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Part III A New Age Dawns
第三部 一個新時代的黎明
A Physicist is the atoms’ way of thinking about atoms. -Anonymous
物理學家就是以原子的方式來考慮原子的人。——無名氏
8 Einstein’s Universe
第八章 愛因斯坦的宇宙
As The Nineteenth century drew to a close, scientists could reflect with satisfaction that they had pinned down most of the mysteries of the physical world: electricity, magnetism, gases, optics, acoustics, kinetics, and statistical mechanics, to name just a few, all had fallen into order before them. They had discovered the X ray, the cathode ray, the electron, and radioactivity, invented the ohm, the watt, the Kelvin, the joule, the amp, and the little erg.
隨著19世紀漸漸遠去，科學家們可以滿意地回想，他們已經解開物理學的大部分謎團。我們略舉數例：電學、磁學、氣體學、光學、聲學、動力學及統計力學，都已經在他們的面前俯首稱臣。他們已經發現了X射線、陰極射線、電子和放射現象，發明了計量單位歐姆、瓦特、開爾文、焦耳、安培和小小的爾格。
If a thing could be oscillated, accelerated, perturbed, distilled, combined, weighed, or made gaseous they had done it, and in the process produced a body of universal laws so weighty and majestic that we still tend to write them out in capitals: the Electromagnetic Field Theory of Light, Richter’s Law of Reciprocal Proportions, Charles’s Law of Gases, the Law of Combining Volumes, the Zeroth Law, the Valence Concept, the Laws of Mass Actions, and others beyond counting. The whole world clanged and chuffed with the machinery and instruments that their ingenuity had produced. Many wise people believed that there was nothing much left for science to do.
凡是能被振蕩的，能被加速的，能被干擾的，能被蒸餾的，能被化合的，能被稱質量的，或能被變成氣體的，他們都做到了；在此過程中，他們提出了一大堆普遍定律。這些定律非常重要，非常神氣，直到今天我們還往往以大寫來書寫："光的電磁場理論"、"里氏互比定律"、"查理氣體定律"、"體積結合定律"、"第零定律"、"原子價概念"、"質量作用定律"等等，多得數也數不清。整個世界丁丁當當、喀嚓喀嚓地回響著他們發明創造出來的機器和儀器的聲音。許多聰明人認為，科學家們已經沒有多少事可干了。
