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  3. Will there ever be another Einstein? This is the undercurrent of conversatio

Will there ever be another Einstein? This is the undercurrent of conversatio

游客2023-08-04  57
问题     Will there ever be another Einstein? This is the undercurrent of conversation at Einstein memorial meetings throughout the year. A new Einstein will emerge, scientists say. But it may take a long time. After all, more than 200 years separated Einstein from his nearest rival, Isaac Newton.
    Many physicists say the next Einstein hasn’t been born yet, or is a baby now. That’s because the quest for a unified theory that would account for all the forces of nature has pushed current mathematics to its limits. New math must be created before the problem can be solved.
    But researchers say there are many other factors working against another Einstein emerging anytime soon.
    For one thing, physics is a much different field today. In Einstein’s day, there were only a few thousand physicists worldwide, and the theoreticians who could intellectually rival Einstein probably would fit into a streetcar with seats to spare.
    Education is different, too. One crucial aspect of Einstein’s training that is overlooked is the years of philosophy he read as a teenager—Kant, Schopenhauer and Spinoza, among others. It taught him how to think independently and abstractly about space and time, and it wasn’t long before he became a philosopher himself.
    "The independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan (工匠) or specialist and a real seeker after truth," Einstein wrote in 1944.
    And he was an accomplished musician. The interplay between music and math is well known. Einstein would furiously play his violin as a way to think through a knotty physics problem.
    Today, universities have produced millions of physicists. There aren’t many jobs in science for them, so they go to Wall Street and Silicon Valley to apply their analytical skills to more practical and rewarding efforts.
    "Maybe there is an Einstein out there today," said Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, "but it would be a lot harder for him to be heard."
    Especially considering what Einstein was proposing.
    "The actual fabric of space and time curving? My God, what an idea!" Greene said at a recent gathering at the Aspen Institute. "It takes a certain type of person who will bang his head against the wall because you believe you’ll find the solution."
    Perhaps the best examples are the five scientific papers Einstein wrote in his "miracle year" of 1905. These "thought experiments" were pages of calculations signed and submitted to the prestigious journal Annalen der Physik by a virtual unknown. There were no footnotes or citations.
    What might happen to such a submission today?
    "We all get papers like those in the mail," Greene said. "We put them in the junk file." [br] What can we learn from Brian Greene’s comment on the next Einstein?
选项 A、People have to compete in order to get their papers published.
B、It is hard for a scientist to have his papers published today.
C、Papers like Einstein’s would unlikely get published today.
D、Nobody will read papers on apparently ridiculous theories.
答案 D
解析 推断题。根据题干中的Brian Greene’s comment定位到原文第九到十四段。第九段直接引用的布莱恩的话，说到也许现在就有一个像爱因斯坦一样的人，但要让别人听到他的声音会困难得多。随后在第十二段中提到，也许最好的例子就是爱因斯坦在他的“奇迹年”，也就是1905年里写的五篇科学论文。这些“思想实验”是一页页的计算公式，爱因斯坦在上面签字并提交给了著名的《物理学年鉴》杂志，他当时在学术界无人知晓。他的论文上也没有脚注或引用。随后在最后两段中进一步说到，这样提交上去的论文如果是在今天，我们会把它们放到垃圾邮件里。显然，布莱恩的话凸显了爱因斯坦那个时代和当下的一种差异，即当下不会有人去读那些有关明显荒诞理论的论文，故选D。
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