哇,看完了!费曼这本 QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter 出乎意料地简单好懂诶,也就集中读了两天吧!前两个 lectures 都是非常基础非常有逻辑衔接得也很好的内容,如果是工科生的话应该差不多在课本里都学过了,第三个 lecture 的后半部分和第四个 lecture 就突然神奇起来,更像科普了,读起来好像就是“我没法给你解释清楚但事情就是我讲的这个样子,虽然看起来一团糟,但 Nature 一直都是一团糟,只不过我们还在一步步寻找规律而已”,反正读完之后产生了强烈地去读一下正经教科书的兴趣
So when some fool physicist gives a lecture at UCLA in 1983 and says, “This is the way it works, and look how wonderfully similar the theories are,” it’s not because Nature is really similar; it’s because the physicists have only been able to think of the same damn thing, over and over again.
我又猜中了这个 fool 就是他自己
In books it says that science is simple: you make up a theory and compare it to experiment; if the theory doesn’t work, you throw it away and make a new theory. Here we have a definite theory and hundreds of experiments, but we can’t compare them!
It was expected that only protons and neutrons would come out. But when the energies became sufficiently large, new particles came out. First there were pions, then lambdas, and sigmas, and rhos, and they ran out of the alphabet.
为何我联想到新冠。。。或者 run out of the alphabet 是常事吧
(向您安利中文(认真
[...] Schwinger, Tomonaga, and I independently invented ways to make definite calculations to confirm that it is true (we got prizes for that).
然后我去查了,是 Nobel Prize
QED 这书读得我真的很想去看那本 Reasoning about Uncertainty... 那本 Introduction 里的引言就很吸引我:
"When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless."
— Bertrand Russell, Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?
书里另一个讲到咖啡的地方:
到了一个小村庄……有两个戴着便帽的德国女人坐在院子里喝咖啡,仿佛根本没有发生过战争……我当时就想:“我的上帝啊,我们都被炸成了碎片,我们的人在地底下求生,我们的人在吃草根,而你们却坐在这里悠闲地喝咖啡。”附近就是我们的汽车,我们的战士在赶往前线,她们却在喝咖啡……
我们终于踏上了他们的土地……最让我们感到吃惊的,是那些良好的公路,是那些宽敞的农舍,是一盆盆的鲜花,甚至他们的谷仓都挂着优雅的窗帘。房间里的桌子上都铺着白色的桌布,摆着昂贵的器皿,还有精美的花瓷。我是在那里第一次见到洗衣机的……我们实在无法理解,既然他们生活得这么好,为什么还要打仗?为什么?我们的人蜷缩在防空洞里,他们还有白色的桌布。咖啡都倒在精致小巧的杯中,我只在博物馆里才看到过这种杯子。我还忘了说一件叫人惊讶的事情呢,简直让我们全都呆住了……那是在反攻时,我们第一次夺取了德国人的战壕。我们跳进他们的战壕,看到那里的暖水瓶里,居然还有热咖啡!咖啡的味道,好香啊……还有饼干!战壕里又有白色床单、干净毛巾,甚至还有卫生纸……我们这边却是什么都没有的。他们有这么舒服的床单,我们却是睡在稻草里,睡在树枝上,两三天没有热水是经常的。我们的士兵举起枪就朝着这些暖水瓶扫射过去……打得热咖啡溅满了战壕……
书里面提到好多次德国人喝咖啡…我还记得上次洪灾的时候听闻德国人点蜡烛烧咖啡