《Nature》上给青年科研工作者的几条忠告.docx

1、Nature上给青年科研工作者的几条忠告Nature上给青年科研工作者的几条忠告Scientist: Four golden lessons STEVEN WEINBERG Steven Weinberg is in the Department of Physics, the University of Texas at Austin, Texas 78712, USA. This essay is based on a commencement talk given by the author at the Science Convocation at McGill University

2、in June 2003.When I received my undergraduate degree about a hundred years ago the physics literature seemed to me a vast, unexplored ocean, every part of which I had to chart before beginning any research of my own. How could I do anything without knowing everything that had already been done? Fort

3、unately, in my first year of graduate school, I had the good luck to fall into the hands of senior physicists who insisted, over my anxious objections, that I must start doing research, and pick up what I needed to know as I went along. It was sink or swim. To my surprise, I found that this works. I

4、 managed to get a quick PhD though when I got it I knew almost nothing about physics. But I did learn one big thing: that no one knows everything, and you dont have to.Another lesson to be learned, to continue using my oceanographic metaphor, is that while you are swimming and not sinking you should

5、 aim for rough water. When I was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1960s, a student told me that he wanted to go into general relativity rather than the area I was working on, elementary particle physics, because the principles of the former were well known, while the

6、 latter seemed like a mess to him. It struck me that he had just given a perfectly good reason for doing the opposite. Particle physics was an area where creative work could still be done. It really was a mess in the 1960s, but since that time the work of many theoretical and experimental physicists

7、 has been able to sort it out, and put everything (well, almost everything) together in a beautiful theory known as the standard model. My advice is to go for the messes thats where the action is.My third piece of advice is probably the hardest to take. It is to forgive yourself for wasting time. St

8、udents are only asked to solve problems that their professors (unless unusually cruel) know to be solvable. In addition, it doesnt matter if the problems are scientifically important they have to be solved to pass the course. But in the real world, its very hard to know which problems are important,

9、 and you never know whether at a given moment in history a problem is solvable. At the beginning of the twentieth century, several leading physicists, including Lorentz and Abraham, were trying to work out a theory of the electron. This was partly in order to understand why all attempts to detect ef

10、fects of Earths motion through the ether had failed. We now know that they were working on the wrong problem. At that time, no one could have developed a successful theory of the electron, because quantum mechanics had not yet been discovered. It took the genius of Albert Einstein in 1905 to realize

11、 that the right problem on which to work was the effect of motion on measurements of space and time. This led him to the special theory of relativity. As you will never be sure which are the right problems to work on, most of the time that you spend in the laboratory or at your desk will be wasted.

12、If you want to be creative, then you will have to get used to spending most of your time not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientific knowledge.Finally, learn something about the history of science, or at a minimum the history of your own branch of science. The least important re

13、ason for this is that the history may actually be of some use to you in your own scientific work. For instance, now and then scientists are hampered by believing one of the over-simplified models of science that have been proposed by philosophers from Francis Bacon to Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. Th

14、e best antidote to the philosophy of science is a knowledge of the history of science.More importantly, the history of science can make your work seem more worthwhile to you. As a scientist, youre probably not going to get rich. Your friends and relatives probably wont understand what youre doing. A

15、nd if you work in a field like elementary particle physics, you wont even have the satisfaction of doing something that is immediately useful. But you can get great satisfaction by recognizing that your work in science is a part of history.Look back 100 years, to 1903. How important is it now who wa

16、s Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1903, or President of the United States? What stands out as really important is that at McGill University, Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy were working out the nature of radioactivity. This work (of course!) had practical applications, but much more importa

17、nt were its cultural implications. The understanding of radioactivity allowed physicists to explain how the Sun and Earths cores could still be hot after millions of years. In this way, it removed the last scientific objection to what many geologists and paleontologists thought was the great age of

18、the Earth and the Sun. After this, Christians and Jews either had to give up belief in the literal truth of the Bible or resign themselves to intellectual irrelevance. This was just one step in a sequence of steps from Galileo through Newton and Darwin to the present that, time after time, has weake

19、ned the hold of religious dogmatism. Reading any newspaper nowadays is enough to show you that this work is not yet complete. But it is civilizing work, of which scientists are able to feel proud.我从来就不是一个独立的人，也从没有独立生活过，直到来了加国。然后发现，有生俱来的独立细胞瞬间苏醒，几乎可以万事不求人，独立自强到令自己刮目相看。其实是环境使然，因为我也求不到人，举目无亲，求人不如求己。一个人

20、带着女儿东奔西走，上下求索，差不多半年的时间，生活才算安定下来。有幸结识了几位华人朋友，圣诞节前第一次聚餐，说起各自的安居经历，无不感叹，加国是个锻炼人的好地方，堪堪把在座的娇娇女都变成了女汉子。主人是一位大我两岁的姐姐，上得厅堂下得厨房，最是热情好客，令人宾至如归。席间说起各自的圣诞计划，我打算带女儿去夏威夷度假。话音刚落，便有两个声音相继表示可以负责我的机场接送。我和这里的许多老外一样，早在订机票的同时就租好了机场的昼夜停车，自驾往返机场。于是婉言谢绝了朋友的好意。“下次不许再这样了啊！知道你是不想给人添麻烦，但你知不知道我们就是喜欢被麻烦呀？”主人心直口快地埋怨道。“我是早上七点的航班，

21、五点半就得值机，四点半出发，若是让你们送的话，岂不是要跟我一样倒时差了，如果是中午的航班，我就不客气了。”“任何时侯都不需要客气。朋友是用来干什么的？朋友就是用来相互亏欠的。因为把你当朋友，所以我有求于你的时侯才不会犹豫，反之你有需要的时侯，也理所当然地来求我办事，人与人之间的感情就是在一次次的相互亏欠互还人情的过程中日渐亲厚的。我巴不得你麻烦我，这样下次我麻烦你的时侯就理直气壮了，否则你从不求我，我怎么好意思去求你，你说是不是这个理儿？”我把这当作了一堂宝贵的人情世故课。简单朴实的道理，却蕴含着与人交往的大智慧。怪不得她周围有这么多的朋友，我很羡慕她为人处事的通透。从那以后，我学会以另一种方

22、式与人相交，大方索取，大方回报，有欠有还，交情不断。有位家长临时有事找人代班去图书馆做义工，我正好有时间，立刻响应。之前我们只是恰好在同一个家长群里的点头之交，见面连话都没说过两句。事后，她主动表示有机会一定要替我一次班，我欣然接受，你来我往的便成了朋友，更是将相互代班发扬成了传统。邻居外出期间托我帮他浇花剪草送收垃圾桶，我爽快地同意，等我回国时，也毫不犹豫地请他为我服务。有一天我不在家，监控摄像头通过手机提示我的院门被风刮开了，摇摇晃晃，还没来得及通知朋友帮我去看一眼，就见邻居走进了画面，拿着工具帮我把松掉的门拴修好，关门离去。我又欠了他一次，没关系，下次包饺子时给他多煮一份。女儿的玩伴度假回来带给我们一罐锡兰红茶，等到春天，我从国内给她捎回明前龙井。她妈妈种的蓝莓大丰收，送给我一盆，我吃不了做成了蓝莓酱，又给她送回去一瓶。下一次，她干脆叫我去她家，品茶煮蓝莓酱。几年下来，我不再是当初那个独在异乡求助无门的女汉子，如今女汉子仍在，却是同在异乡，出入相友守望相助。朋友是用来相互亏欠的，投我以桃，报之以李。