By Matthew Francis

在很長的一段時間里，作為人類歷史上珍貴的寶物之一，愛因斯坦的大腦跟隨一個醫(yī)生一起顛沛流離，直到50年后才又回到普林斯頓醫(yī)院安頓下來。在這段傳奇背后，科學(xué)家一直沒有放棄對愛因斯坦大腦的研究。正如愛因斯坦以他著名的公式捕捉到能量和物質(zhì)的精髓，我們則在試圖捕捉天才的精髓……

Before he died, Albert Einstein requested that his whole body be cremated as soon as possible after death, and his ashes scattered in an undisclosed location.1. cremate: 火葬；scatter: 撒播；undisclosed: 隱蔽的，未公開的。But his request was only partially heeded.2. partially: 部分地；heed: 接受。Einstein’s closest friend, the economist Otto Nathan,disposed of his ashes according to his wishes, but not before Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who performed the autopsy,3. dispose of: 處理；pathologist: 病理學(xué)家；autopsy:驗尸。removed his brain. Family and friends were aghast,but Harvey convinced Einstein’s son Hans Albert to give his reluctant permission after the fact.4. aghast: 驚駭?shù)?，吃驚的；reluctant: 不情愿的。The eccentric doctor kept the brain in a glass jar of formalin inside a cider box under a cooler, until 1998, when he returned it to Princeton Hospital,and from time to time, he would send little chunks of it to interested scientists.5. 這位古怪的醫(yī)生把（愛因斯坦的）大腦放進了一瓶福爾馬林液中，把瓶子放進了一個裝蘋果酒的盒子里，又把盒子放在了冷卻器下面，一直到1998年他才把此物歸還給了普林斯頓醫(yī)院，并時常會把（愛因斯坦的）大腦的部分組織寄給對它感興趣的科學(xué)家們。eccentric: 古怪的，下文出現(xiàn)的eccentricity意思為“怪癖”；formalin: 福爾馬林；cider: 蘋果酒；cooler: 冷卻器；chunk: 塊。

Most of us will never be victims of brain-theft, but Einstein’s status as the archetypical genius of modern times singled him out for special treatment.6. archetypical: 典型的，下文中的archetype為其名詞形式；single out: 挑選出。An ordinary person can live and die privately, but a genius—and his grey matter7. grey matter: 腦灰質(zhì)。—belongs to the world. Even in his lifetime, which coincided with8. coincide with: 符合，與……一致。the first great flowering of mass media, Einstein was a celebrity, as famous for his wit and white shock of hair as he was for his science. Indeed, his life seems to have been timed perfectly to take advantage of the proliferations of newspapers and radio shows, whose reports often framed Einstein’s theories as being incomprehensible to anyone but the genius himself.9. proliferation: 擴散；incomprehensible:費解的。

There’s no doubt that Einstein’s contributions to science were revolutionary. Before he came along, cosmology was a part of philosophy but, thanks to him, it’s become a branch of science.10. come along: 出現(xiàn)；cosmology: 宇宙學(xué)。Einstein’s work also led to the discovery of exotic physical phenomena such as black holes,gravitational waves, quantum entanglement and the Big Bang.11. black hole: 黑洞；gravitational wave:引力波；quantum entanglement: 量子糾纏；the Big Bang: 宇宙大爆炸。But despite this scienti fic legacy, Einstein’s fame owes something more to our culture’s obsession with celebrity. Apart from his distinctive coif, he had a way with words and, as a result, he is frequently quoted, occasionally with bon mots he didn’t actually say.12. 除了他與眾不同的頭巾外，愛因斯坦還很擅長言辭，因此，他說過的話經(jīng)常被人引用，其中有些妙句甚至不是他本人說的。coif: 頭巾；have a way with words: 擅長言辭；bon mot: 妙語。More than anything, Einstein possessed the distinctive mystique13. mystique: 奧秘，秘訣。of genius, a sense that he was larger than life, or different from the rest of us in some fundamental way, which is why so many people were desperate to get hold of his brain.

Many people have wondered whether genius is a physical attribute,a special feature that could be isolated in the brain, and Einstein’s grey matter is considered an experimental ground for testing this claim.14. 很多人懷疑天才是不是一種身體特質(zhì)，即大腦中一個單獨的特殊功能，愛因斯坦的腦灰質(zhì)被視為是驗證這一說法的試驗體。attribute: 特質(zhì)。Unfortunately, as the psychologist Terence Hines has argued,the published studies that were carried out on Einstein’s brain are flawed15. flawed: 有缺陷的，有紕漏的。in important ways. In each case, researchers compared parts of Einstein’s brain to people assumed to be “normal”, but in most of these studies the scientists knew which brain sample was Einstein’s. They set about looking for differences—any differences—between Einstein and the control brains and, when you approach science in this way, it’s very easy to find differences.

After all, there was only one Einstein, just as there’s only one “you” and only one “me”. The only way to be sure that Einstein’s brilliance was due to his anatomy16. anatomy: 解剖。would be to analyse his brain alongside many other people like him,in contrast to people unlike him. Otherwise, it’s impossible to tell the difference between the unique physiological characteristics of his genius and random variation between individuals.17. physiological: 生理的；random variation: 隨機變化。But that doesn’t mean we can’t investigate his genius. For while we might not have good studies of his brain, we do have the story of his life, and the contents of his mind, in the form of his research.

Einstein is often remembered as a harmless, other-worldly figure, detached from mundane problems.18. other-worldly: 超脫塵俗的；detach from: 從……分離；mundane: 世俗的。Certainly he had his eccentricities: he wore sweatshirts that grew rattier over the years, because wool sweaters made him itch.19. ratty: 破爛的，此處為比較級；itch: 發(fā)癢。He didn’t like socks, and sometimes wore women’s shoes on vacation. But the conventional narrative of Einstein as tweedy eccentric ignores his radical politics and occasionally troubled personal life.20. 人們通常將愛因斯坦描述成一個松散悠閑的怪人，卻忽略了他激進的政治立場還有偶爾混亂的私生活。tweedy: 松散悠閑的；radical: 激進的。

But Einstein was no saint. He cheated on his first wife Mileva Mari with his cousin Elsa Einstein, whom he later married and cheated on in turn. He was known to write sexist doggerel in letters to his friends,21. sexist: 性別歧視的；doggerel:打油詩。and he had dif ficult relationships with his children—though he could be extremely kind to other people’s children, and even helped youngsters in his neighbourhood with their homework.

In other words, Einstein was—like all of us—a bundle of contradictions,someone who behaved well sometimes and badly at others. As a world-famous scientist, he had a louder ampli fier22. ampli fier: 擴音器，此處指愛因斯坦作為著名科學(xué)家，比普通人影響更大。than an ordinary person, but if we expect a genius to be somehow fundamentally different from the rest of humanity,studying Einstein’s life and opinions will disappoint.

Which leaves us with what established Einstein’s reputation: his science.Einstein sometimes had trouble recognising the implications of his ideas, to the point where it’s likely that he would have trouble recognising the way general relativity23. general relativity: 一般相對論，關(guān)于時空和引力的基本理論，主要由愛因斯坦創(chuàng)立。is researched and taught today. In 1939, he published a paper intending to show that black holes didn’t and couldn’t exist. The term “black hole” wasn’t around back then, but several physicists proposed that gravity might cause objects to collapse on themselves. Einstein’s usually excellent intuition failed him in this case. His calculations were technically correct,but he hated the idea of black holes so much that he failed to see that, with enough density, gravity overwhelms all other forces,making collapse inevitable.24. 嚴(yán)格來講，他的計算是正確的，不過他對“黑洞”這個概念厭之入骨，這使他未能認(rèn)識到在密度足夠大的情況下，重力會壓垮其他力量，最終必將導(dǎo)致崩塌。overwhelm: 壓垮。

愛因斯坦與前妻米列娃

To be fair to Einstein, general relativity was still an esoteric25. esoteric: 深奧的，難懂的。theory in 1939. Very few researchers used it, and the observational methods required to show that black holes exist—radio and X-ray astronomy—were in their infancy.26. X-ray astronomy: X射線天文學(xué)；infancy:初期。But black holes weren’t Einstein’s only weakness as a scientist. He was also modest about his mathematical ability. He relied on others,including his first wife Mileva and his good friend, the physicist Michele Besso, to help him work out thorny27. thorny: 棘手的，難處理的。problems.

And as is always the case with scienti fic geniuses, Einstein’s theories would exist even if he had not. Historians of science once subscribed to a “Great Man” theory, but we now know that transformative ideas emerge from the work of many talented individuals, instead of emerging ex nihilo from one brilliant mind.28. subscribe to: 同意；ex nihilo: 〈拉丁語〉無中生有。

Nor was Einstein the only physicist to make brilliant discoveries in the early 20th century. Curie won two Nobel Prizes and contributed directly to research that led to several others, yet she isn’t considered the archetype of genius—despite having crazy hair to rival Einstein’s.29. 居里夫人獲得了兩個諾貝爾獎，并且對其他許多研究有直接的貢獻(xiàn)，但是她并未被當(dāng)作一個天才典范——盡管她也有一頭可以和愛因斯坦相媲美的亂發(fā)。Curie: 居里夫人，法國著名科學(xué)家、物理學(xué)家和化學(xué)家；rival: 比得上某人。But of course there are two unfortunate biases against Curie: her gender and the fact that she was an experimentalist, not a theoretician.30. biase: 偏見；experimentalist: 實驗者；theoretician: 理論家。

This difference is instructive31. instructive: 有啟發(fā)性的。. Thanks to the diversity of human experience and human talents, we know that genius isn’t a monolithic32. monolithic: 完全統(tǒng)一的。quality that appears in identical form everywhere we find it. Einstein’s genius was different from Curie’s, and scienti fic genius is different from musical genius. Celebrity, on the other hand,tends to follow more predictable patterns. Once a person becomes famous, they tend to stay that way. Had he lived in another era,Einstein might have been a decent33. decent: 相當(dāng)好的。physicist, but he wouldn’t have been the Einstein we know. But because he lived in a special time,after the lights of fame had begun to shine bright, and before science came to be seen as a team sport, he has become our genius.