双语：My Friend, Albert Einstein （我的朋友阿尔伯特•爱因斯坦）
He was one of the greatest scientists the world has ever known, yet if Ihad to convey the essence of Albert Einstein in a single word, I would choose
simplicity. Perhaps an anecdote will help. Once, caught in a downpour, he took
off his hat and held it under his coat. Asked why, he explained, with admirable
logic, that the rain would damage the hat, but his hair would be none the worse
for its wetting. This knack for going instinctively to the heart of a matter was
the secret of his major scientific discoveries -- this and his extraordinary
feeling for beauty.
I first met Albert Einstein in 1935, at the famous Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, N. J. He had been among the first to be invited to the
Institute, and was offered carte blanche as to salary. To the director’s dismay,
Einstein asked for an impossible sum: It was far too small. The director had to
plead with him to accept a larger salary.
I was in awe of Einstein, and hesitated before approaching him about some
ideas I had been working on. When I finally knocked on his door, a gentle voice
said, “Come” — with a rising inflection that made the single word both a welcome
and a question. I entered his office and found him seated at a table,
calculating and smoking his pipe. Dressed in ill-fitting clothes, his hair
characteristically awry, he smiled a warm welcome. His utter naturalness at once
set me at ease.
As I began to explain my ideas, he asked me to write the equations on the
blackboard so he could see how they developed. Then came the staggering— and
altogether endearing— request: “Please go slowly. I do not understand things
quickly.” This from Einstein! He said it gently, and I laughed. From then on,
all vestiges of fear were gone.
Einstein was born in 1879 in the German city of Ulm. He had been no infant
prodigy; indeed, he was so late in learning to speak that his parents feared he
was a dullard. In school, though his teachers saw no special talent in him, the
signs were already there. He taught himself calculus, for example, and his
teachers seemed a little afraid of him because he asked questions they could not
answer. At the age of 16, he asked himself whether a light wave would seem
stationary if one ran abreast of it. From that innocent question would arise,
ten years later, his theory of relativity.
Einstein failed his entrance examinations at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic
School, in Zurich, but was admitted a year later. There he went beyond his
regular work to study the masterworks of physics on his own. Rejected when he
applied for academic positions, he ultimately found work, in 1902, as a patent
examiner in Berne, and there in 1905 his genius burst into fabulous flower.
Among the extraordinary things he produced in that memorable year were his
theory of relativity, with its famous offshoot, E=mc (energy equals mass times
the speed of light squared), and his quantum theory of light. These two theories
were not only revolutionary, but seemingly contradictory: The former was
intimately linked to the theory that light consists of waves, while the latter
said it consists somehow of particles. Yet this unknown young man boldly
proposed both at once—and he was right in both cases, though how he could have
been is far too complex a story to tell here.
Collaborating with Einstein was an unforgettable experience. In 1937, the
Polish physicist Leopold Infeld and I asked if we could work with him. He was
pleased with the proposal, since he had an idea about gravitation waiting to be
worked out in detail. Thus we got to know not merely the man and the friend, but
also the professional.
The intensity and depth of his concentration were fantastic. When battling
a recalcitrant problem, he worried it as an animal worries its prey. Often, when
we found ourselves up against a seemingly insuperable difficulty, he would stand
up, put his pipe on the table, and say in his quaint English, “I will a little
tink” (he could not pronounce “th”). Then he would pace up and down, twirling a
lock of his long, graying hair around his fore-finger.
A dreamy, faraway and yet inward look would come over his face. There was
no appearance of concentration, no furrowing of the brow -- only a placid inner
communion. The minutes would pass, and then suddenly Einstein would stop pacing
as his face relaxed into a gentle smile. He had found the solution to the
problem. Sometimes it was so simple that Infeld and I could have kicked
ourselves for not having thought of it. But the magic had been performed
invisibly in the depths of Einstein’s mind, by a process we could not
fathom.
When his wife died he was deeply shaken, but insisted that now more than
ever was the time to be working hard. I remember going to his house to work with
him during that sad time. His face was haggard and grief-lined, but he put forth
a great effort to concentrate. To help him, I steered the discussion away from
routine matters into more difficult theoretical problems, and Einstein gradually
became absorbed in the discussion. We kept at it for some two hours, and at the
end his eyes were no longer sad. As I left, he thanked me with moving sincerity.
“It was a fun,” he said. He had had a moment of surcease from grief, and then
groping words expressed a deep emotion.
Although Einstein felt no need for religious ritual and belonged to no
formal religious ritual and belonged to no formal religious group, he was the
most deeply religious man I have known. He once said to me, “Ideas come from
God,” and one could hear the capital “G” in the reverence with which he
pronounced the word. On the marble fireplace in the mathematics building at
Princeton University is carved, in the original German, what one might call his
scientific credo: “God is subtle, but he is not malicious.” By this Einstein
meant that scientists could expect to find their task difficult, but not
hopeless: The Universe was a Universe of law, and God was not confusing us with
deliberate paradoxes and contradictions.
Einstein was a accomplished amateur musician. We used to play duets, he on
the violin, I at the piano. One day he surprised me by saying Mozart was the
greatest composer of all. Beethoven “created” his music, but the music of Mozart
was of such purity and beauty one felt he had merely “found” it -- that it had
always existed as part of the inner beauty of the Universe, waiting to be
revealed.
It was this very Mozartean simplicity that most characterized Einstein’s
methods. His 1905 theory of relativity, for example, was built on just two
simple assumptions. One is the so-called principle of relativity, which means,
roughly speaking, that we cannot tell whether we are at rest or moving smoothly.
The other assumption is that the speed of light is the same no matter what the
speed of the object that produces it. You can see how reasonable this is if you
think of agitating a stick in a lake to create waves. Whether you wiggle the
stick from a stationary pier, or from a rushing speedboat, the waves, once
generated, are on their own, and their speed has nothing to do with that of the
stick..
Each of these assumptions, by itself, was so plausible as to seem
primitively obvious. But together they were in such violent conflict that a
lesser man would have dropped one or the other and fled in panic. Einstein
daringly kept both -- and by so doing he revolutionized physics. For he
demonstrated they could, after all, exist peacefully side by side, provided we
gave up cherished beliefs about the nature of time.
Science is like a house of cards, with concepts like time and space at the
lowest level. Tampering with time brought most of the house tumbling down, and
it was this that made Einstein’s work so important -- and controversial. At a
conference in Princeton in honor of his 70th birthday, one of the speakers, a
Nobel Prize winner, tried to convey the magical quality of Einstein’s
achievement. Words failed him, and with a shrug of helplessness he pointed to
his wristwatch, and said in tones of awed amazement, “It all came from this.”
His very ineloquence made this the most eloquent tribute I have heard to
Einstein’s genius.
Although fame had little effect on Einstein as a person, he could not
escape it; he was, of course, instantly recognizable. One autumn Saturday, I was
walking with him in Princeton discussing some technical matters. Parents and
alumni were streaming excitedly toward the stadium, their minds on the coming
football game. As they approached us, they paused in sudden recognition, and a
momentary air of solemnity came over them as if they had been reminded of a
different world. Yet Einstein seemed totally unaware of this effect and went on
with the discussion as though they were not there.
We think of Einstein as one concerned only with the deepest aspects of
science. But he saw scientific principles in everyday things to which most of us
would give barely a second thought. He once asked me if I had ever wondered why
a man’s feet will sink into either dry or completely submerged sand, while sand
that is merely damp provides a firm surface. When I could not answer, he offered
a simple explanation.
It depends, he pointed out, on surface tension, the elastic-skin effect of
a liquid surface. This is what holds a drop together, or causes two small
raindrops on a windowpane to pull into one big drop the moment their surfaces
touch.
When sand is damp, Einstein explained, there are tiny amounts of water
between grains. The surface tensions of these tiny amounts of water pull all the
grains together, and friction then makes them hard to budge. When the sand is
dry, there is obviously no water between grains. If the sand is fully immersed,
there is water between grains, but no water surface to pull them together.
This is not as important as relativity; yet there is no telling what
seeming trifle will lead an Einstein to a major discovery. And the puzzle the
sand does give us an inkling of the power and elegance of his mind.
Einstein’s work, performed quietly with pencil and paper, seemed remote
from the turmoil of everyday life: But his ideas were so revolutionary they
caused violent controversy and irrational anger. Indeed, in order to be able to
award him a belated Nobel Prize, the selection committee had to avoid mentioning
relativity, and pretend the prize was awarded primarily for his work on the
quantum theory.
Political events upset the serenity of his life even more. When the Nazis
came to power in Germany, his theories were officially declared false because
they had been formulated by a Jew. His property was confiscated, and it is said
a price was put on his head.
When scientists in the United States, fearful that the Nazis might develop
an atomic bomb, sought to alert American authorities to the danger, they were
scarcely heeded. In desperation, they drafted a letter which Einstein signed and
sent directly to President Roosevelt. It was this act that led to the fateful
decision to go all-out on the production of an atomic bomb— an endeavor in which
Einstein took no active part. When he heard of the agony and destruction that
his E=mc had wrought, he was dismayed beyond measure, and from then on there was
a look of ineffable sadness in his eyes.
There was something elusively whimsical about Einstein. It is illustrated
by my favorite anecdote about him. In his first year in Princeton, on Christmas
Eve, so the story goes, some children sang carols outside his house. Having
finished, they knocked on his door and explained they were collecting money to
buy Christmas presents, Einstein listened, then said, “Wait a moment.” He put on
his scarf and overcoat, and took his violin from its case Then, joining the
children as they went from door to door, he accompanied their singing of “Silent
Night” on his violin.
How shall I sum up what it meant to have known Einstein and his works? Like
the Nobel Prize winner who pointed helplessly at his watch, I can find no
adequate words. It was akin to the revelation of great art that lets one see
what was formerly hidden. And when, for example, I walk on the sand of a lonely
beach, I am reminded of his ceaseless search for cosmic simplicity—and the scene
takes on a deeper, sadder beauty.
Questions for Comprehension and Consideration:
1. Which of the following do you find Hoffmann doing: writing a biography,
reminiscing, entertaining his readers, explaining relativity, illustrating some
point about Einstein? Which purpose seems to predominate?
2. What qualities did Einstein possess that gave him a permanent place in
the author’s affections?
3. What connections between Einstein the scientist and Einstein the man
does Hoffmann’s essay reveal to us?
4. What is Hoffmann’s thesis? Where does he state it?
5. Study three or four of the examples Hoffmann includes in his essay. What
is the function of each?
6. Write an essay about someone whose behavior you can illustrate with
vivid examples. Your subject need not be a famous person, merely someone you
know fairly well: a relative, teacher, or friend; a colorful town character; a
leader, or a zealous follower. If possible, choose examples that will highlight
the one or two traits that seem to you most worth noticing.
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