科学与翻译

Spread over a 16 m-wide wall in the Palazzo Vecchio town hall in Florence, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Battle of Anghiari is a magnificent fresco depicting two horse riders in combat. Also impressive are la America Tropical by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros in the Italian Hall in Los Angeles, and the numerous frescos adorning the ancient Hagia Sophia church in Bulgaria. Unfortunately no one can see these paintings: they are all hidden beneath a layer of plaster.

If studies by a team of scientists from the US and France continue to prove successful, however, then it could be only a matter of time before such frescoes, which have often been covered for religious or political motives, are exposed. Although plaster is opaque to visible light, in the much lower frequency terahertz (10¹² Hz) it all becomes clear. “Most non-polar, dielectric materials are transparent in the terahertz spectral range,” says Bianca Jackson, a physicist at Michigan University in the US. “Therefore, with enough power, terahertz can penetrate ‘infinitely’ thick, optically opaque materials suchas concrete or wood.”

Jackson and her colleagues are collaborating with researchers from Picometrix — a photonics company based in Ann Arbor, Michigan —as well as the National Higher School of Advanced Techniques (ENSTA) and the Centre for Research and Restoration in the Louvre Museum, both in Paris. Their system involves scanning a pulse of terahertz light over a surface and then measuring how the amplitude of the reflected signal changes with time. Because materials have different dielectric properties, which determine how much light is reflected, these measurements can tell how dissimilar materials are layered on top of one another. This makes it ideal for imaging frescos — a technique that won favour during the Renaissance in which pigments are painted into wet plaster.

Although art historians regularly employ ultraviolet, infrared and Raman spectroscopy to examine the surfaces of murals, these techniques cannot probe deeper than a millimetre into plaster. On the other hand, X-rays and microwaves can penetrate many layers, but X-rays cannot distinguish between the layers and microwaves have a poor spatial resolution. Terahertz radiation has none of these drawbacks and, because it is non-ionizing, should not damage a painting either.

The Michigan team has already tested Picometrix’s “T-ray 4000” system on a graphite sketch of a butterfly imbedded in a 4 mm layer of plaster-of-Paris. After focusing the T-ray transceiver onto the back of the plaster, they found that they could make out the 2 mm wide graphite lines of the butterfly. The team is now planning to take the system next month to the St John the Baptist church in Vif, France, where there are believed to be many hidden frescoes.

Irl Duling, director of terahertz business development at Picometrix, says that the company is already shipping the T-ray system to customers. “T-ray 4000 is the only full-featured, portable time-domain terahertz system.”

原文：http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/32833

Muslim scientists placed far greater emphasis on empiricism and experimentation than any previous ancient civilization, and they introduced quantification, precise observation, controlled experiment, and careful records. Their new approach to scientific inquiry led to the development of the scientific method in the Islamic world. In particular, the empirical observations and quantitative experiments of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen) in his Book of Optics (1021) is seen as the beginning of the modern scientific method.

Ibn al-Haytham, who is now known as the father of optics, used the scientific method to obtain the results in his Book of Optics. In particular, he combined observations, experiments and rational arguments to show that his modern intromission theory of vision, where rays of light are emitted from objects rather than from the eyes, is scientifically correct, and that the ancient emission theory of vision supported by Ptolemy and Euclid (where the eyes emit rays of light), and the ancient intromission theory supported by Aristotle (where objects emit physical particles to the eyes), were both wrong. It is known that Roger Bacon (who was sometimes erroneously given credit for the scientific method) was familiar with Ibn al-Haytham’s work.

Ibn al-Haytham developed rigorous experimental methods of controlled scientific testing in order to verify theoretical hypotheses and substantiate inductive conjectures. Ibn al-Haytham’s scientific method was very similar to the modern scientific method and consisted of the following procedures:

1. Observation
2. Statement of problem
3. Formulation of hypothesis
4. Testing of hypothesis using experimentation
5. Analysis of experimental results
6. Interpretation of data and formulation of conclusion
7. Publication of findings

The development of the scientific method is considered to be so fundamental to modern science that some — especially philosophers of science and practicing scientists — consider earlier inquiries into nature to be pre-scientific. Some have described Ibn al-Haytham as the “first scientist” for this reason.

In The Model of the Motions, Ibn al-Haytham also describes an early version of Occam’s razor, where he employs only minimal hypotheses regarding the properties that characterize astronomical motions, as he attempts to eliminate from his planetary model the cosmological hypotheses that cannot be observed from Earth.

George Sarton, the father of the history of science, wrote: “The main, as well as the least obvious, achievement of the Middle Ages was the creation of the experimental spirit and this was primarily due to the Muslims down to the 12th century.”

摘自：http://www.answers.com/topic/islamic-science?cat=technology

Aristotle’s Lyceum provided the world’s first comprehensive set of courses on all aspects of knowledge. Although the little room where Aristotle probably taught had space for perhaps just 10 students, the scope of the courses that he gave there, which miraculously survive today in some 30 books of his lecture notes, was phenomenal. It is hard to believe they were written by a single person.

Aristotle had an extraordinary range of interests and learning. His courses included philosophy, logic, astronomy, physics, biology, meteorology, poetry, drama, ethics, politics, psychology and economics - in fact, many of the subjects of a modern university. Some of his biological insights were not rediscovered until the 19th century and his logic was not superseded until the work of Gottlob Frege in the early part of the 20th century.

Born in northern Greece in 384 BC, Aristotle’s ideas dominated western science and philosophy for nearly 2000 years, from his death in 322 BC until Galileo’s destruction of his mechanics in 1609. Unfortunately, with the rise of modern physics over the past three centuries, Aristotle’s achievements have been eclipsed. We honour the thinkers of antiquity who guessed right - the atomic theory of Democritus, the heliocentric view of Aristarchus - but not the man who we can truly say invented science. For his physics and astronomy, Aristotle has become identified as the barrier to scientific progress in the renaissance.

After he died, Aristotle’s books, which represent perhaps just one-third of his total output, are said to have been buried in a cave in Asia Minor for 200 years. Although the Peripatetic philosopher Andronicus did prepare an edition of Aristotle’s works in Rome shortly after their rediscovery, they were entirely lost to Europe following the fall of the Roman empire. It was not until the 11th and 12th centuries - thanks to Arabic translations from the Islamic kingdoms of Sicily and Spain - that his writings were rediscovered in Europe.

摘自：http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/3494

Science (from the Latin scientia, ‘knowledge’), in the broadest sense, refers to any systematic knowledge or practice. Examples of the broader use included political science and computer science, which are not incorrectly named, but rather named according to the older and more general use of the word. In a more restricted sense, science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on the scientific method, as well as to the organized body of knowledge gained through such research.

Fields of science are commonly classified along two major lines: Natural sciences, which study natural phenomena (including biological life), and Social sciences, which study human behavior and societies.

These groupings are empirical sciences, which means the knowledge must be based on observable phenomena and capable of being experimented for its validity by other researchers working under the same conditions.

Mathematics, which is sometimes classified within a third group of science called formal science, has both similarities and differences with the natural and social sciences. It is similar to empirical sciences in that it involves an objective, careful and systematic study of an area of knowledge; it is different because of its method of verifying its knowledge, using a priori rather than empirical methods. Formal science, which also includes statistics and logic, is vital to the empirical sciences. Major advances in formal science have often led to major advances in the physical and biological sciences. The formal sciences are essential in the formation of hypotheses, theories, and laws, both in discovering and describing how things work (natural sciences) and how people think and act (social sciences).

The word science comes through the Old French, and is derived from the Latin word scientia for knowledge, which in turn comes from scio. ‘I know’. The Indo-European root means to discern or to separate, akin to Greek schizein, to split, Latin scindere, to split. From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, science or scientia meant any systematic recorded knowledge. Science therefore had the same sort of very broad meaning that philosophy had at that time. In other languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, the word corresponding to science also carries this meaning.

From classical times until the advent of the modern era, “philosophy” was roughly divided into natural philosophy and moral philosophy. In the 1800s, the term natural philosophy gradually gave way to the term natural science. Natural science was gradually specialized to its current domain, which typically includes the physical sciences and biological sciences. The social sciences, inheriting portions of the realm of moral philosophy, are currently also included under the auspices of science to the extent that these disciplines use empirical methods. As currently understood, moral philosophy still retains the study of ethics, regarded as a branch of philosophy.

Today, the primary meaning of “science” is generally limited to empirical study involving use of the scientific method.

摘录自：http://www.answers.com/science

这些书我都有纸版。

1. 蔡建华，龚昌德等，《量子统计的格林函数理论》
2. Fetter, Walecka, 《多粒子系统的量子理论》，Quantum Theory of Many Particle Systems (1971)
3. A. A. Abrikosov 等，《统计物理学中的量子场论方法》
4. G. D. Mahan, Many-Particle Physics
5. J. W. Negele, Henri Orland, Quantum Many-Particle Systems
6. Nato Nagaosa, Quantum Field Theory in Condensed Matter Physics
7. 文小刚，《量子多体理论》

量子多体：(第1-9周)，周三下午 13:30 - 15:15，学楼409；周五下午 15:30 - 17:15，学楼107
自然科学史：(第2-13周)，周三晚上 19:00 - 21:50，逸夫楼 404