万物简史 第32期:埃文斯牧师的宇宙(1)

Interestingly, Zwicky had almost no understanding ofwhy any of this would happen. According to Thorne, "he did not understand the laws of physics wellenough to be able to substantiate his ideas."Zwicky's talent was for big ideas. Others—Baademostly—were left to do the mathematical sweepingup."

有意思的是，兹威基几乎不知道这一切发生的原因。据索恩说：“他不大懂物理学定律，因此不能证明他的思想。兹威基的才华是用来考虑大问题的，而收集数据是别人--主要是巴德--的事。”

Zwicky also was the first to recognize that there wasn't nearly enough visible mass in theuniverse to hold galaxies together and that there must be some other gravitational influence—what we now call dark matter. One thing he failed to see was that if a neutron star shrankenough it would become so dense that even light couldn't escape its immense gravitationalpull. You would have a black hole.

兹威基也是第一个认识到，宇宙里的可见物质远远不足以把宇宙连成一片，肯定有某种别的引力影响--就是我们现在所谓的暗物质。有一点他没有注意到，即中子星坍缩得很紧，密度很大，连光也无法摆脱它的巨大引力。这就形成了一个黑洞。

Unfortunately, Zwicky was held in such disdain by most of his colleagues that his ideasattracted almost no notice. When, five years later, the great Robert Oppenheimer turned hisattention to neutron stars in a landmark paper, he made not a single reference to any ofZwicky's work even though Zwicky had been working for years on the same problem in an officejust down the hall. Zwicky's deductions concerning dark matter wouldn't attract seriousattention for nearly four decades. We can only assume that he did a lot of pushups in thisperiod.

不幸的是，他的大多数同事都瞧不起他，因此他的思想几乎没有引起注意。5年以后，当伟大的罗伯特•奥本海默在一篇有划时代意义的论文中把注意力转向中子星的时候，他没有一次提到兹威基的成就，虽然兹威基多年来一直在致力于同一个问题，而且就在走廊那头的办公室里。在差不多40年的时间里，兹威基有关暗物质的推论没有引起认真的注意。我们只能认为，他在此期间做了许多俯卧撑。