【研究生学术英语读写教程翻译 中国科学院大学Unit3】

Unit3 Theorists,experimentalists and the bias in popular physics理论家，实验家和大众物理学的偏见

Most people with more than a passing interest in physics will tell you who came up with the idea of quarks - Murray Gell-Mann.

大多数对物理学仅有一时爱好的人都会告知你谁提出了夸克的想法——默里·盖尔曼。

Now gather around the same crowd which knows about Gell-Mann and ask them who Henry Kendall, Jerome Friedman and Richard Taylor are. It’s very likely that you will draw mostly blank stares.

现在，在生疏盖尔曼的人群中聚集一堂，问他们亨利·肯德尔，杰罗姆·弗里德曼和理查德·泰勒是谁。你很有可能茫然地看着他们。

Yet “coming up with the idea〞 was as far as Gell-Mann went in 1964 when he and George Zweig independently developed the concept. Without the 1968 experiments of Kendall, Friedman and Taylor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), quarks would have remained a mere theory, a will-o-wisp whose existence was confidently postulated but never proven.

然而，直到1964年盖尔·曼〔Gell-Mann〕和乔治·茨威格〔George
Zweig〕独立提出这个概念时，他才提出“提出这个想法〞。假如没有1968年肯德尔，弗里德曼和泰勒在斯坦福直线加速器中心〔SLAC〕所进展的的试验，夸克将仅仅是一种理论，一个未经证明的、缥缈的大胆假设。

Similar themes proliferate throughout the popular view of physics. Everyone knows Paul Dirac who conjectured the existence of the positron, but how many know Carl Anderson and his collaborator Seth Neddermeyer who actually found it? People similarly know about Wolfgang Pauli and Enrico Fermi stating the requirement for a ghostly particle called the neutrino in the 30s, but ask popular science enthusiasts if they are aware of the dogged pursuit of the neutrino by Raymond Davis for over 30 years and you will likely see knitted brows. Finally, even today, a schoolchild would likely know Einstein’s prediction of the bending of starlight by the gravitational field of a star, but Arthur Eddington’s verification of this fact would be little known.

在整个流行的物理学观点中，相像的主题激增。每个人都知道保罗·狄拉克〔Paul
Dirac〕猜出了正电子的存在，但是有多少人知道卡尔·安德森〔Carl Anderson〕和他的合作者塞思·内德迈耶〔Seth
Neddermeyer〕真正发觉了正电子？类似地，人们也生疏在30年月提出了幽灵粒子〔即中微子〕条件的泡利和费米，但假如你询问科普爱好者是否了解雷戴维斯在30余年间，始终不懈地捕获中微子的踪迹，你很可能发觉会他们眉头紧锁。最终，即使在今日，一个学校生仍可能知道爱因斯坦通过恒星的引力场对星光弯曲的猜测，但是亚瑟·爱丁顿对这一事实的验证却鲜为人知。

I started mulling over this vivid gap between the public’s appreciation of theorists vs experimentalists on reading a post by physics professor Chad Orzel who, taking a cue from my post about famous American physicists, makes the cogent point that while American theorists lagged behind their European counterparts until the post-war years, they were almost equa