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12 The Earth Moves
第十二章 大地在移動
In one of his last professional acts before his death in 1955, Albert Einstein wrote a short but glowing foreword to a book by a geologist named Charles Hapgood entitled Earth's Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science. Hapgood's book was a steady demolition of the idea that continents were in motion. In a tone that all but invited the reader to join him in a tolerant chuckle, Hapgood observed that a few gullible souls had noticed "an apparent correspondence in shape between certain continents." It would appear, he went on, "that South America might be fitted together with Africa, and so on... It is even claimed that rock formations on opposite sides of the Atlantic match."
1955年，阿爾伯特·愛因斯坦辦了生前最后一件專業方面的事──為一本書寫了個短小而生動的前言。該書的題目是《移動的地殼：解答地球科學中的一些問題》，作者是一位名叫查爾斯·哈普古德的地質學家。哈普古德在書里堅決駁斥了關于大陸在漂移的觀點。他以逗大家與他一起發笑的口氣指出，少數容易上當受騙的人認為“有些大陸的形狀顯然吻合”。他接著說，似乎“南美洲可以和非洲拼在一起，如此等等，有人甚至聲稱，大西洋兩岸的巖石結構完全一致”。
Mr. Hapgood briskly dismissed any such notions, noting that the geologists K. E. Caster and J. C. Mendes had done extensive fieldwork on both sides of the Atlantic and had established beyond question that no such similarities existed. Goodness knows what outcrops Messrs. Caster and Mendes had looked at, beacuse in fact many of the rock formations on both sides of the Atlanticare the same—not just very similar but the same.
哈普古德先生斷然擯棄了任何這類觀點，并且指出，地質學家K.E.卡斯特和J.C.門德斯已經在大西洋兩岸進行了大量實地考察，毫無疑問地確定這些相似之處壓根兒就不存在。天知道卡斯特和門德斯兩位先生考察了哪些地方，因為大西洋兩岸的許多巖石結構確實是一樣的──不僅非常類似，而且完全一樣。
This was not an idea that flew with Mr. Hapgood, or many other geologists of his day. The theory Hapgood alluded to was one first propounded in 1908 by an amateur American geologist named Frank Bursley Taylor.
無論是哈普古德先生，還是那個年代的許多別的地質學家，這個觀點怎么也聽不進去。哈普古德提到的理論，最初是由一位名叫弗蘭克·伯斯利·泰勒的美國業余地質學家在1908年提出來的。
