史蒂文?温伯格 著
张旭 译

     很久以前，当我得到学士学位时，物理学文献对我而言是一个广阔而未知的大海。若不探察大海的每一部分并悉心编制海图，我将无法展开我自己的任何研究。若不了解他人已经完成的工作，我怎样才能开展自己的工作呢？幸运的是，我在研究生院的第一年，有幸接触到一些资深物理学家。他们使我超越原有观念的束缚，坚持要求我必须开始进行研究，在前行中挖掘需要学习的内容。如此一来，沉浮全看自己。我惊讶地发现他们的建议竟然可行。我努力尽快获得博士学位——虽然当我拿到学位时，对于物理学几乎一无所知。但是，我懂得了一个很重要的道理：没有人了解全部，你也不必强求。
     接下来要了解的一个经验，将继续使用我关于海洋的隐喻——当你畅游而没有沉没时，你应该去挑战汹涌的海水。当上个世纪六十年代末期，我执教于麻省理工学院时，一个学生告诉我，他准备进入广义相对论的研究领域，而不是进入我所正在从事的基本粒子领域。因为前者的基本原理如此清晰明了，而后者却对他而言却显得一片混乱。我猛然领悟到他恰恰已经给出做出相反选择的绝佳理由。当时，粒子物理是一个仍然存在创造性工作的领域。虽然在六十年代该领域的确一片混乱，但自从那时起，许多理论物理学家和实验物理学家已开始理出头绪，把许多实验事实（更进步说，几乎所有事实）纳入一个被称为“标准模型”的优美理论中。我的建议是：追寻混乱——那才是行动之所在。
     我的第三个建议可能最难以接受——宽容地对待自己空耗的时间。学生仅仅被要求解决那些他们的教授认为是可以解决的问题（除非教授非常残酷）。另外，问题的科学意义并无关紧要——为了通过课程，不得不解决这些问题。但是在真实世界中，很难知道哪些问题是重要的，而且你无从知晓在历史的既定时刻一个问题是否可以被解决。在二十世纪开始时，几位物理学领袖包括洛仑兹和麦克尔逊，尝试建立一套电子理论。部分目的是为解开无法探测到地球相对以太运动效应之谜。我们现在知道他们试图破解的问题本身就是错误的。在当时，没有人能够建立一套成功的电子理论，因为量子力学尚未被创立。到了1905年，天才的爱因斯坦认识到，运动的时空度量效应才是问题所在。据此，他创立了狭义相对论。当你无法确定什么是研究中真正的问题所在时，你在实验室或者书桌前的大部分时间将被无情消耗掉。如果你想具备创造性，那么你将不得不习惯于投入大把时间而无任何创造性，习惯于在科学知识的海洋里徘徊不前。
最后，了解一些科学史，至少你自己所在科学分支的历史。如此建议的最基本原因是，科学史对你自己的科学工作有些实际的用处。例如，科学家们偶尔会因轻信那些从弗朗西丝?培根到托马思?库恩和卡尔?波普等哲学家们提出的过于简单的科学模型而受桎梏。对付科学哲学最好的解药莫过具备科学史知识。
     更为重要的是，科学史可以使你觉得自己的工作看起来更有价值。作为一位科学家，你可能将不会富有。你的朋友和亲戚可能无法理解你的工作。另外，如果你从事于类似基本粒子物理这样的领域，你甚至不能体会到工作立刻有用的满足感。但是，通过认识到自己的科学工作将是历史的一部分，会使你获得极大的满足。
     回首100年前，到1903年。在1903年，谁是大英帝国首相，谁是合众国总统，这个问题对现在而言能有多重要呢？真正有着重要意义的是，欧内斯特?卢瑟福和弗雷德里克?索迪揭示出放射性的本质！这个工作有着实际的应用（当然！），但是更重要的是它的文化含义。理解了放射现象，使得物理学家可以解释太阳和地心如何在百万年后仍旧保持高温。这样，最终解决对地球年龄问题的科学争论。地质学家和古生物学家的认识是正确的，实际上地球和太阳的年龄非常之大。在此之后，基督教徒和犹太教徒要么不得不放弃对圣经中所谓的真理的信任，要么就置自身于非理性。这仅仅是从伽利略经由牛顿和达尔文到现在不断地削弱宗教教条主义桎梏中的一步。只要阅读当今的报纸，就足以让你认识到这个工作还远远没有结束。不过，这是一项创造人类文明的工作，科学家足以对此引以为豪。
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史蒂文?温伯格现任教于美国德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校物理学系。因创立基本粒子间弱相互作用和电磁相互作用统一理论，并预言了弱中性流的存在，温伯格与格拉肖、萨拉姆共同获得1979年诺贝尔物理学奖。

Steven Weinberg: Four golden lessons
NATURE | VOL 426 | 27 NOVEMBER 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? Fortunately, 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 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 don't have to.
    Another lesson to be learned, to continue using my oceanographic metaphor, is that while you are swimming and not sinking you should 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 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 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 — that's where the action is.
    My third piece of advice is probably the hardest to take. It is to forgive yourself for wasting time. Students are only asked to solve problems that their professors (unless unusually cruel) know to be solvable. In addition, it doesn't matter if the problems are scientifically important — they have to be solved to pass the course. But in the real world, it's very hard to know which problems are important, 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 effects of Earth's 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 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. 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 reason 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 oversimplified models of science that have been proposed by philosophers from Francis Bacon to Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. The 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, you're probably not going to get rich. Your friends and relatives probably won't understand what you're doing. And if you work in a field like elementary particle physics, you won't 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 was 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 important were its cultural implications. The understanding of radioactivity allowed physicists to explain how the Sun and Earth's 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 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 weakened 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.
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■ 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 in June 2003.

　　今年圣诞节我收到一份“偷”来的圣诞礼物。之所以说“偷”，原因在于那支精美手表的售价，估计只能抵销其材料费、手工费、运输费，以及手表从制造到销售过程中各环节商人的转手费，却不包括这个瑞士名牌的设计费、品牌维护费、广告费等等知识产权的成本。
　　简而言之，就是一支盗版手表，我拥有的第一支。
　　同样是长驻北京的新加坡朋友回国过节前，将这支T.H.的时新型号送交给我。我看看，A级仿冒品果然档次不同，从设计的精致程度、质感到重量感都与真品不相上下。朋友手上戴着一支“血统纯正”的法国名牌表，在巴黎费近万新元换来的。她拿出在北京买的盗版货相互比对，我们将眼睛瞇出一条线，仍看不出两者有任何不同，虽然价格相差超过百倍。
　　听说，冒牌劳力士和真品之间，你就是用放大镜也未必能找出仿冒者的破绽。
　　我一面惊叹这些盗版货的高质量，一面想到不久前刚写的中西政治人物的知识产权争论，不禁莞尔。
　　真伪之间的模糊，或者说伪造手法的高超，使盗版问题越来越不限于一场消费者和正版厂家之间的拉锯，而逐渐上升为中国和欧美政府之间的矛盾焦点。
　　从去年开始，美国和欧洲的商务部长、贸易专员像走马灯一样接二连三来中国访问。除了最吸引外界眼球的人民币课题外，西方商务部长的另一个指定题目就是中国的知识产权侵犯问题。
　　根据美国商务部估计，世界范围内的盗版和侵犯知识产权活动使美国公司每年损失超过2000亿美元（3076亿新元），而中国是盗版活动最猖獗的。另外，欧盟的数据表明,由于中国知识产权保护不力，2002到2005年三年间,欧盟因为中国盗版所导致的经济损失高达3800万欧元(约7690万新元)。
　　站在维护正版合法利益，尤其藐视名牌崇拜心理的立场上，我一向对盗版没有特别的亲切感。可是，在获得第一支盗版表以后，我对盗版的印象突然面临挑战。
　　一个很简单的疑问是，既然这么漂亮的东西用几十新元就造得出来，为什么要用几千元上万元来拥有他？即使说，在精美外观下，盗版货和正品在内部机械上差别巨大，这差别难道会有百倍之多？
　　事后，我终于认真逛了北京著名的秀水市场。因为出售大量盗版的关系，在一些国际旅客心中，这里恐怕要和北京故宫齐名了。在其中专卖手饰手表的楼层，商家很专业地向客人展示他们的货品，什么牌子什么型号他们烂熟于心。虽然每隔十几分钟就有商场稽查员来巡场一次，他们收起来再拿出来，不敢把货直接放到柜台上。
　　他们很了解，美国和欧洲哪个部长再来的时候，风声就会更紧张一些。而在其他的时候，他们也像一般商人一样，做着他们的买卖。一些出门的货品短期内损坏，他们还保修保换。
　　我再琢磨到消费者偷了什么，我盗的知识产权，其实是偷了一份我没有资格拥有的快乐，一份我不具备的身份。奢侈品的价格为什么这么高？价高就是它的意义，设计、品质和用料对一份奢侈品的定价而言，只占极小的一部分。
　　突然觉得，盗版贸易可能是用一种省事而狡诈的现代“劫富济贫”法。世界上既然永远有一群消费能力极高的富人，盗版大概很难消灭。
《联合早报》
（编辑：黄爱莲）