万物简史第164期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(7)

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　　迈克尔逊说服电话的发明者、刚刚发了财的亚历山大·格雷厄姆·贝尔提供资金，制造了一台迈克尔逊自己设计的巧妙而灵敏的仪器，名叫干涉仪，用来非常精确地测定光的速度。

　　Then, assisted by the genial² but shadowy Morley, Michelson embarked³ on years of fastidious measurements. The work was delicate and exhausting, and had to be suspended for a time to permit Michelson a brief but comprehensive nervous breakdown⁴, but by 1887 they had their results. They were not at all what the two scientists had expected to find.

　　接着，在和蔼而又神秘的莫雷的协助下，迈克尔逊进行了几年的精心测量。这是一件非常细致而又很花力气的活儿，迈克尔逊的精神一下子完全垮了，工作不得不中断了一段时间。但是，到1887年，他们有了结果。而且，这个结果完全出乎这两位科学家的意料。

　　物理学

　　As Caltech astrophysicist Kip S. Thorne has written: "The speed of light turned out to be the same in all directions and at all seasons."It was the first hint in two hundred years—in exactly two hundred years, in fact—that Newton’s laws might not apply all the time everywhere. The Michelson-Morley outcome became, in the words of William H. Cropper, "probably the most famous negative result in the history of physics." Michelson was awarded Nobel Prize in physics for the work—the first American so honored—but not for twenty years. Meanwhile, the Michelson-Morley experiments would hover⁵ unpleasantly, like a musty smell, in the background of scientific thought.

　　加州理工大学天体物理学家基普·S.索恩写道：“结果证明，光的速度在各个方向、各个季节都是一样的。”这是200年来——实际上恰好是200年——出现的第一个迹象，说明牛顿定律也许不是在任何时候、任何地方都适用的。用威廉·H.克罗珀的话来说，迈克尔逊-莫雷结果成为“很可能是物理学史上最负面的结果”。为此，迈克尔逊获得了诺贝尔物理学奖——从而成为获此殊荣的第一位美国人——但要过20年之后。与此同时，迈克尔逊-莫雷实验像一股霉味那样令人不快地浮动在科学家的脑海深处。

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