Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts (Ep. 116)

He invested in global trading companies like the East India Company, for example, that were sending guns and textiles out to Africa and then shipping enslaved peoples over to the Americas.

例如，他投资了东印度公司等全球贸易公司，这些公司将枪支和纺织品运往非洲，然后将奴隶运往美洲。

He also invested in other stock market companies.

他还投资了其他股票市场公司。

There was this famous occasion — it’s the anniversary this year of what’s called the South Sea Bubble — when he invested a small fortune in a new company, the South Sea Company, and he watched the levels rise, and he stayed in there, and he sold when the stocks had gone up.

有一个著名的场合——“今年是所谓的南海泡沫的周年纪念日”——当时他向一家新公司南海公司投资了一小笔钱，他看到股价上涨，他就留在那里，并在股票上涨时卖出。

He made a small fortune, but then he made the classic beginner’s error.

他赚了一笔小钱，但随后他犯了典型的初学者错误。

He invested in again at a higher price, and he watched the value crash.

他以更高的价格再次投资，然后他目睹了价值的崩溃。

So he did lose several million in today’s currency on that particular venture.

因此，他在这次冒险中确实损失了数百万美元（相当于今天的货币）。

But in general, when he died, he was an extremely rich man, and you can tell that — the inventory of his possessions runs to a vellum scroll that’s 17 feet long.

但总的来说，当他去世时，他是一个极其富有的人，你可以看出，他的财产清单长达 17 英尺长的牛皮纸卷轴。

He spent money on having a good number of portraits of himself painted that he would send out to other people as bribes or as rewards for their allegiance to him.

他花钱为自己画了很多肖像，然后将这些肖像送给其他人作为贿赂或作为对他们效忠的奖励。

He had furniture.

他有家具。

He had decorations.

他有装饰品。

He had a carriage.

他有一辆马车。

He had a sedan chair tucked in the stables.

他在马厩里放了一张轿子。

He had lots of servants.

他有很多仆人。

On Newton’s time at The Royal Mint

牛顿在皇家造币厂的时光

He’d been trying to leave Cambridge for some time, and he had a very close friend, Charles Montagu, the Earl of Halifax, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, very influential man.

一段时间以来，他一直试图离开剑桥，他有一个非常亲密的朋友，哈利法克斯伯爵查尔斯·蒙塔古，他是英国财政大臣，非常有影响力的人。

He managed to find Newton this very prestigious job at the Mint that paid a good salary.

他设法为牛顿在造币厂找到了一份非常有声望的工作，薪水很高。

The minute Newton heard about it, he downed tools at Cambridge, rushed down to London, and he moved and started a new life within a few months.

牛顿一听说这件事，就放下了剑桥的工具，赶往伦敦，几个月后就搬家开始了新的生活。

Newton didn’t like being physically in the Mint.

牛顿不喜欢呆在造币厂。

He was given a house that had walls all around the garden, so you couldn’t see anything.

他得到了一所房子，花园周围都有围墙，所以你看不到任何东西。

The worst thing was that it was very noisy.

最糟糕的是它非常吵。

At that time, there was a zoo in the Tower, so he was kept awake all night by the roaring of the lions and the other animals in the zoo.

当时塔里有一个动物园，所以他整晚都被动物园里的狮子和其他动物的吼叫声弄得睡不着。

There was also the clanking of all the Mint machinery.

还有造币厂所有机器的叮当声。

Because it was a tower, it was a military fortification.

因为它是一座塔楼，所以它是军事防御工事。

There were many soldiers there, and they were riding around on horses and doing all that drill and all the stuff that soldiers do.

那里有很多士兵，他们骑着马四处走动，做所有的训练和士兵做的所有事情。

After a few months, he left the town because he really didn’t like living there.

几个月后，他离开了这个小镇，因为他真的不喜欢在那里生活。

He worked there one day a week, but he did most of his work at home.

他每周有一天在那里工作，但大部分工作都是在家完成的。

What criminals did was to file bits off the edge of these silver coins.

犯罪分子所做的就是从这些银币的边缘锉掉碎片。

They had lots of little silver shavings, which they could melt down and turn into silver and get rich that way, but that meant the currency, the coins, were getting lower and lower and lower in value.

他们有很多小银屑，他们可以将其熔化并变成白银，从而致富，但这意味着货币、硬币的价值越来越低。

Newton’s first job when he got to the Mint was to call in all the currency.

牛顿到造币厂后的第一份工作就是收回所有的货币。

Every single coin was meant to go to the Mint.

每一枚硬币都应该送到造币厂。

Then he melted it all down, and he started again with new coins that had milled edges like modern coins do, so they’re much, much more difficult to scrape or to forge, and then he reissued those.

然后他把它们全部熔化，然后他再次开始使用像现代硬币一样铣削边缘的新硬币，因此它们更难以刮擦或锻造，然后他重新发行了这些硬币。

But quite a lot of things went wrong, and like all those stories, it was a tale of the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

但很多事情都出了问题，就像所有这些故事一样，这是一个富者愈富、穷人愈穷的故事。

When alchemists looked out on the world, they could see everything around them changing.

当炼金术士放眼世界时，他们可以看到周围的一切都在发生变化。

For example, acorns were growing into trees, or babies were growing into adults, or wood was buried — forest was turning into coal.

例如，橡子正在长成树木，或者婴儿正在长成成年人，或者木头被掩埋——森林正在变成煤炭。

This idea of change seemed to make a lot of sense to them.

这种改变的想法对他们来说似乎很有意义。

And the idea was that just as a base metal, lead, can be transmuted into gold, if you pray, you can cleanse your own soul and get nearer to God.

这个想法是，就像贱金属铅可以转化为黄金一样，如果你祈祷，你就可以净化自己的灵魂并更接近上帝。

It was that sort of spiritual alchemy that Newton believed in, but he pursued a huge amount of alchemical research.

牛顿相信的就是这种精神炼金术，但他进行了大量的炼金术研究。

He was very expert in alchemy, and many of his alchemical beliefs actually got carried over into his natural philosophy.

他是炼金术方面的专家，他的许多炼金术信仰实际上都融入了他的自然哲学中。

You can’t draw a hard line between alchemy that’s rubbish and science that’s legitimate and that science is right.

你不能在垃圾炼金术和合法且科学正确的科学之间划清界限。

It’s not like that at all.

根本不是那样的。

You have this very difficult problem of explaining how it is that gravity operates because if you think about it, it’s something we still really haven’t resolved.

你要解释重力是如何运作的，这是一个非常困难的问题，因为如果你仔细想想，你会发现这是我们还没有真正解决的问题。

If you’ve got two lumps of matter, like the Earth and the moon, made of inert material, how is it that, somehow, they can attract each other, that they’ve got an innate power?

如果你有两块物质，比如地球和月球，由惰性材料制成，它们是如何以某种方式相互吸引的，它们如何拥有与生俱来的力量？

That’s the sort of question that science has never really been able to answer.

这是科学从未真正能够回答的问题。

He drew on his alchemical theories to provide different mechanisms to justify and to explain his theory of universal gravity.

他利用他的炼金术理论提供了不同的机制来证明和解释他的万有引力理论。

In many people’s view of the world, God created the universe, and then God disappeared and left it to run itself like a clock.

在许多人的世界观中，上帝创造了宇宙，然后上帝就消失了，让宇宙像时钟一样自行运行。

Newton’s idea was that God was constantly present throughout the universe.

牛顿的观点是上帝始终存在于整个宇宙中。

He used the word “immanent.” He’s immanent throughout the universe.

他用了“内在的”这个词。他无处不在，无处不在。

When a comet comes in — comets, in his view, are sent by God, and they’ve got fiery tails that have got vegetative — a live matter in them that reanimates the universe.

当一颗彗星到来时——在他看来，彗星是上帝派来的，它们有炽热的尾巴，并且具有植物性——其中的生命物质使宇宙重新焕发活力。

There’s a very vibrant, vital, living view of the universe.

这里有一个非常充满活力、生机勃勃、生动的宇宙观。

It was one that’s absent from modern physics and one that he developed from his own chemical research.

这是现代物理学中不存在的一种现象，也是他从自己的化学研究中发展出来的一种现象。

In the queries of the Opticks, he formulated two different views of gravity.

在光学报的询问中，他提出了两种不同的引力观点。

One is the one that there’s some sort of invisible power that stretches out through empty space and attracts the sun to the moon or the apple to the ground.

一种是存在某种无形的力量，它穿过虚空，将太阳吸引到月亮上，或者将苹果吸引到地面上。

The other version is that there’s something called an ether and that the ether is made up of tiny, tiny, tiny invisible particles that you can’t weigh.

另一个版本是，有一种叫做以太的东西，以太是由微小的、微小的、你无法称量的看不见的粒子组成的。

You can’t see them.

你看不到它们。

You can’t smell them, but they pervade everywhere, and then gravity can travel through that ether just like sound is transmitted through air or through water.

你闻不到它们的味道，但它们无处不在，然后重力可以穿过以太，就像声音通过空气或水传播一样。

That basic model sounds really weird now, but throughout the 19th century, regular scientists, very eminent, prominent scientists all believed in ether, and they developed models of it.

这个基本模型现在听起来真的很奇怪，但在整个 19 世纪，普通科学家、非常杰出的科学家都相信以太，并且他们开发了它的模型。

It only finally disappeared in 1905 when Albert Einstein introduced his theory of relativity, and one of his aims in doing that is to dispense with the ether, to say it’s a hypothetical substance, and it’s no longer needed.

直到 1905 年阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦提出相对论时，它才最终消失，他这样做的目的之一就是放弃以太，说它是一种假设的物质，不再需要它。

It sounds as though he was creating a mythological version of scientific creativity.

听起来他似乎正在创造一个神话版本的科学创造力。

The story was unknown for decades.

这个故事几十年来一直不为人知。

It was only, really, in the 19th century that the story of the apple tree came back.

事实上，直到 19 世纪，苹果树的故事才重新流行起来。

Now, of course, it’s as though he were a secular saint.

当然，现在他就好像一个世俗的圣人一样。

He has an attribute.

他有一个属性。

Like Saint Catherine has a wheel, well, Isaac Newton has his apple.

就像圣凯瑟琳有一个轮子一样，艾萨克·牛顿有他的苹果。

What Volta was able to do — he created a thing called a pile, which was a precursor of a modern battery.

沃尔特能够做到的——他创造了一种叫做“电堆”的东西，这是现代电池的前身。

He managed to produce a current of electricity, and he showed that it’s the same as the electricity that’s in our bodies.

他成功地产生了电流，并证明它与我们体内的电流相同。

So I think Alessandro Volta is the most important person in the creation of current electricity as opposed to static electricity.

所以我认为亚历山德罗·沃尔塔是创造电流而非静电的最重要人物。

On scientific revolutions and the history of science

关于科学革命和科学史

I suppose Isaac Newton’s Principia would be the Bible of the new science, and that could spread internationally.

我认为艾萨克·牛顿的《原理》将成为新科学的圣经，并且可以在国际上传播。

It went along with the very pacifist aim to reduce international tensions.

它符合缓解国际紧张局势的和平主义目标。

This concept — the label, the Scientific Revolution — became really important during the second half of the 20th century.

这个概念——“标签、科学革命”——在 20 世纪下半叶变得非常重要。

Since then, a lot of historians have strongly challenged it.

此后，许多历史学家对此提出了强烈质疑。

I personally don’t think it’s a very good label.

我个人认为这不是一个很好的标签。

Science, as we know it, didn’t exist in the 16th, 17th century, which is where the Scientific Revolution is usually placed.

正如我们所知，科学在16、17世纪还不存在，而科学革命通常发生在那个世纪。

The term “Scientific Revolution” implies that you go from a nonscientific state to a very scientific sort of position, and that actually didn’t happen.

“科学革命”一词意味着你从非科学状态转变为非常科学的状态，但这实际上并没有发生。

There was a long process of continuity.

这是一个漫长的连续过程。

You could see the 18th century as being extremely important for developing the idea of careers outside the Church and the law, which were the traditional careers — developing different sorts of careers and making science into a professional activity, and that’s what happened in the 19th century.

你可以认为 18 世纪对于发展教会和法律之外的职业理念极其重要，这些职业是传统的职业——发展不同种类的职业并使科学成为一种专业活动，这就是 19 世纪发生的事情。

We do know a lot about the ancient world.

我们确实对古代世界了解很多。

Unfortunately, we still don’t take sufficient account of other cultures outside Greece and Rome as seen as being particularly important.

不幸的是，我们仍然没有充分考虑希腊和罗马以外的其他文化，认为它们特别重要。

I think, more and more, we have to look at what was happening in other parts of the world and recognize that not everything originated with Europe.

我认为，我们必须越来越多地关注世界其他地区正在发生的事情，并认识到并非一切都起源于欧洲。

A lot of ancient cultures, ancient civilizations had very advanced levels of knowledge, but they weren’t directing it to what we would call science.

许多古代文化、古代文明拥有非常先进的知识水平，但他们并没有将其导向我们所谓的科学。

They wanted to live better.

他们想要生活得更好。

They wanted to be more healthy.

他们想要变得更健康。

They wanted to grow more crops.

他们想种植更多农作物。

They wanted to get from one place to another.

他们想要从一个地方到达另一个地方。

They wanted to become rich.

他们想变得富有。

To do all those things, they developed techniques that later got taken over and were adapted and now are seen as being part of science.

为了完成所有这些事情，他们开发了一些技术，这些技术后来被接管并进行了改编，现在被视为科学的一部分。

Here, there is this clock that’s long, long preceding the Middle Ages.

在这里，有一座早在中世纪之前很久的时钟。

The fact that one has been found which is so technically proficient suggests, or really confirms, that there must have been many, many others as well.

发现一个技术如此熟练的人这一事实表明，或者说确实证实了，一定还有很多很多其他人。

What historians have started doing is rereading ancient texts and reinterpreting different references to pick up indications that this sort of technology did exist long before we thought it ever did.

历史学家已经开始做的是重读古代文献并重新解释不同的参考文献，以找出这种技术早在我们认为存在之前就已经存在的迹象。

What historians of science do is argue and interpret and find ways of expressing their own points of view.

科学史学家所做的就是争论、解释并找到表达自己观点的方法。

We teach science students how to write essays, how to present their own position.

我们教理科学生如何写论文，如何表达自己的立场。

That’s the skill that everybody is going to need.

这是每个人都需要的技能。

If you’re writing a grant application, you need to be able to present your ideas clearly.

如果您正在撰写资助申请，您需要能够清楚地表达您的想法。

The other reason for why I think every science student should learn history of science is that the students I teach absolutely love it because they have an opportunity to argue and to express their own ideas and think for themselves.

我认为每个理科学生都应该学习科学史的另一个原因是，我教的学生绝对喜欢科学史，因为他们有机会争论、表达自己的想法并独立思考。

It’s something that students really, really enjoy as well as learning a lot from.

这是学生们非常非常喜欢的事情，并且可以从中学到很多东西。

For example, they know in their absolute hearts that the sun goes around the earth.

例如，他们心里绝对知道太阳绕着地球转。

They know that the sun goes around the earth, but then more and more evidence comes up that really argues against that belief, and that becomes a sort of a crisis when the evidence overwhelms the previous belief.

他们知道太阳绕着地球转，但是越来越多的证据出现，真正反驳了这种信念，当证据压倒了以前的信念时，这就变成了一种危机。

You flip into a new paradigm and go through a different belief that the earth goes around the sun.

你转变为一个新的范式，并经历了一种不同的信念，即地球绕着太阳转。

An enormous number of holes have been picked in Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

托马斯·库恩的著作《科学革命的结构》中发现了大量漏洞。

I think Thomas Kuhn himself would agree with many of those.

我认为托马斯·库恩本人也会同意其中的许多观点。

On the other hand, it was a key book in the way that it influenced people and persuaded them to think about the interaction between science and society in a different way.

另一方面，它是一本重要的书，因为它影响了人们并说服他们以不同的方式思考科学与社会之间的相互作用。

So it’s been enormously influential, although I don’t really agree with all that much of it.

所以它具有巨大的影响力，尽管我不太同意它的全部内容。

Queen Christina as Minerva.

克里斯蒂娜女王饰演密涅瓦。

Credit: National Museum of Norway

图片来源：挪威国家博物馆

She collected an intellectual court around her.

她在她周围聚集了一个知识分子法庭。

She attracted René Descartes, the French philosopher, to her court to come and be her tutor.

她吸引了法国哲学家勒内·笛卡尔来到她的宫廷，担任她的导师。

She learned maths and physics from Descartes, one of Europe’s leading philosophers at the time.

她向当时欧洲顶尖哲学家之一笛卡尔学习数学和物理。

But it’s quite cold in Sweden, unlike France.

但与法国不同，瑞典很冷。

He got very chilled, and he caught some illness, and he died while he was in Sweden with her.

他感到很冷，还得了一些病，最后在和她一起在瑞典时去世了。

That’s what she’s best known for, but she was also revered in her own age as Athena or as Minerva, the goddess of wisdom.

这是她最出名的地方，但在她那个时代，她也被尊为雅典娜或智慧女神密涅瓦。

That became a very common emblem.

这成为一个非常常见的标志。

There are various busts and pictures of Queen Christina dressed like Minerva, wearing a helmet — because she was also the goddess of war — wearing a helmet with an owl on the top.

有各种克里斯蒂娜女王的半身像和照片，她打扮得像密涅瓦，戴着头盔——因为她也是战争女神——戴着头盔，头盔的顶部有一只猫头鹰。

I think Queen Christina was also important for launching a tradition of learned numbers of women who were capable of understanding scientific ideas.

我认为克里斯蒂娜女王对于开创许多有能力理解科学思想的博学女性的传统也很重要。

When Charles Darwin was a medical student in Edinburgh, he had to read Erasmus Darwin’s medical textbook, which was called Zoonomia.

当查尔斯·达尔文（Charles Darwin）在爱丁堡还是一名医科学生时，他必须阅读伊拉斯谟·达尔文（Erasmus Darwin）的医学教科书，该教科书被称为“Zonomia”。

It was in Zoonomia, in the pages at the end, that Erasmus Darwin first suggested evolutionary ideas.

正是在《Zoonomia》的最后几页中，伊拉斯谟·达尔文首次提出了进化论的观点。

When Charles Darwin went on the Beagle voyage, when he started taking notes about all the flora and fauna that he saw, he had several notebooks.

当查尔斯·达尔文进行小猎犬号航行时，当他开始记录他所看到的所有动植物时，他有几本笔记本。

There’s one notebook that has got his first sketch of an evolutionary branching tree, and that notebook is called Zoonomia.

有一本笔记本上有他的第一个进化分支树的草图，那个笔记本叫做 Zoonomia。

That’s just one example of how influential his grandfather’s intellectual ideas were, but also his general approach to life, his aversion to slavery, for example.

这只是他祖父的知识思想有多大影响力的一个例子，也是他总体生活方式的一个例子，例如他对奴隶制的厌恶。

On the lateness of certain scientific discoveries

关于某些科学发现的迟到

But long before Charles Darwin formulated his idea of evolution by natural selection, that view of the permanence and the unchanging nature of the earth had been overturned a long while previously, and all the geological information was already in place by then.

但早在查尔斯·达尔文提出自然选择进化论之前，关于地球性质的永久性和不变性的观点早已被推翻，所有的地质信息那时都已经就位了。

If you go back, for example, even to Robert Hooke, who was a contemporary of Isaac Newton — during the plague, when Isaac Newton was in his country home at Woolsthorpe, Robert Hooke took refuge at a country house in Surrey.

例如，如果你回溯到与艾萨克·牛顿同时代的罗伯特·胡克——在瘟疫期间，当艾萨克·牛顿在伍尔索普的乡间别墅里时，罗伯特·胡克在萨里的一所乡间别墅避难。

He went for long walks over the downs, and he found lots of fossils of marine organisms.

他在丘陵上走了很长一段路，发现了很多海洋生物的化石。

Already, in the middle of the 17th century, Robert Hooke was arguing that there must once have been a sea that lay over that land because he was finding all these marine fossils.

早在 17 世纪中叶，罗伯特·胡克 (Robert Hooke) 就认为，这片土地上一定曾经有一片海洋，因为他发现了所有这些海洋化石。

It’s a long, slow process.

这是一个漫长而缓慢的过程。

In retrospect, it’s quite easy to say, “Well, why did it take so long for people to discover that?” One reason is that they had other things to do.

回想起来，很容易说：“好吧，为什么人们花了这么长时间才发现这一点？”原因之一是他们还有其他事情要做。

Another reason is that during the 18th and 19th centuries, when all the new canals and the railways were being built, then people started slicing down inside the earth, and for the first time, they could see all those layers, all those geological strata.

另一个原因是，在 18 世纪和 19 世纪，当所有新的运河和铁路都在修建时，人们开始在地球内部切开，他们第一次可以看到所有这些层、所有那些地质层。

Again, it was a different activity — improving transport — that stimulated the scientific insights.

同样，正是一项不同的活动——“改善交通”——激发了科学见解。

Also, roughly half the flora don’t have flowers that you can count the sexual characteristics in that way.

此外，大约一半的植物群没有花朵，因此您可以通过这种方式计算性别特征。

It’s a deeply flawed system that was much criticized at the time.

这是一个存在严重缺陷的系统，当时受到了很多批评。

It was like all new scientific ideas — it had to be promoted.

就像所有新的科学思想一样——它必须得到推广。

There had to be almost a sort of public relations exercise to make sure that Linnaean botany was accepted rather than another one.

几乎必须有一种公共关系活动来确保林奈植物学而不是其他植物学被接受。

And it’s now being replaced.

现在它正在被替换。

There’s a lot of debate about whether it is the best and most useful classification system.

关于它是否是最好、最有用的分类系统存在很多争论。

It’s not absolutely right.

这并不完全正确。

It’s just one system of doing it.

这只是执行此操作的一种系统。

In the 18th century, they were shown mainly as being noble and austere.

在18世纪，它们主要表现为高贵和朴素。

In the 17th century, a lot of them actually were given very melancholic expressions — someone like the diarist John Evelyn, for example, or Isaac Newton himself, because being melancholy was associated with scholarship — the idea that you would sit inside in a darkened room, and you had very white skin and fine bones.

在 17 世纪，他们中的很多人实际上都被赋予了非常忧郁的表情——比如日记作家约翰·伊芙琳，或者艾萨克·牛顿本人，因为忧郁与学术联系在一起——你会坐在一个黑暗的房间里，皮肤非常白，骨头也很细。

Your physical attributes reflected the brilliance of your brain.

你的身体特征反映了你大脑的聪明才智。

Portrait of Dorothy Hodgkin.

多萝西·霍奇金的肖像。

Credit: National Portrait Gallery, London.

图片来源：伦敦国家肖像画廊。

She was also a very affable, lovely person who campaigned for maternity leave for women in the universities, who was very supportive of other women.

她也是一个非常和蔼可亲、可爱的人，在大学里为女性争取产假，她非常支持其他女性。

She doesn’t have a glamorous, heroic, tragic tale like Rosalind Franklin, for example.

例如，她没有像罗莎琳德·富兰克林那样迷人、英雄、悲剧的故事。

She was just an ordinary woman who got on, and she did her science, and she had four children, and she was very supportive of her peers, and everybody liked her.

她只是一个普通的女人，过得很好，她做她的科学，她有四个孩子，她非常支持她的同龄人，每个人都喜欢她。

It seems to me that she is the ideal role model for a scientist.

在我看来，她是科学家的理想榜样。

Maggi Hambling has painted a very, very sympathetic portrait of her as an elderly lady burrowing amongst her papers, and she’s painted her with four arms because she’s so busy that her arms are dashing around all over the place.

玛吉·汉布林（Maggi Hambling）为她画了一幅非常非常富有同情心的肖像，画中她是一位在文件中挖洞的老太太，她把她画成有四只手臂，因为她太忙了，手臂到处乱跑。

She’s got a big model of a molecule in the middle of her desk to show off her achievements.

她的桌子中央有一个巨大的分子模型来展示她的成就。

On women in science

关于科学领域的女性

If you think about the history of science, of course there are individuals, like Newton and Einstein, who made great discoveries, but science isn’t just about that.

如果你想想科学史，当然有像牛顿和爱因斯坦这样的个人做出了伟大的发现，但科学不仅仅如此。

You have to be able to communicate ideas from one person to another, from one country to another.

你必须能够从一个人到另一个人、从一个国家到另一个国家交流想法。

If you think about that model of science, if you think of science as being continuous, not as a range of mountain peaks with individual geniuses standing on top of them, then women played a very, very important role because teaching, illustrating, drawing, editing, running museums, collecting different specimens — those are all absolutely crucial.

如果你思考一下科学的模型，如果你认为科学是连续的，而不是一系列的山峰，个别天才站在山顶，那么女性就发挥了非常非常重要的作用，因为教学、插图、绘画、编辑、管理博物馆、收集不同的标本——这些都是绝对重要的。

If you think of Isaac Newton — he wrote his Principia in a very complicated geometrical language.

如果你想到艾萨克·牛顿，他用非常复杂的几何语言写了他的《原理》。

He said he deliberately made it very difficult because what he said was, “I don’t want to be bothered by little smatterers in mathematics.” So ordinary people, even quite skilled mathematicians, found his book impossible to approach.

他说他故意让这件事变得非常困难，因为他说的是，“我不想被数学上的小知识打扰。”所以普通人，甚至是相当熟练的数学家，都觉得他的书难以接近。

It was only when other people translated it or explained the ideas in it in simpler terms that his vision, supposedly under the apple tree, managed to spread around the world.

只有当其他人翻译它或用更简单的语言解释其中的思想时，他的愿景，据说是在苹果树下，才成功传播到世界各地。

Women played a very important role in that sort of communication and spread of science.

妇女在这种科学交流和传播中发挥了非常重要的作用。

I agree with Londa Schiebinger, but I also think that we need to rewrite how we think about the history of science and what’s important about the history of science.

我同意隆达·席宾格（Londa Schiebinger）的观点，但我也认为我们需要重写我们对科学史的看法以及科学史的重要性。

Science is about collaboration.

科学就是合作。

It’s about cooperation.

这是关于合作的。

It’s not about unique effort, and women were very important in that process.

这与独特的努力无关，女性在这个过程中非常重要。

The guild structure was very strong in Germany, and a lot of women — in England as well — who were working in instrument-making shops inherited their father’s business, or they were trained up from when they were small children to work with their father.

德国的行会结构非常强大，许多在乐器制造店工作的女性（在英国也是如此）继承了父亲的生意，或者从小就接受训练，与父亲一起工作。

That sort of structure was stronger in Germany than it was in England, but there were also some important female astronomers.

德国的这种结构比英国更强大，但也有一些重要的女性天文学家。

For example, the first Astronomer Royal at Greenwich, when the observatory was built in the 17th century, the first Astronomer Royal was John Flamsteed, and his wife, Joanna (Margaret), was also a good astronomer.

比如格林威治的第一位皇家天文学家，17世纪建天文台时，第一位皇家天文学家是约翰·弗拉姆斯蒂德，他的妻子乔安娜（玛格丽特）也是一位优秀的天文学家。

She was very good at carrying out all the mathematical calculations that are needed to transform the data — the readings of the stars — to transform those data into measurements that can be recorded in a star catalog.

她非常擅长执行转换数据（恒星读数）所需的所有数学计算，将这些数据转换为可以记录在恒星目录中的测量结果。

Another excellent example of that is Caroline Herschel, who came over from Germany with her brother, William, and they set up in Bath together.

另一个很好的例子是卡罗琳·赫歇尔（Caroline Herschel），她和她的兄弟威廉（William）从德国过来，他们一起在巴斯定居。

She was going to be a musician, and she started on her musical career.

她要成为一名音乐家，并开始了她的音乐生涯。

But then William Herschel got the astronomy bug, and he persuaded her to devote her life to helping him.

但后来威廉·赫歇尔迷上了天文学，他说服她毕生帮助他。

She was out there all night, observing on the telescope, also carrying out this work of translating raw data into figures that could be recorded in the star catalog.

她整夜都在外面，用望远镜观察，同时也进行将原始数据转化为可以记录在星表中的数字的工作。

Also, on her own, she discovered several new comets, and she became very well known for that in the late 18th century.

此外，她还独自发现了几颗新彗星，并因此在 18 世纪末变得非常出名。

The problem with theoretical physics — I think there aren’t enough good teachers in the girls’ schools.

理论物理的问题 —— 我认为女校的好老师不够。

That’s one problem.

这是一个问题。

I also think we still have a cultural bias, which is very unfortunate, which suggests that women are not clever enough to do physics.

我还认为我们仍然存在文化偏见，这是非常不幸的，这表明女性不够聪明，无法从事物理学研究。

I personally really resent that because I got a degree in physics from Oxford.

我个人真的很讨厌这一点，因为我获得了牛津大学的物理学位。

I think a lot of men in physics, unfortunately, are still unwilling to recruit or to promote female scientists.

不幸的是，我认为物理学界的许多男性仍然不愿意招募或提拔女性科学家。

Those are some of the prejudices that we have to smash down.

这些是我们必须打破的一些偏见。

As I understand it, a lot of women in Arab nations who go into science at university level then end up teaching other women.

据我了解，阿拉伯国家的许多女性在大学阶段进入科学领域，然后最终成为其他女性的教师。

That’s something that we could benefit from in this country.

这是我们在这个国家可以受益的事情。

Whereas, a lot of the problems start at school, that girls aren’t well taught, and they’re discouraged from carrying out subjects like computer science or physics.

然而，很多问题都是从学校开始的，女孩没有受到良好的教育，并且不鼓励她们学习计算机科学或物理等科目。

I turned it down because I didn’t want to spend the next three years in a laboratory, fine-tuning instruments and working out some number to the 10th place of decimals.

我拒绝了，因为我不想在接下来的三年里呆在实验室里，微调仪器并计算出小数点后第十位的数字。

I made a positive decision that I was bored by physics.

我做出了一个积极的决定：我对物理感到厌倦。

I wasn’t very good at the practical aspect anyway, and I wanted to get out in the world, and I wanted to do something different.

无论如何，我不太擅长实践，我想走出去，想做一些不同的事情。

On the beneficial effects of committing unhistoric acts

论实施非历史行为的有益影响

The aspect of that work that gave me the most pleasure and most gratification was when a student was in deep distress for some reason or another, and I managed to help that individual student and help them regain their life and get back to work and become a happy student again.

这项工作给我最大的乐趣和最满足的方面是当一个学生因为某种原因陷入深深的痛苦时，我设法帮助那个学生，帮助他们重新获得生活，重新回到工作岗位，再次成为一个快乐的学生。

I think that’s the sort of thing that George Eliot was talking about — that I had hope that I had a big influence on individual lives.

我认为这就是乔治·艾略特所说的那种事情——我希望我对个人生活有很大的影响。

That was the most rewarding aspect of my career.

这是我职业生涯中最有价值的方面。

I also steered into studying science without anybody — including me — seriously questioning whether that was what I actually wanted to do.

我也开始学习科学，没有任何人——包括我——认真质疑这是否是我真正想做的事情。

I was very intellectually competent, so I passed all my exams.

我的智力非常强，所以我通过了所有的考试。

I went to Oxford, and I got a very good degree.

我去了牛津，并获得了很好的学位。

But I’m far happier now, now that I’ve undertaken a historical subject and I’m more on the art side.

但现在我更快乐了，因为我已经学习了历史科目，而且我更关注艺术方面。

Perhaps that’s what I should have done when I was at school, but no one ever noticed that at the time.

也许这就是我在学校时应该做的事情，但当时没有人注意到这一点。

At that time, there was a double image.

那时，有双重形象。

I was being encouraged to succeed intellectually as a scientist, but also, there was still that older role model, that I had to be the perfect wife and the perfect mother.

人们鼓励我作为一名科学家在智力上取得成功，但同时，仍然有那个古老的榜样，即我必须成为完美的妻子和完美的母亲。

I had to have my nail varnish all sorted out.

我必须把我的指甲油全部整理好。

There was this double role model, and I was trying to fulfill both, and I felt that I was fulfilling neither.

有一个双重角色模型，我试图同时满足两者，但我觉得我两者都没有实现。

I don’t think it was really until my 40s or 50s that I started feeling confident.

我认为直到 40 多岁或 50 多岁我才真正开始感到自信。

That’s one of the things I find wonderful when I walk around Cambridge now, and I see young fathers taking their children to school or playing with their children.

这是我现在在剑桥散步时发现的美妙的事情之一，我看到年轻的父亲带孩子上学或和孩子一起玩耍。

That’s a cooperative parental approach towards their children that’s fantastic.

这是一种父母对孩子的合作态度，非常棒。

It’s wonderful for the children, and it is also very rewarding for the parents as well — for both parents, particularly the father.

这对孩子们来说是美妙的，对父母来说也是非常有益的——对父母双方，尤其是父亲来说。

We’ve got to get away from this idea that work is what really matters because it’s life that matters and how happy you are.

我们必须摆脱这样一种观念：工作才是真正重要的，因为生活和你的快乐程度才是重要的。

That’s far more important than what work you manage to do.

这比你能完成的工作重要得多。

That’s probably why I have so many images in my book, because we were making — they don’t exist now, but they were called tape-slide programs, the 35-millimeter slides that were synchronized with a tape cassette.

这可能就是为什么我的书中有这么多图像，因为我们正在制作——它们现在不存在了，但它们被称为磁带幻灯片程序，即与磁带同步的 35 毫米幻灯片。

You had to present an image and an idea together in very simple, basic terms, and I think that was fantastic intellectual training.

你必须用非常简单、基本的术语一起呈现图像和想法，我认为这是很棒的智力训练。

And I’ve found it a very rewarding way of teaching because if you .

我发现这是一种非常有益的教学方式，因为如果你。

.

。

.

。

At the beginning of the academic year, you’ve got a group of students, and they’re all very nervous — not just of me.

学年伊始，你们有一群学生，他们都非常紧张——不仅仅是我。

They’re nervous of each other.

他们彼此都很紧张。

They don’t want to embarrass themselves in front of the other students.

他们不想在其他学生面前难堪。

If I show them a picture, everybody can say something about a picture.

如果我向他们展示一张图片，每个人都可以对图片发表评论。

They can say, “Well, that’s a man and a woman sitting at a table.”

他们可以说：“嗯，那是一个男人和一个女人坐在一张桌子旁。”

By encouraging them to explore the picture, more and more ideas come out.

通过鼓励他们探索图片，越来越多的想法就会出现。

It’s a very helpful way to start a conversation about what’s happening and what all the subtexts are and what all the symbols are.

这是一种非常有用的方式来开始讨论正在发生的事情、所有的潜台词是什么以及所有的符号是什么。

The frontispiece about the Temple of Serapis by Charles Lyell.

查尔斯·莱尔 (Charles Lyell) 所著关于塞拉皮斯神庙的卷首插画。

Credit: ResearchGate

图片来源：ResearchGate

If you go back to the Renaissance and the 17th century, it was traditional that the frontispiece of a book — the image opposite the title page — the frontispiece carried a visual summary of the arguments of the whole book.

如果你回到文艺复兴时期和 17 世纪，按照传统，一本书的卷首插图——“扉页对面的图像”——卷首插图对整本书的论点进行了视觉总结。

That was true .

确实如此。

.

。

.

。

I suppose the latest famous example was in the middle of the 19th century, Charles Lyell’s famous book on geology.

我想最新的著名例子是 19 世纪中叶查尔斯·莱尔 (Charles Lyell) 的著名地质学著作。

It had a frontispiece about the Temple of Serapis, and that summarized his whole theory about the temple sinking and rising.

它有一篇关于塞拉皮斯神庙的卷首插图，总结了他关于神庙沉没和崛起的整个理论。

On the pillars of the temple, you could see boreholes from the marine organisms where it had been submerged below the waters.

在寺庙的柱子上，你可以看到被淹没在水下的海洋生物留下的钻孔。

That’s an old tradition, to summarize an argument in pictures.

用图片来总结论证是一个古老的传统。

Perhaps it’s one we could valuably get back to.

也许这是我们可以有价值地回顾的一个。

One of Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier’s 12 plates, page 512.

玛丽·安妮·保尔兹·拉瓦锡 (Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier) 的 12 个图版之一，第 512 页。

Credit: Gutenberg.org

图片来源：Gutenberg.org

When they got married, she was only 13.

他们结婚时，她只有13岁。

The first thing she did was learn English, which he never did, so she was absolutely essential in his work with all the English chemists and people like Benjamin Franklin from the States and Joseph Priestley from England.

她做的第一件事就是学习英语，而他从未这样做过，所以在他与所有英国化学家以及像美国的本杰明·富兰克林和英国的约瑟夫·普里斯特利这样的人的工作中，她绝对是必不可少的。

He published a big book, a revolutionary book of chemistry — it was published during the French Revolution — which is commonly regarded as a revolutionary book.

他出版了一本大书，一本革命性的化学书——它是在法国大革命期间出版的——通常被认为是一本革命性的书。

It’s regarded as the foundation of modern chemistry.

它被认为是现代化学的基础。

It’s got 12 plates in it.

里面有12个盘子。

Each of those plates shows an instrument and takes it apart so that somebody who reads the book in Berlin or New York or London could replicate Lavoisier’s results precisely and build an instrument that was exactly the same as the one that he was using.

每张图画都展示了一种仪器，并将其拆开，以便在柏林、纽约或伦敦阅读这本书的人可以精确地复制拉瓦锡的结果，并建造一种与他正在使用的仪器完全相同的仪器。

She drew all those plates.

她画了所有这些盘子。

There’s a famous portrait of them.

他们有一张著名的肖像。

It’s in the Metropolitan in New York — a big portrait, a double portrait of the Lavoisier couple.

这是在纽约大都会的一张大幅肖像，拉瓦锡夫妇的双人肖像。

On his side of the picture, there’s lots of glass instruments and bowls and tubes, and on her side of the picture — she’s looking very beautiful and glamorous — but on her side of the picture, there’s a big portfolio.

在他的这一面，有很多玻璃仪器、碗和管子，在她的这一面——“她看起来非常美丽和迷人”——但在她的这一面，有一个很大的作品集。

She was an art student, and she learned from David, the man who painted the double portrait.

她是一名艺术系学生，师从画双人肖像的大卫。

All her illustrations, her sketches still survive at Cornell University in the archive.

她所有的插图和草图仍然保存在康奈尔大学的档案馆中。

There’re pictures of her made by her, showing her husband’s laboratory, and she shows herself sitting in the middle of the laboratory, and she’s writing down all the observations, and she’s very, very much involved in the scientific work.

有她拍的照片，展示了她丈夫的实验室，她展示了自己坐在实验室中间，她正在写下所有的观察结果，她非常非常参与科学工作。

Sketch of Marie-Anne Lavoisier’s husband’s laboratory.

玛丽·安妮·拉瓦锡丈夫的实验室草图。

Credit: HistoryOfScience

图片来源：科学史

There’re two different kinds of illustration that she did.

她画了两种不同类型的插图。

One was technical illustrations for the book, and the other was this illustration showing science not as the sole product of Lavoisier’s brain but as a collective work.

一幅是这本书的技术插图，另一幅是这幅插图，它表明科学不是拉瓦锡大脑的唯一产物，而是一项集体工作。

There’re about 10 people in the picture, and it includes her as a woman right at the center of Lavoisier’s science.

照片中大约有 10 个人，其中包括处于拉瓦锡科学中心的女性。

Her works were collected by Queen Charlotte, who was the wife of King George III.

她的作品被乔治三世国王的妻子夏洛特王后收藏。

She did a great deal to promote the science of botany amongst women at the end of the 18th century.

18 世纪末，她为在女性中推广植物学做出了巨大贡献。

Then I get back to work, and everything resumes as usual for the next half an hour, and then it all happens again.

然后我回去工作，接下来的半个小时一切都恢复如常，然后一切又发生了。

I was completely unaware that I did that until several people have told me that I do, but it seems to work.

我完全没有意识到我这样做了，直到几个人告诉我我这样做了，但这似乎有效。

For example, one of the most famous — which seems relevant today — is that when Jenner introduced smallpox vaccination at the end of the 18th century, everybody was absolutely terrified about what effects that would have on the human body.

例如，最著名的一个——“今天看来很重要”——是当詹纳在 18 世纪末引入天花疫苗时，每个人都非常害怕这会对人体产生什么影响。

Gillray did a very famous caricature of all the patients in the clinic sprouting horns and turning into cows because the vaccine was based on cowpox.

吉尔雷画了一幅非常著名的漫画，画中诊所里的所有病人都长出了角，变成了牛，因为疫苗是基于牛痘的。

That’s just one very obvious example.

这只是一个非常明显的例子。

There were a lot of caricatures about Charles Darwin, for example, representing him as an ape because what he dared to do was bring together animal life and human life.

例如，有很多关于查尔斯·达尔文的漫画，将他描绘成一只猿，因为他敢于将动物生命与人类生命结合在一起。

There’s another famous one of Marie Curie, and she’s with her husband, and it’s so typical that her husband Pierre is holding up this tube of radium chloride, and it’s shining out on his forehead as though he were the genius.

还有一个著名的居里夫人，她和她的丈夫在一起，很典型的是，她的丈夫皮埃尔举着这管氯化镭，它在他的额头上闪闪发光，好像他是天才一样。

She is dressed very demurely and timidly, and she’s hiding behind his back, so it’s giving him all the credit for this discovery, whereas actually, it was her work.

她穿得非常端庄和胆怯，而且她躲在他的背后，所以这一切都归功于他的发现，而实际上，这是她的工作。

It was her project, and she was in charge of radiation.

这是她的项目，她负责辐射。