艾伦·莱特曼 - 麻省理工学院人工智能研究专业

艾伦·莱特曼

A sense of the mysterious

Ever since I was a young boy, my pas-

sions have been divided between science
and art. I was fortunate to make a life in
两个都, as a physicist and a novelist, 和
even to ½nd creative sympathies be-
tween the two, but I have had to live
with a constant tension in myself and a
continual rumbling in my gut.

In childhood, I wrote dozens of po-
ems. I expressed in verse my questions
about death, my loneliness, my admira-
tion for a plum-colored sky, my unre-
quited love for fourteen-year-old girls.
Overdue books of poetry and stories lit-
tered my second-floor bedroom. Read-
英, listening, even thinking, I was mes-
merized by the sounds and the move-
ment of words. Words could be sudden,
like ‘jolt,’ or slow, like ‘meandering.’
Words could be sharp or smooth, cool,

艾伦·莱特曼, 美国科学院院士-
我的自从 1996, is adjunct professor of humanities
at mit. He is the author of several books on sci-
恩斯, including “Ancient Light: Our Changing
View of the Universe” (1991) and “Origins:
The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists”
(with R. Brawer, 1990). His works of ½ction in-
clude “Einstein’s Dreams” (1993), “The Diagno-
sis” (2000), which was a ½nalist for the National
Book Award, 和, 最近, “Reunion”
(2003).

silvery, prickly to touch, blaring like a
trumpet call, fluid, pitter-pattered in
rhythm. 和, as if by magic, 字
could create scenes and emotions. 什么时候
my grandfather died, I buried my grief in
writing a poem, which I showed to my
grandmother a month later. She cradled
my face with her veined hands and said,
“It’s beautiful,” and then began weeping
all over again. How could marks on a
white sheet of paper contain such power
and force?

Between poems, I did scienti½c ex-
实验. These I conducted in the
cramped little laboratory I built out of a
storage closet in my house. In my home-
made alchemist’s den, I horded resistors
and capacitors, coils of wire of various
thicknesses and grades, batteries,
switches, photoelectric cells, magnets,
dangerous chemicals that I had secret-
ly ordered from unsuspecting supply
stores, test tubes and Petri dishes, lovely
glass flasks, Bunsen burners, scales. 我
delighted in my equipment. I loved to
build things. Around the age of thirteen,
I built a remote control device that could
activate the lights in various rooms of
the house, amazing my three younger
brothers. With a thermostat, a light-
bulb, and a padded cardboard box, 我
constructed an incubator for the cell cul-
tures in my biology experiments. 后
seeing the Frankenstein movie, I built a

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艾伦
Lightman
在
科学

spark-generating induction coil, requir-
ing tedious weeks upon weeks of wind-
ing a mile’s length of wire around an
iron core.

In some of my scienti½c investi-
门, I had a partner, 约翰, my best
high-school friend. John was a year old-
er than I, and as skinny as a strand of
number-30-gauge wire. When he
thought something ironic, he would
let out a high-pitched shrill laugh that
sounded like a hyena. John did not share
my interest in poetry and the higher arts.
For him, all that was a sissyish waste of
卡路里. John was all practicality. 约翰
wanted to seize life by the throat and cut
straight to the answer.

As it turned out, he was a genius with
his hands. Patching together odds and
ends from his house, he could build any-
thing from scratch. John never saved the
directions that came with new parts, 他
never drew up detailed schematic dia-
克, and his wiring wandered drunk-
enly around the circuit board, but he had
the magic touch, and when he would sit
down cross-legged on the floor of his
room and begin ½ddling, the transistors
hummed. His inventions were not pret-
蒂, but they worked, often better than
mine.

Weekends, John and I would lie

around in his room or mine, 无聊的, 利斯-
tening to Bob Dylan records, occasional-
ly thinking of things to excite our imagi-
nations. Most of our friends ½lled their
weekends with the company of girls,
who produced plenty of excitement, 但
John and I were socially inept. So we lis-
tened to Dylan and read back issues of
Popular Science. Lazily, we perused dia-
grams for building wrought-iron furni-
ture with rivets instead of welded joints,
circuits for fluorescent lamps and voice-
activated tape recorders, and one-man
flying machines made from plastic beach
bottles. And we undertook our ritual

expedition to Clark and Fay’s on Poplar
Avenue, the best-stocked supply store in
Memphis. 那里, we squandered whole
Saturdays happily adrift in the aisles of
copper wire, socket wrenches, diodes,
and oddly shaped metallic brackets that
we had no immediate use for but pur-
chased anyway. Clark and Fay’s was our
home away from home. 不, more like
our temple. At Clark and Fay’s, we spoke
to each other in whispers.

Our most successful collaboration was

a light-borne communication device.
The heart of the thing was a mouthpiece
made out of a lid of a shoe polish can,
with a flat section of a balloon stretched
tightly across it. Onto this rubber mem-
brane we attached a tiny piece of sil-
vered glass, which acted as a mirror. A
light beam was focused onto the tiny
mirror and reflected from it. When a
person talked into the mouthpiece, 这
rubber vibrated. 反过来, the tiny mirror
quivered, and those quiverings produced
shimmerings in the reflected beam, 喜欢
the shimmerings of sunlight reflected
from a trembling sea. 因此, the informa-
tion in the speaker’s voice was precisely
encoded onto light, each rise and dip of
uttered sound translating itself into a
brightening or dimming of light. 后
its reflection, the fluttering beam of light
traveled across John’s messy bedroom to
our receiver, which was built from large-
ly off-the-shelf stuff: a photocell to con-
vert varying intensities of light into
varying intensities of electrical current,
an ampli½er, and a microphone to con-
vert electrical current into sound. Final-
莱, the original voice was reproduced at
the other end. Like any project in which
John was involved, our communication
device looked like a snarl of spare parts
from a junkyard, but the thing worked.
It was with my rocket project that my

scienti½c and artistic proclivities ½rst
collided. Ever since the launch of Sputnik

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A sense
的
mysterious

in October of 1957, around my ninth
birthday, I had been entranced with the
idea of sending a spacecraft aloft. I imag-
ined the blastoff, the uncoiling plume of
smoke, the silvery body of the rocket lit
by the sun, the huge acceleration, 这
beautiful arc of the trajectory in the sky.
By the age of fourteen, I was experiment-
ing with my own rocket fuels. A fuel that
burned too fast would explode like a
bomb; a fuel that burned too slow
would smolder like a barbecue grill.
What seemed to work best was a mix-
ture of powdered charcoal and zinc, 在-
fur, and potassium nitrate. For the igni-
的, I used a flashbulb from a Brownie
camera, embedded within the fuel
chamber. The sudden heat from the bulb
would easily start the combustion, 和
the bulb could be triggered by thin wires
trailing from the tail of the rocket to the
battery in my control center, a hundred
feet away. The body of the rocket I built
from an aluminum tube. The craft had
red tail ½ns. It was beautiful. 为一个
launch pad, I used a V-shaped steel gird-
是, pointed skyward at the appropriate
angle and anchored in a wooden Coca-
Cola crate ½lled with concrete.

I invited my awed younger brothers
and several friends from the neighbor-
hood to attend the launch, which took
place one Sunday at dawn at Ridgeway
Golf Course. 约翰, who was not the
slightest romantic and didn’t see any-
thing useful about rockets, elected to
stay in his bed and sleep. But even so, 我
had a good audience.

Because I had estimated from thrust
and weight calculations that my rocket
might ascend a half mile into space,
some of the boys brought binoculars.
From my control center, I called out the
countdown. I closed the switch. Ignition.
With a flash and a whoosh, the rocket
shot from its pad. But after rising only a
few hundred feet, it did a sickening

swerve, spun out of control, 和
crashed. The ½ns had come off. 和
sudden clarity, I remembered that in-
stead of riveting the ½ns to the rocket
body as I should have, I had glued them
在. To my eye, the rivets had been far
too ugly. How I thought that mere glue
would hold under the heat and aerody-
namic force, I don’t know. Evidently I
had sacri½ced reality for aesthetics. 约翰
would have been horri½ed.

Later I learned that I was not the ½rst
scientist for whom beauty had ultimate-
ly succumbed to reality. Aristotle fa-
mously proposed that as the heavens
revolve about the Earth, the planets
move in circles. Circles because the cir-
cle is the simplest and most perfect
shape. Even when astronomers discov-
ered that the planets changed in bright-
ness during their orbits, showing that
they couldn’t remain a constant distance
from Earth, scientists remained so en-
thralled with the circle that they decided
the planets must move in little circles at-
tached to big circles. The circle idea was
lovely and appealing. But it was proved
wrong by the careful observations of
Brahe and Kepler in the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries. Planets
orbit in ellipses, not circles. Equally
beautiful was the idea, dating from
the 1930s, that all phenomena of nature
should be completely identical if right-
hand and left-hand are reversed, 仿佛
reflected in a mirror. This elegant idea,
called parity conservation, was proved
wrong in the late 1950s by the experi-
ments proposed by Lee and Yang, 展示-
ing that some subatomic particles and
reactions do not have identical mirror-
image twins. Contrary to all expecta-
系统蒸发散, 正确的- and left-handedness are not
equal.

When my scienti½c projects went
awry, I could always ½nd certain ful-
½llment in mathematics. I loved mathe-

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艾伦
Lightman
在
科学

matics just as I loved science and poetry.
When my math teachers assigned home-
工作, most other students groaned and
complained, but I relished the job. 我
would save my math problems for last,
right before bedtime, like bites of choco-
late cake awaiting me after a long and
dutiful meal of history and Latin. 然后
I would devour my cake. In geometry, 我
loved drawing the diagrams, I loved
½nding the inexorable and irrefutable
relations between lines, angles, 和
curves. In algebra, I loved the idea of
abstraction, letting Xs and Ys stand for
the number of nickels in a jar or the
height of a building in the distance.
And then solving a set of connected
方程, one logical step after another.
I loved the shining purity of mathemat-
集成电路, the logic, the precision. I loved the
肯定. With mathematics, you were
guaranteed an answer as clean and crisp
as a new twenty-dollar bill. And when
you had found that answer, you were
正确的, unquestionably right. The area of
a circle is πr 2. Period.

Mathematics contrasted strongly with

the ambiguities and contradictions of
人们. The world of people had no cer-
tainty or logic. People confused me. 我的
mother sometimes said cruel things to
me and my brothers, even though I felt
that she loved us. My aunt Jean contin-
ued to drive recklessly and at great
速度, even though everyone told her
that she would kill herself in an automo-
bile. My uncle Edwin asked me to do a
mathematical calculation that would
help him run the family business with
more ef½ciency, but when I showed him
the result he brushed it aside with dis-
dain. Blanche, the dear woman who
worked forever for our family, deserted
her husband after he abused her and
then talked about him with affection for
年. How does one make sense out of
such actions and words?

A long time later, after I became a
novelist, I realized that the ambiguities
and complexities of the human mind are
what give ½ction and perhaps all art their
力量. A good novel gets under our skin,
provokes us and haunts us long after
the ½rst reading, because we never fully
understand the characters. We sweep
through the narrative over and over
再次, searching for meaning. 好的
characters must retain a certain mys-
tery and unfathomable depth, even for
the author. Once we see to the bottom
of their hearts, the novel is dead for us.
最终, I learned to appreciate
both certainty and uncertainty. Both are
necessary in the world. Both are part of
being human.

In college, I made two important deci-

sions about my career. 第一的, I would put
my writing on the back burner until I
became well established in science. 我
knew of a few scientists who later be-
came writers, like C. 磷. Snow and Rachel
Carson, but no writers who later in life
became scientists. For some reason, 科学-
ence–at least the creative, research side
of science–is a young person’s game. 在
my own ½eld, 物理, I found that the
average age at which Nobel Prize win-
ners did their prize-winning work was
only thirty-six. Perhaps it has something
to do with the focus and isolation of the
主题. A handiness for visualizing in
six dimensions or for abstracting the
motion of a pendulum favors an agility
of mind but apparently has little to do
with anything else. 相比之下, 艺术
and humanities require experience with
life and the awkward contradictions of
people–experience that accumulates
and deepens with age.

第二, I realized that I was better
suited to be a theorist than an experi-
mentalist. Although I loved to build
事物, I simply did not have the hands-

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A sense
的
mysterious

on dexterity and practical talents of the
best students. My junior-year electronics
project caught ½re when I plugged it in.
My senior thesis project, a gorgeous ap-
paratus of brass ½ttings and mylar win-
dows designed to measure the half-life
of certain radioactive atoms, was side-
lined on the lab bench instead of being
installed in the cyclotron for a real ex-
periment. I never did believe the thing
would actually work. And apparently
neither did my professor, who kindly
gave me high marks for my endless
drawings of top views and side views
and calculations of solid angles and ef-
½ciencies. By graduation, I knew that I
was destined to be a theorist, a scientist
who worked with abstractions about
the physical world, ideas, mathematics.
My equipment would be paper and pen-
cil.

A year or two later, I had my ½rst true
experience with original research. 它是
an experience that I can compare only
to my ½rst love affair. At the time, 我曾是
twenty-two years old, a graduate student
in physics at the California Institute of
技术. My thesis advisor at Caltech
was Kip Thorne, only thirty himself but
already a full professor. Kip had grown
up in Mormon Utah but had completely
acclimatized to the hip zone of Califor-
nia in the early 1970s. He sported long
red hair, starting to thin, a red beard,
sandals, loose kaftan-like shirts
splotched with colors, sometimes a
gold chain around his neck. Freckled,
lean-limbed, wiry. And brilliant. His spe-
cialty was the study of general relativity,
Einstein’s theory of gravity. 实际上, 那里
was at this time a renaissance of interest
in Einstein’s arcane theory because as-
tronomers had recently discovered new
objects in space, such as neutron stars,
that had enormous gravity and would
require general relativity for a proper
理解.

One of Kip’s programs was to compare
general relativity to other modern theo-
ries of gravity. And it was in that pro-
gram that he assigned me my ½rst re-
search problem. I was supposed to show,
by mathematical calculation, whether a
particular experimental result required
that gravity be geometrical. The known
experimental result was that all objects
fall under gravity with the same acceler-
化. Drop a book and a cannonball
from the same height and they will hit
the floor at the same time, if air resist-
ance is small. By ‘geometrical,’ Kip
meant that gravity could be described
completely as a warping of space. 在
such a picture, a mass like the sun acts
as if it were a heavy weight sitting on a
stretched rubber sheet, and orbiting
planets follow along the sagging surface
of the sheet. In the early 1970s, 一些
modern theories of gravity, such as Ein-
stein’s general relativity, were geometri-
卡尔. Some were not. To be ‘geometrical,’
to be equivalent to a bending of space, A
theory had to have a particular mathe-
matical form. So my project amounted
to writing down on a piece of paper the
equations representing a giant umbrella
theory of gravity, a theory of theories
that encompassed many different possi-
ble theories, next imposing the restric-
tion that all objects fall with the same
acceleration, and then ½nding out
whether that restriction were suf½cient-
ly powerful to rule out all nongeometri-
cal theories.

I was both thrilled and terri½ed by my
assignment. Until this point of my aca-
demic life, my theoretical adventures
had consisted mainly of solving home-
work problems. With homework prob-
莱姆斯, the answer was known. 如果你
couldn’t solve the problem yourself, 你
could look up the answer in the back of
the book or ask a smarter student for
帮助. But this research problem with

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艾伦
Lightman
在
科学

gravity was different. The answer wasn’t
已知的. And even though I understood
that my problem was inconsequential in
the grand sweep of science, it was still
original research. No one would know
the answer until I found it. Or failed to
½nd it.

After an initial period of study and
工作, I succeeded in writing down all
the equations I thought relevant. Then I
hit a wall. I knew something was amiss,
because a simple result at an early stage
of the calculation was not coming out
正确的. But I could not ½nd my error. 和
I didn’t even know what kind of error.
Perhaps one of the equations was wrong.
Or maybe the equations were right but I
was making a silly arithmetic mistake.
Or perhaps the conjecture was false but
would require an especially devious
counterexample to disprove it. Day af-
ter day, I checked each equation, I paced
back and forth in my little windowless
of½ce, but I didn’t know what I was
doing wrong. This confusion and failure
went on for months. For months, I ate,
drank, and slept my research problem.
I began keeping cans of tuna ½sh in the
lower drawer of my desk and eating
meals in my of½ce.

Then one morning, I remember that it
was a Sunday morning, I woke up about
5 a.m. and couldn’t sleep. I felt terribly
excited. Something strange was happen-
ing in my mind. I was thinking about my
research problem, and I was seeing deep-
ly into it. I was seeing it in ways I never
had before. The physical sensation was
that my head was lifting off my shoul-
德斯. I felt weightless. And I had abso-
lutely no sense of my self. It was an expe-
rience completely without ego, 没有
any thought about consequences or
approval or fame. I didn’t know who I
was or where I was. I was simply spirit,
in a state of pure exhilaration.

The best analogy I’ve been able to ½nd

for that intense feeling of the creative

moment is sailing a round-bottomed
boat in strong wind. 通常情况下, the hull
stays down in the water, with the fric-
tional drag greatly limiting the speed of
the boat. But in high wind, every once in
a while the hull lifts out of the water and
the drag goes instantly to near zero. 它
feels like a great hand has suddenly
grabbed hold and flung you across the
surface like a skimming stone. It’s called
planing.

So I woke up at ½ve to ½nd myself
planing. Although I had no sense of my
ego, I did have a feeling of rightness. 我
had a strong sensation of seeing deeply
into this problem and understanding it
and knowing that I was right–a certain
kind of inevitability. With these sensa-
tions surging through me, I tiptoed out
of my bedroom, almost reverently, afraid
to disturb whatever strange magic was
going on in my head, and I went to the
kitchen. 那里, I sat down at my ram-
shackle table. I got out the pages of my
calculations, by now curling and stained.
A tiny bit of daylight was starting to seep
through the window. Although I was
oblivious to myself, my body, and every-
thing around me, the fact is that I was
completely alone. I don’t think any oth-
er person in the world would have been
able to help me at that moment. And I
didn’t want any help. I had all of these
sensations and revelations going on in
my head, and being alone with all that
was an essential part of it.

Somehow, I had reconceptualized the

项目, spotting my error of thinking,
and began anew. I’m not sure how this
rethinking happened, but it wasn’t by
going from one equation to the next.
After a while at the kitchen table, 我
solved my research problem. I had
proved that the conjecture was true.
The equal acceleration of the book and
the cannonball does indeed require that
gravity be geometrical. I strode out of
the kitchen, feeling stunned and power-

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A sense
的
mysterious

满. Suddenly I heard a noise and looked
up at the clock on the wall and saw that
it was two o’clock in the afternoon.

I was to experience this creative mo-
ment again, with other scienti½c proj-
ects. But this was my ½rst time. 作为一个
novelist, I’ve experienced the same sen-
站. I’ve read the accounts of other
writers, musicians, and actors, 和我
think the sensation and process are al-
most identical in all creative activities.
The pattern seems universal: The study
and hard work. The prepared mind. 这
being stuck. The sudden shift. The let-
ting go of control. The letting go of self.
I learned many things about science
from Kip. One of the most important
was the concept of the ‘well-posed prob-
lem.’ A well-posed problem is a problem
that can be stated with enough clarity
and de½niteness that it is guaranteed a
解决方案. Such a solution might require
十年, or a hundred, but there should
be a de½nite solution. Such a solution
may be arrived at by a variety of differ-
ent approaches–such as Schrödinger’s
wave equation versus Heisenberg’s ma-
trix formulation of quantum mechan-
ics–and these different expressions may
involve very different mental pictures
and interpretations and even psycholog-
ical force. But they are mathematically
and logically equivalent, and they all
lead to the same numerical answers.
They are all tools in the service of the
well-posed problem. While it is true
that science is constantly revising itself
to respond to new information and
ideas, at any moment in time scientists
are working on well-posed problems.

I often think of Kip’s idea of the well-
posed problem as closely related to Karl
Popper’s notion of what makes a scien-
ti½c proposition. According to Popper,
who was an important early-twentieth-
century British philosopher of science, A
scienti½c proposition is a statement that
can in principle be proved false. 不像

with mathematics, which exists com-
pletely within its own world of logical
abstraction, you can never prove a scien-
ti½c proposition or theory true because
you can never be sure that tomorrow
you might not ½nd a counterexample in
自然. Scienti½c theories are just sim-
pli½ed models of nature. Such a model
might be mathematically correct but its
beginning premises may not be in suf½-
cient accord with physical reality. 但
you can certainly prove any scienti½c
theory false. You can ½nd a counterex-
充足, an experiment that disagrees
with the theory. 和, according to Pop-
每, unless you can at least imagine an ex-
periment that might falsify the theory,
that theory or statement is not scienti½c.
In direct and indirect ways, Kip em-
phasized to his students that we should
not waste time on problems that weren’t
well posed. I have since come to under-
stand that there are many interesting
problems that are not well posed in the
Popper or Thorne sense. 例如:
Does God exist? 或者, What is love? 或者,
Would we be happier if we lived a thou-
sand years? These questions are terribly
interesting, but they lie outside the do-
main of science. Never will a physics
student receive his or her degree work-
ing on such a question. One cannot falsi-
fy the statement that God exists (或者
doesn’t exist). One cannot falsify the
statement that we would be happier (或者
not happier) if we lived longer. Yet these
are still fascinating questions, 问题
that provoke us and bring forth all kinds
of creative thought and invention. 为了
many artists and humanists, the ques-
tion is more important than the answer.
One of my favorite passages from Rilke’s
Letters to a Young Poet: “We should try to
love the questions themselves, 喜欢
locked rooms and like books that are
written in a very foreign tongue.” Sci-
ence is powerful, but it has limitations.
Just as the world needs both certainty

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艾伦
Lightman
在
科学

and uncertainty, the world needs ques-
tions with answers and questions with-
out answers.

Another thing I learned from Kip,

more a matter of personal style, was gen-
erosity. Kip bent over backwards to give
credit ½rst to his students. He would put
his name last on joint papers, he would
heap praise on his students at public
lectures. Kip was well aware of his
strengths, but he was modest at the same
时间, and he was deeply generous in his
心. I believe that he inherited these
virtues from his own thesis advisor at
普林斯顿大学, John Wheeler. Wheeler, 在
转动, absorbed much of his personal
style from his mentor, the great atomic
physicist Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. 在
a sense, I was a great-grandstudent of
Bohr.

Three Caltech professors served on
my thesis committee, charged with ex-
amining me at my ½nal thesis defense.
Richard Feynman was one of the three.
For some years, Feynman had taken an
interest in Kip’s students and, every cou-
ple of months, would go to lunch with us
and pepper us with questions about the
latest ½ndings in gravitational waves or
black holes or some other topic in gener-
al relativity. At my thesis defense, I stood
at a blackboard in a small room while
these guys sat comfortably and asked me
问题. Feynman asked the ½rst two
问题. His ½rst question was rather
easy, and I answered it without too much
trouble. His second question was just a
little beyond my reach. I struggled with
它, I went sideways and backwards, I cir-
cled around. 最后, after about twenty
minutes of fumbling at the blackboard, 我
managed an answer. Feynman asked no
more questions. 之后, I realized that
with his two questions he had precisely
bracketed my ability. He had launched
two artillery shells at me, one falling
short, one long, and he knew exactly

where I was in the intellectual landscape
of physics.

I vividly remember a scene from some-

time in 1975. It takes place during my
two years as a postdoctoral fellow at
Cornell. I am sitting on a couch in Edwin
Salpeter’s house. Ed, suffering from one
of his recurring back problems, lies on
the floor. From that low vantage, 他是
helping me think through a problem
involving stars being ripped apart and
consumed by a giant black hole. It is a
theoretical problem of course.

此时, Ed would have been
about ½fty years old. He was widely
regarded as one of the two or three
greatest theoretical astrophysicists in
世界. His most famous work, done
in the 1950s, involved the theoretical rec-
ipe for how helium atoms in stars can
combine to make carbon and then heav-
ier elements beyond that. It is believed
that all of the chemical elements in the
universe heavier than the two lightest,
hydrogen and helium, were forged at
the centers of stars. Ed and his col-
leagues showed how that process was
可能的. Among some of his other ac-
成就, he calculated how many
stars should be created in each range of
mass–a sort of birth weight chart for
newborn stars.

When I ½rst arrived at Cornell, 在里面
fall of 1974, Ed immediately dragged me
out to the tennis court to ½nd out what I
was made of. I was a fair tennis player
我. After a number of exhausting
matches over the season, we were ap-
proximately tied, but Ed could not re-
frain from quietly gloating whenever he
beat me. And I could see that same gen-
tlemanly but competitive edge in his sci-
恩斯. He didn’t like to lose.

On and off the tennis court, Ed

dressed in tattered short-sleeve sports
shirts. 这些, combined with his loafers

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A sense
的
mysterious

and stylishly long hair and faint Austrian
accent, gave him an air of casual ele-
gance. But Ed was enormously serious
about his physics. When he was talking
about a physics problem, he would
sometimes stop, turn his head, and just
stare off into space for a few moments,
and you knew that he was delving into
deeper layers of thought.

What I found most brilliant about Ed
was his physical intuition. He could vi-
sualize a physical problem and almost
feel his way to the core of it, all in his
头. This ability arose from his vast
knowledge of physics and astronomy
and his talent for making analogies
from one subject to another. 许多
the greatest scientists have had this tal-
ent for analogies. Planck compared the
inside surface of a container to a collec-
tion of springs with different oscillation
频率. Bohr compared the nucleus
of an atom to a drop of liquid.

So we’re in Ed’s living room, me on
the couch, Ed on his back on the floor,
some kind of classical music floating in
from the next room, and Ed draws an
analogy between stars being swallowed
by the big black hole and a drunk wan-
dering on a street with an uncovered
sewer hole. If a star comes too close to
the black hole it will be destroyed, 只是
as if the drunk stumbles to the sewer
hole he will fall in. Each star, in each or-
bit around the central black hole, is giv-
en a random jostle by the gravity of the
other stars, just as the drunk takes a ran-
dom step every minute. Such random
steps can lead a star, or a drunk, to fall
into the hole. The star bumps about in
two-dimensional ‘angular-momentum
空间,’ just as the drunk wanders around
on a two-dimensional street. The critical
问题, Ed announces from the floor,
is whether each random step of the
drunk is bigger or smaller than the di-
ameter of the hole. With this insight, 我

and the other postdoctoral fellow collab-
orating with me on the problem can now
work out the details. The result will be a
prediction for the Hubble Space Tele-
范围, more than a decade away. Ed asks
if I would please bring him a cup of tea.
He has other things to think about this
早晨.

几个月后, I had a severe
emotional upheaval with a different sci-
enti½c project. I was working on the
arrangement of stars in a globular clus-
特尔. A globular cluster is a congregation
of about a hundred thousand stars, 全部
orbiting each other under their mutual
gravitational attraction. There are about
a hundred globular clusters in our gal-
axy. Through the telescope, a globular
cluster appears as a beautiful, shining
ball of light. Imagine: a hundred thou-
sand stars all concentrated together in a
tight ball, whizzing about like angry
bees in a bees’ nest.

Since about 1970, astrophysicists had
begun to simulate the structure and evo-
lution of globular clusters on a comput-
是. You feed the computer the initial po-
sition of a lot of points, each represent-
ing a star or group of stars, you put in the
effects of gravity, each point gravitation-
ally attracting all the others, and you let
the computer tell you what happens in
时间. 从某种意义上说, the computer is doing
an experiment for you. Each minute of
computer time might represent a million
years for the globular cluster. 中的一个
½ndings of these ‘experiments’ was that
the simulated globular clusters begin
collapsing. The inner stars lose energy
and move closer to the center, 而
outer stars gain energy and move farther
from the center. For extra grati½cation,
there were even observations of actual
globular clusters in space, observations
suggesting that some globular clusters
may indeed have undergone such col-
lapse.

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科学

Many of the computer simulations
had been done with the simpli½cation
that all stars have the same mass. I want-
ed to investigate what happens under the
more realistic assumption that there is a
range of masses of stars. But instead of
doing a computer simulation, 这是
extremely time-consuming to set up and
costly to run, I found an approximate
way to attack the problem using only
pencil and paper. As I suspected, 拥有
a range of masses of stars made the clus-
ter collapse even sooner and faster.

While in the ½nal stages of writing up
my results for publication, I strolled into
the astronomy library to complete my
list of references to previous work. 和
那里, to my horror, I discovered a brand
new issue of Astrophysics and Space Science
in which two Japanese scientists had
solved the same problem. With my
pulse racing, I checked their results
against mine. Our ½gures and graphs
agreed to within three decimal places. 我
had been scooped! 当然, most peo-
ple get scooped at various times of their
lives if they’re working on anything at all
interesting. But this was the ½rst time for
我.

I experienced a complex set of reac-
系统蒸发散. I was embarrassed. I was humiliat-
编辑. I grieved the loss of several months
of my time. I worried whether the wast-
ed effort would compromise my chances
for an assistant professorship. But then,
another emotion began working its way
through my body. Amazement. 我曾是
utterly amazed that people on the other
side of the planet, with no correspon-
dence between us, no comparing of
笔记, had decided to solve the same
problem and had gotten the same an-
swer to three decimal places. 有
something wonderful and thrilling about
那. Here was powerful evidence of a
thing–part science, part mathematics–
that exists outside of our own heads.

Presumably, Martians would have also
gotten the same answer to three decimal
地方. There was a terrible precision in
世界.

After this feeling of awe at the terrible

precision and exactness of the world, 我
began to experience another emotion:
irrelevancy. If the physical universe is
reducible to precise equations with pre-
cise answers to three decimal places
(和更多), then why was I, as a particu-
lar person, needed to ½nd those an-
swers? For the globular cluster problem
with multiple masses, Saito and Yoshiza-
wa had found the answer before me. 如果
neither they nor I had found the answer,
then in another month or another year
somebody else would have found the
回答. Another scientist might have
used a different formulation of the prob-
莱姆, or described his or her results with
different language, but the answer would
have been the same. It seems to me that
science is not the best occupation for a
person who wants to make a mark as an
个人, accomplishing something
only that individual can do. In science, 它
is the ½nal measured number or the ½nal
equation that matters most. If Heisen-
berg and Schrödinger hadn’t formulated
quantum mechanics, then someone else
将有. If Einstein hadn’t formulat-
ed relativity, then someone else would. 如果
Watson and Crick hadn’t discovered the
double-helical structure of dna, 然后
someone else would. Science brims with
colorful personalities, but the most im-
portant thing about a scienti½c result is
not the scientist who found it but the
result itself. Because that result is uni-
凡尔赛宫. 从某种意义上说, that result already ex-
主义者. It is found by the scientist. 为我,
this impersonal, disembodied character
of science is both its great strength and
its great weakness.

I couldn’t help comparing the situa-
tion to my other passion, 艺术. 在里面

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A sense
的
mysterious

艺术, individual expression is everything.
You can separate Einstein from the equa-
tions of relativity, but you cannot sepa-
rate Beethoven from the Moonlight Sona-
ta. No one will ever write the The Tempest
except Shakespeare or The Trial except
Kafka.

I loved the grandeur, the power, 这
美丽, the logic, and the precision of
科学, but I also ached to express
something of myself, my individuality,
the particular way that I saw the world,
my unique way of being. On that day in
the Cornell library as I feverishly turned
the pages of Astrophysics and Space Science,
I learned something about science, 和我
also learned something about myself. 我
would continue following my passion
for science, but I could no longer sup-
press my passion for writing.

最后, in the early 1980s, I began writ-

ing essays. For some years I had been
publishing poems in small literary mag-
azines. The essay gave me the greater
flexibility I wanted. With an essay, 我
could be informative, poetic, philosophi-
卡尔, 个人的. 和, at a time when most
of my self-identity and con½dence were
still based on my achievements as a sci-
entist, with the essay I could connect my
scienti½c and artistic interests. 我会
come home in the evening, elated from
a day of research at the Harvard-Smith-
sonian Center for Astrophysics, 和
ponder an essay.

One of my ½rst essays concerned Jo-
seph Weber, a distinguished professor of
physics at the University of Maryland.
Weber had pioneered the ½rst gravita-
tional wave detectors. And he had be-
come somewhat of an outcast in the sci-
enti½c community because he claimed
to see gravitational waves when no one
else could.

When you shake an electrical charge,
it emits waves of electricity and magnet-

ism that travel through space at the
speed of light. 同样地, Einstein’s gen-
eral relativity predicted that when you
shake a mass of any kind, whether elec-
trically charged or not, it emits gravita-
tional waves, waves of oscillating gravity
that travel through space at the speed of
光. Hypothetically, 最强的
sources of such waves would be cata-
clysmic cosmic events, like the collision
of black holes in space.

How does one observe a gravitational
wave? When a gravitational wave strikes
a mass, it causes that mass to expand
and contract like a working billows
pump. Gravitational waves, 然而, 是
fantastically weaker than electromagnet-
ic waves. A typical expansion or contrac-
tion expected for a cosmic gravitational
wave might be one part in 1021 or small-
是, corresponding to a thousand-mile-
long ruler changing its length by the
width of a single atomic nucleus. 康塞-
经常地, while a high-school student can
build a crystal radio set to detect electro-
magnetic waves, gravitational waves re-
quire extraordinarily sensitive equip-
ment to measure them.

在 1960, when no one else was dream-

ing of detecting gravitational waves,
Weber conceived of the idea of a reso-
nant cylinder, a metallic cylinder that
would ring like a bell (but an extremely
soft bell) when struck by a gravitational
wave. One of the problems of building
such a resonant cylinder, or any detector,
is that it is always expanding and con-
tracting a little bit from tiny random dis-
turbances, such as a truck turning a cor-
ner a half a mile away. It is extremely dif-
½cult to discriminate such noise from
the minuscule motions expected from
a gravitational wave. So you build two
cylinders, thousands of miles apart, 和
monitor them closely. If both of them
begin softly ringing in precisely the
same way at the same time, then perhaps

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科学

they’ve just been struck by a gravitation-
al wave.

In the early 1960s, Weber began build-

ing such cylinders, the ½rst one located
at the University of Maryland near
华盛顿, 华盛顿特区, the second at Ar-
gonne National Laboratory near Chi-
卡戈. Each cylinder had a length of ½ve
脚, a diameter of about two feet, and a
weight of about three thousand pounds.
在 1968, not long after the completion
of his second cylinder, Weber began
reporting the observation of simulta-
neous oscillations of his two cylinders.
He claimed to have discovered the ½rst
gravitational waves.

In the following decade, other groups

of scientists attempted to duplicate
Weber’s results. They built their own
cylinders, hooked them up to their own
piezoelectric crystals to measure minute
oscillations, compared their own charts
of the oscillations in time. No one saw
oscillations of the magnitude claimed
by Weber, and no one saw simultaneous
oscillations of their cylinders except
what would be expected by chance. 在
事实, other detectors were built with a
hundred times more sensitivity than
Weber’s, and they failed to ½nd gravita-
tional waves.

Weber published his results. 其他
scientists published theirs. Weber dis-
missed the negative ½ndings of other sci-
entists. Experimental physicists studied
Weber’s results and said he was making
mistakes. Perhaps the tape recorders he
used to combine the data from the two
cylinders were themselves accidentally
injecting simultaneous signals. Or per-
haps small magnetic fluctuations in elec-
tric power lines or lightning bolts could
mimic gravitational waves. Weber held
his ground. Theorists got into the act.
They calculated the amount of expan-
sion and contraction that would be ex-
pected from realistic sources of gravita-

tional waves in space. According to these
calculations, Weber’s resonant cylinders
were not remotely sensitive enough to
detect gravitational waves, even if such
waves did indeed exist. A few theorists
proposed the possibility of exotic mech-
anisms to generate gravitational waves
with enormous power, and these propos-
als confused the discussion. Weber pas-
sionately held his ground. In telephone
conversations, in personal visits, at sci-
enti½c conferences, he got into scathing
论据. He lost friends and col-
联赛. 然而, in the face of a mountain
of contradictory evidence, he continued
to maintain that he was measuring gravi-
tational waves. 清楚地, Weber was not
behaving in the traditions of science. Jo-
seph Weber was allowing his personal
investment to interfere with good judg-
蒙特.

Then I, a greenhorn essayist, leaped
into the fray. I wrote an essay about emo-
tional prejudice in scientists for the mag-
azine Science 83. 标题: “Nothing but
the Truth.” In this essay, I ridiculed sev-
eral scientists, including Weber. I cringe
when I reread it. With self-righteous
flourish, I wrote that “The white-haired
Weber has become something of a tragic
½gure in the scienti½c community, 骗局-
tinuing to declare his rightness in the
face of incontrovertible evidence.”

A few months after the essay was pub-

列出, I found myself ten feet from
Weber at a scienti½c conference. 一些
unsuspecting colleague introduced us.
Weber’s face immediately turned purple,
he snarled something at me, and he
stomped away.

之后, I decided that I deserved his
contempt, and I hated myself for what
I had written. Because Joseph Weber
was really a hero. 是的, he was almost cer-
tainly sloppy in his experiment. And he
should have graciously accepted the op-
posing results of other scientists. But he

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A sense
的
mysterious

had imagined the ½rst gravitational wave
detector, he had built the ½rst gravita-
tional wave detector, and his insights
about gravitational wave detectors had
created the ½eld. 今天, the most ad-
vanced gravitational wave detector in
世界, the Laser Interferometer
Gravitational Wave Observatory
(ligo), has just recently begun opera-
系统蒸发散. If ligo does not detect the ½rst
gravitational wave, then its upgraded
version probably will. ligo would not
exist without Weber’s seminal work.
And it is quite possible that Weber
would not have accomplished that work
without his emotional prejudice and
热情. In the book Personal Knowledge,
the chemist Michael Polanyi argues that
such personal passion is vital to the ad-
vance of science. I agree. Without a pow-
erful emotional commitment, 科学家
could not summon up the enormous
energy needed for pursuing an idea for
年, working day and night in the lab
or at their desks doing calculations, 的-
ten sacri½cing the rest of their lives. 这是
little wonder that such a personal com-
mitment sometimes causes the scientist
to defend his or her beliefs regardless of
facts.

Even extraordinary physicists such as
Einstein and Planck have defended their
prejudices in the face of opposing evi-
登塞. Soon after Einstein published his
theory of special relativity in 1905, a Ger-
man experimental physicist named Wal-
ter Kaufmann repeated a crucial experi-
ment to measure the mass of electrons
moving at high speed. According to Ein-
stein’s theory, the mass of a moving par-
ticle should increase with speed in a par-
ticular way. A competing theory by Max
Abraham, a colleague of Kaufmann’s at
Göttingen University, proposed a differ-
ent formula for the increase in mass.
Kaufmann’s experimental results were
closer to Abraham’s predictions than to

Einstein’s. Over the next year, 最棒的
Max Planck, father of the quantum,
carefully studied Kaufmann’s experi-
ment but could ½nd no flaw. 内弗特-
较少的, Planck threw his support behind
Einstein’s theory.

Einstein himself, in a review article in

1907, said he could see nothing wrong
with Kaufmann’s experiments and
agreed that they ½t Abraham’s theory
better than his. 然而, he continued, “在
my opinion other theories [理论
other than his own] have a rather small
probability because their fundamental
assumptions concerning the mass of the
moving electrons are not explainable in
terms of theoretical systems which em-
brace a greater complex of phenomena.”
Here and elsewhere, Einstein clearly pre-
ferred his prejudice for comprehensive
theoretical systems over actual experi-
mental data. And data do sometimes
改变. 几年后, the experi-
ments of Kaufmann were proved to
be in error, and Einstein was vindicated.
In future years, 然而, his prejudices
sometimes led him astray. For decades,
Einstein was personally committed to
his nonquantum uni½ed theory that
combined gravity and electromagne-
主义. In a letter to his friend Paul Ehren-
fest in 1929, Einstein wrote, “[我的] latest
results are so beautiful that I have every
con½dence in having found the natural
½eld equations of such a variety.” This
时间, Einstein turned out to be wrong.
But that is not the point. When right and
when wrong, Einstein’s passion, his aes-
thetic and philosophical prejudices, 和
his personal commitment were probably
essential to his scienti½c creativity.

All of which led me to question the

meaning of ‘the scienti½c method.’
Since high school, I had been taught that
scientists must wear sterile gloves at all
times and remain detached from their
工作, that the distinguishing feature of

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艾伦
Lightman
在
科学

science is the much vaunted scienti½c
方法, whereby hypotheses and theo-
ries are objectively tested against experi-
评论. If the theory is contradicted by
实验, then it must be revised or
discarded. If one experiment is contra-
dicted by many other experiments, 然后
it must be critically examined. Such an
objective procedure would seem to leave
little room for personal prejudice.

I have since come to understand that
the situation is more complex. The sci-
enti½c method does not derive from the
actions and behavior of individual scien-
奶嘴. Individual scientists are not emo-
tionally detached from their research.
相当, the scienti½c method draws its
strength from the community of scien-
奶嘴, who are always eager to criticize
and test each other’s work. Every week
there are many journal articles, confer-
恩塞斯, and informal gatherings at the
blackboard in which scientists analyze
the latest ideas and results from all over
世界. It is through this collective
activity that objectivity emerges.

So how could I reconcile the Popper-
ian view of science, with its unbudging
demand for objective experimental tests,
against the Polanyian view, with its
emphasis on the personal commitments
and passions of individual scientists?
The answer, perhaps obvious but at ½rst
shocking to a young scientist, is that one
must distinguish between science and
the practice of science. Science is an ide-
阿尔, a conception of logical laws acting in
the world and a set of tools for discover-
ing those laws. 相比之下, the practice
of science is a human affair, 复杂的
by all the bedraggled but marvelous psy-
chology that makes us human.

About the time of my ill-considered

essay on Joseph Weber, I had a most
beautiful experience with scienti½c dis-
covery, perhaps the most beautiful of my

生活. I was studying the effects of particle
creation in high-temperature gases. 乙酰胆碱-
cording to Einstein’s famous formula,
E = mc2, energy can be created from
matter and matter can be created from
活力. The phenomenon has been ob-
served in the lab. It should also occur in
空间. Whenever the temperature of a
gas is high enough, as should happen in
strong gravity, then some of that thermal
energy can be transformed into electrons
and their antiparticles, the positrons. 在
转动, the creation of those particles will
act back on the properties and emitted
radiation of the gas. 因此, a good theo-
retical understanding of the nature of
such a ‘relativistic thermal plasma’
would be interesting not only in its own
正确的, but also as a diagnostic for inter-
preting the gamma rays and X-rays ob-
served from high-energy objects in
空间.

This research problem had been sug-
gested to me by Martin Rees of the Insti-
tute of Astronomy in England. I ½rst met
Martin during a visit to his institute in
the summer of 1974, just after receiving
my Ph.D. Martin was only thirty-two at
时间. In the world of astrophysics,
he was already a natural phenomenon.
Among his many accomplishments, 他
was one of the ½rst to point out that the
distribution of quasars in space was in-
consistent with the steady-state theory
of cosmology, thus lending support to
the big bang theory. He has made major
contributions to the astrophysics of
black holes, the theory of galaxy for-
运动, the origin of the cosmic back-
ground radiation, and many other top-
集成电路. 实际上, there has been practically no
area of modern astronomy and cosmolo-
gy that has not bene½ted from Martin
Rees’s imagination. Martin is always
erupting with new ideas, and he freely
shares these without seeking acknowl-
edgment or credit. Many of the nearly

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A sense
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mysterious

illegible letters I received from him dur-
ing the middle and late 1970s, when we
were working on similar problems,
would begin, “Thank you Alan for your
very interesting preprint on X. I agree
almost entirely with you, except for one
or two small points.” And then he would
go on to elaborate on a number of im-
portant and often critical effects that I
had missed in my investigation.

Many a pleasant summer I spent en-
joying the unhurried pace and intimacy
of Cambridge, England, walking through
the luxurious gardens of the colleges and
bicycling up Madingley Road to the In-
stitute of Astronomy. 当时, 它是
a modest one-story building bordered by
a wooden fence and a cow pasture. 在里面
1970s and 1980s, nearly everyone in the
world worth their salt in astrophysics
visited that building–to quietly work, 到
gather for British tea at four in the after-
noon, and to catch ideas thrown out by
the youthful but silver-haired Martin
Rees, Plumian Professor of Astronomy
and Experimental Philosophy. (在里面
1990s, Martin became Sir Martin and
was further elevated to Astronomer
Royal of England.)

Sometime around 1980, 马丁
suggested the importance of under-
standing the theoretical properties of
high-temperature gases. 问题
nagged at me for a couple of years before
I found a way to approach it. 有
two obvious extreme cases. 当。。。的时候
temperatures were low, 那里将会是
no creation of particles. The proper-
ties of such a gas were well understood.
尤其, the emitted radiation in-
creased with increasing temperature in a
known way. (All gases emit some radia-
的, except at zero temperature.) 还
well understood was the case of ex-
tremely high temperatures. 这里, 那里
would be such a huge number of elec-
trons and positrons created that the ra-

diation would be trapped, 除了
a thin layer at the outer edge of the gas.
The properties of this gas were also well
明白了. In such a situation, 这
emerging radiation would have a well-
known form, called black-body radia-
的, that would increase with tempera-
ture in a known way. 然而, 因为
of the prodigious energy requirements,
such extremely high-temperature gases
with black-body radiation would not ac-
tually exist in space. Most interesting,
所以, was the intermediate case,
when the temperature is high enough
to create particles but not so high to pro-
duce enough particles to trap the radia-
tion and yield black-body radiation.
I was fascinated by the question of
how the intermediate case would join to
其他. I expected that as energy was
put into the gas at a higher and higher
速度, the temperature would ½rst start to
increase according to the low-tempera-
ture case, then increase at some other
intermediate rate, then ½nally begin in-
creasing according to the ultra high-
temperature case.

To my astonishment, 我发现
something entirely different. With in-
creasing energy input, the temperature
at ½rst did indeed rise as expected. 但
after increasing to a critical value, 这
temperature began decreasing with fur-
ther increase of the rate of energy input
and emitted radiation. 最后, at a very
high rate of energy input, the tempera-
ture turned around and began increasing
再次, in the known way for a very high-
temperature gas.

起初, this result seemed absolutely

counter to my physical intuition. Put
more energy into something and you
expect its temperature to go up, 不是
向下. Then I understood. The temper-
ature of a gas is the average energy of a
particle in that gas. Once you begin cre-
ating new particles, the additional parti-

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艾伦
Lightman
在
科学

cles can soak up all the increased energy,
so much so that the average energy per
particle actually can decrease. By analo-
gy, when you give increasing quantities
of food to a nation, the amount of food
per person normally increases. But if the
people of that nation produce children at
a fast enough rate, then the food per per-
son can actually begin decreasing even
though there is more and more total
食物.

The result was not only astonishing.
It was delightful, it was beautiful, and it
was a little mysterious. 再次, I experi-
enced a kaleidoscope of emotions. Ini-
tially, I was surprised. 然后, I was puz-
zled. 然后, when I understood the re-
苏尔特, I was extremely happy. I had found
something new–again not terribly im-
portant in the grand scheme of science,
but something that no one had ever
known before me–and I felt elated and
powerful with the knowledge. (实际上, A
Swedish physicist, Roland Svensson, 在-
dependently found the same result about
同一时间, and we published nearly
simultaneously.)

Then I felt a sense of mystery. I had
shed light on a small corner of nature.
Other scientists had illuminated larger
地区. But there were almost certainly
vast chambers and ballrooms that re-
mained in the dark. So many beautiful
and strange things as yet unknown. In an
article published in 1931, Einstein wrote,
“The most beautiful experience we can
have is the mysterious. It is the funda-
mental emotion which stands at the cra-
dle of true art and true science.” What
did Einstein mean by “the mysterious?”
I don’t think he meant that science is
full of unpredictable or unknowable or
supernatural forces. I believe that he
meant a sense of awe, a sense that there
are things larger than us, that we do not
have all the answers. A sense that we can
stand right at the edge between known

and unknown and gaze into that cavern
and be exhilarated rather than fright-
伊德. I have experienced that beautiful
mystery both as a physicist and as a nov-
elist. As a physicist, in the in½nite mys-
tery of physical nature. As a novelist, 在
the in½nite mystery of human nature
and the power of words to portray some
of that mystery.

In the decade after my project on high-

temperature gases, my science began
gently subsiding, like a retreating blue
tide. I looked out at the horizon and felt
that my best work as a scientist was
moving away into my past. At the same
时间, I gazed into the future and began
pushing the boundaries of my essays,
which took on more of a fabulist quality,
like the writings of Italo Calvino and
Primo Levi. I invented. I told stories. 我
wrote about life and society on a planet
made entirely of iron. I wrote about a
moody Isaac Newton visiting my of½ce.
The science in my essays became only a
doorway to what lay beyond. 最终,
when I was about forty years old, I began
writing ½ction. The time had arrived for
my other passion to take over. 大约
1990, when I left Harvard for mit, I had
stopped doing scienti½c research alto-
在一起. I miss it terribly, 尽管
many pleasures and rewards of being a
writer.

But I am still a scientist. I am still fasci-
nated by how things work, by the beauty
and logic of the natural world. When I
see something interesting, like a particu-
lar angle made by the wake of a boat, 我
still take out a pencil and calculate why.
When I travel on airplanes, I still amuse
myself by rederiving mathematical theo-
rems that I learned years ago. 即使当
I write a scene for a novel, I sometimes
subconsciously begin a paragraph with a
topic sentence–a perfect metaphor for
科学, but nearly fatal for art.

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Every writer has a source for his writ-

英, a deep hidden well that he draws
from to create. For me that source is sci-
恩斯. In ways that I cannot explain, 科学-
ence suffuses all of my novels, charac-
特尔斯, 场景, 句子, even individual
字. Some people have told me that
my novels have an architectural quality,
a prominence of design. Perhaps that is a
sign of the source.

这些年来, I have learned to rec-
ognize the different sensations of sci-
ence and of art in my body. Some of the
sensations, such as the creative moment,
are the same. But I know the feeling in
my body of deriving an equation. 我
know the different feeling in my body of
listening to one of my characters speak
before I have told her what to say. I know
the line. I know the swoop of an idea. 我
know the wavering note. Most of the
时间, these feelings swirl all together as
a rumbling in my stomach, a wondrous
and beautiful and ½nally mysterious cry
世界的, logic and illogic, 肯定
and uncertainty, questions with answers
and questions without.

A sense
的
mysterious

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21
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