听《杨振宁-poetry and science》

Chen Ning YANG: What is poetry? Poetry is a condensation of thoughts. You write, in few lines, very complicated thoughts. And when you do this well, it becomes very beautiful poetry. It becomes powerful poetry. It becomes concentrated poetry and that is what we are after. And this is not a dream. It is a fact. Because we have already achieved some of these. By "we", I mean collectively, physicists. By starting from Newton, Maxwell, Einstein and so and so forth.

Bill MOYERS: I mean, in your field, which I think of as the realm of pure thought, are there any of life's answers in there?

YANG: Of course, because what we doing is we are reducing the fundamentals of the structure of matter, of the universe, into a few equations. The equations look very simple, but contains the basis of most of what we see around us. Mr. Maxwell of the last century came long and wrote down a few equations. They are just four lines, but that describes electric and magnetic forces in total and with great accuracy. What is meant by this accuracy? The marvelous thing about it is that if you have an extremely bright graduate student, you can shut him up in a room and say now you compute the magnetic moment of the electron and if he's bright enough and if you have taught him enough he should be able to come out after a few months with a number which is eleven decimal points long and agrees exactly on the dot with what is measured. Just imagine that. He started with nothing. Just a few of Maxwell's equations. That means that we have penetrated the structure of nature in an unimaginable way.

MOYERS: Why should I care about that? What difference does it make to me as a citizen? As an individual? I am not a scientist. I'll never understand the formula on that board that you put up there?

YANG: If there were no understanding of electricity at the end of the last century, the 20th century could not look the way it does today. Almost everything depends on it. Just think about it. If you cannot maneuver electricity, everything collapses. A car would collapse too, because a car has electricity in it, you have to have the ignition and so on so forth. The world without electricity look completely different. Therefore when you really understand something in such detail which is so fundamental, I think our experience is that you will be able to use it in a major way.