Why Is Einstein the Poster Boy for Genius

By Matthew Francis

在很长的一段时间里，作为人类历史上珍贵的宝物之一，爱因斯坦的大脑跟随一个医生一起颠沛流离，直到50年后才又回到普林斯顿医院安顿下来。在这段传奇背后，科学家一直没有放弃对爱因斯坦大脑的研究。正如爱因斯坦以他著名的公式捕捉到能量和物质的精髓，我们则在试图捕捉天才的精髓……

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: 隐蔽的，未公开的。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: 处理；pathologist: 病理学家；autopsy:验尸。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: 惊骇的，吃惊的；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. 这位古怪的医生把（爱因斯坦的）大脑放进了一瓶福尔马林液中，把瓶子放进了一个装苹果酒的盒子里，又把盒子放在了冷却器下面，一直到1998年他才把此物归还给了普林斯顿医院，并时常会把（爱因斯坦的）大脑的部分组织寄给对它感兴趣的科学家们。eccentric: 古怪的，下文出现的eccentricity意思为“怪癖”；formalin: 福尔马林；cider: 苹果酒；cooler: 冷却器；chunk: 块。

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为其名词形式；single out: 挑选出。An ordinary person can live and die privately, but a genius—and his grey matter7. grey matter: 脑灰质。—belongs to the world. Even in his lifetime, which coincided with8. coincide with: 符合，与……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: 扩散；incomprehensible:费解的。

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: 出现；cosmology: 宇宙学。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: 量子纠缠；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. 除了他与众不同的头巾外，爱因斯坦还很擅长言辞，因此，他说过的话经常被人引用，其中有些妙句甚至不是他本人说的。coif: 头巾；have a way with words: 擅长言辞；bon mot: 妙语。More than anything, Einstein possessed the distinctive mystique13. mystique: 奥秘，秘诀。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. 很多人怀疑天才是不是一种身体特质，即大脑中一个单独的特殊功能，爱因斯坦的脑灰质被视为是验证这一说法的试验体。attribute: 特质。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，有纰漏的。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: 随机变化。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: 超脱尘俗的；detach from: 从……分离；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: 破烂的，此处为比较级；itch: 发痒。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. 人们通常将爱因斯坦描述成一个松散悠闲的怪人，却忽略了他激进的政治立场还有偶尔混乱的私生活。tweedy: 松散悠闲的；radical: 激进的。

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: 性别歧视的；doggerel:打油诗。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: 扩音器，此处指爱因斯坦作为著名科学家，比普通人影响更大。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: 一般相对论，关于时空和引力的基本理论，主要由爱因斯坦创立。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. 严格来讲，他的计算是正确的，不过他对“黑洞”这个概念厌之入骨，这使他未能认识到在密度足够大的情况下，重力会压垮其他力量，最终必将导致崩塌。overwhelm: 压垮。

爱因斯坦与前妻米列娃

To be fair to Einstein, general relativity was still an esoteric25. esoteric: 深奥的，难懂的。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射线天文学；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，难处理的。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: 〈拉丁语〉无中生有。

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. 居里夫人获得了两个诺贝尔奖，并且对其他许多研究有直接的贡献，但是她并未被当作一个天才典范——尽管她也有一头可以和爱因斯坦相媲美的乱发。Curie: 居里夫人，法国著名科学家、物理学家和化学家；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: 偏见；experimentalist: 实验者；theoretician: 理论家。

This difference is instructive31. instructive: 有启发性的。. Thanks to the diversity of human experience and human talents, we know that genius isn’t a monolithic32. monolithic: 完全统一的。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: 相当好的。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.