今日读书,得一好例,愿与读者诸君分享。书名是UNCERTAINTY:Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science,作者是David Lindley (区别于Dennis Victor Lindley,但两位似乎都是剑桥学生)。
So Heisenberg didn’t introduce uncertainty into science. What he changed, and profoundly so, was its very nature and meaning. It had always seemed a vanquishable foe. Starting with Copernicus and Galileo, with Kepler and Newton, modern science evolved through the application of logical reasoning to verifiable facts and data. Theories, couched in the rigorous language of mathematics, were meant to be analytical and precise. They offered a system, a structure, a thorough accounting that would replace mystery and happenstance with reason and cause. In the scientific universe, nothing happens except that something makes it happen. There is no spontaneity, no whimsy. The phenomena of nature might be inordinately complicated, but at bottom science must reveal order and predictability. Facts are facts, laws are laws. There can be no exceptions. The mills of science, like those they replaced, would grind exceeding small. And just as perfectly.
Another voice came into the argument. By the time Heisenberg announced his principle, Albert Einstein was close to fifty. He was the old man of science, respected, revered, but no longer always attended to. Younger scientists were doing the important work. Einstein occupied the role of lofty commentator. He too, in his day, had been a revolutionary. In his great year of 1905, with his theory of relativity, he had overthrown the old Newtonian idea of absolute space and time. Events that one observer saw as simultaneous might seem to another to happen in sequence, one after the other. A third observer might see that sequence reversed. Heisenberg loosely adduced Einstein’s revolutionary principle in support of his own: different observers see the world differently.
作者介绍: David Lindley was a theoretical astrophysicist at Cambridge University and at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Chicago, before turning to writing. He has been an editor at Nature, Science, and Science News, and acted as quizmaster for a long-running segment of Sounds Like Science, a radio show hosted by Ira Flatow. His book reviews and other journalism have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wilson Quarterly, New Scientist, and the London Review of Books. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.