or at a minimum the history of your own br
anch of science. The least important reason for this is that the history may actually be of some u
se to you in your own scientific work. For instance, now and then scientists are hampered by beli
eving one of the over-simplified models of science that have been proposed by philosophers from
Francis Bacon to Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. The best antidote to the philosophy of science i
s a knowledge of the history of importantly, the history of science can make your w
ork seem more worthwhile to you. As a scientist, you're probably not going to get rich. Your frie
nds and relatives probably won't understand what you're doing. And if you work in a field like ele
mentary particle physics, you won't even have the satisfaction of doing something that is immedia
tely useful. But you can get great satisfaction by recognizing that your work in science is a part
of back 100 years, to 1903. How important is it now who was Prime Minister of Gre
at 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 radioa
ctivity. This work (of course!) had practical applications, but much more important were its cultura
l implications. The understanding of radioactivity allowed physicists to explain how the Sun and Ea
rth's cores could still be hot after millions of years. In this way, it removed the last scientific obje
ction to what many geologists and paleontologists thought was the great age of the Earth and th
e Sun. After this, Christians and Jews either had to give up belief in the literal truth of the Bible
or resign themselves to intellectual irrelevance. This was just one step in a sequence of steps fro
m Galileo through Newton and Darwin to the present that, time after time, has weakened the hol
d of religious dogmatism. Reading any newspaper nowadays is enough to show you that this wor
k is not yet complete. But it is civilizing work, of which scientists are able to feel proud.

来源: /blog/




Steven Weinberg：四条黄金忠告
（翻译：佚名）

Steven Weinberg 现在得克萨斯大学物理系。本文以他 2003年6月在麦克基尔大学科学大会上
的讲话为基础。


当我得到大学学位的时候 － 那是百八十年前的事了－物理文献在我眼里
就象一个未经探索的汪洋大海 ，我必须在勘测了它的每一个部分之后才能开始自
己的研究。做任何事情之前怎么能不先了 解所有已经 做过了的工作呢？万幸的
是，在我做研究生的第一年，我碰到了一些资深的物理学家，他们不顾我忧心忡
忡的反对，坚持我应该开始进行研究，而在研究 的过程中学习所需的东西。这
可是生死悠关的 事。我惊讶地发现他们的意见是可行的。我设法很快就拿到了一