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

游客2023-08-04  54
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 does the author tell us about physicists today?
选项 A、They tend to neglect training in analytical skills.
B、They are very good at solving practical problems.
C、They attach great importance to publishing academic papers.
D、They often go into fields yielding greater financial benefits.
答案 D
解析 细节题。根据题干中的physicists today定位到原文第八段。该段提到，如今，大学培养了数百万的物理学家。但是适合他们的科学工作并不多，所以他们去了华尔街和硅谷，将自己的分析技能应用到更实际、报酬更高的工作中。由此可知，当下的物理学家往往都去了经济收入更高的领域，故选D。
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