舞台上的化学秀

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化学家一定是穿着白大褂，在实验室里和烧杯烧瓶元素周期表化学方程式打交道吗？把化学秀搬上舞台的社会公共意义何在呢？
hints:
The Life Scientific
BBC Radio 4
Andrea Sella
University College London
Humphry Davy
主持：haifaforever
校对：早安Miki
翻译&注释：haifaforever  
答疑：tvxqshell
口语点评：steelver
口语节目地址：http://bulo.hujiang.com/group/topic/659530/Thank you for downloading The Life Scientific from BBC Radio 4.
Today, one of science's showmen.
"What I'd like to do is to turn the lights out completely, and then the gas coming out now. So notice, first of all, the flashes, and then you may be able to see smoke rings coming up."
Andrea Sella is filling theatres and lecture halls up and down the country with dramatic demonstrations of chemistry. He is a professor of University College London and a sleeves-rolled-up bench chemist. Colleagues go to him because of his skill and enthusiasm in getting experiments to work and making new materials that potentially could be used to mop up carbon dioxide or make new forms of energy. But does he worry that his showmanship overshadows his research into the rare earth metals important to many modern technologies from mobile phones to wind turbines?
Welcome Andrea. Now it's fair to say that you are much better known among the wider public for your lecture demonstrations, which are, I think, much in a tradition of the great public scientists of old 19th century, people like Humphry Davy. Do you see these lectures as showmanship?
Well, there's certainly an element of showmanship about them. And the showmanship, I think, is a really important part of it. Chemists have long been known, in fact, notorious for doing big chemistry lectures. Where I hesitate sometimes is the idea that we chemists often sort of show spectacular flashy bang kind of stuff, and sometimes I think undersell the real intellectual profundities, the real depth of our subject.感谢您下载BBC广播四台的《科学生涯》节目。
今天节目的嘉宾，一位科学界的表演家。
“我要做的是把灯光完全灭掉，现在气体出来了。那么大家要注意了，首先会出现闪光，然后你们或许能看见烟圈冉冉升起。”
安德里亚·塞拉以他激动人心的化学表演让全国上下的剧院和演讲厅里座无虚席。他是伦敦大学学院的教授，一位充满干劲的湿法化学家。同事们都会去找他帮忙，因为他懂得技巧，而且充满激情，能让实验成功，还能制成或许能扫清二氧化碳或产生新能源的新型物质。不过他表演才能的光辉似乎要改过他在稀土金属方面的研究了，尽管这种金属对从手机到风力涡轮机的多项现代科技都非常重要，他对此担不担心呢？
欢迎你，安德里亚。如今可以说，在广大公众中，你更为人所熟知的是你演讲时所做的表演，但我觉得，这在很大程度上是古老的19世纪时那些伟大的公众科学家们的一项传统，比如汉弗莱·戴维。你是否把这些演讲看作表演秀呢？
唔，这里面当然有表演技巧的元素，而且我还认为这是其中非常重要的一部分。一直以来，化学家其实以作长篇大论的化学演讲而著称。我偶尔也会犹豫，因为我们化学家常常会展示些引人注目的现象，比如闪光啊爆炸啊这类东西，而我有时会担心，这种做法会让人低估其中真正的知识奥义，也就是我们这门学科的真正深度。