Loving faster than light: romance and the body in Einstein's universe

爱得比光还快：爱因斯坦宇宙中的浪漫与身体

• 批准号: AH/F003552/1
• 负责人: Katy Price
• 金额: $ 3.1万
• 依托单位: Anglia Ruskin University
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2008 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FF003552%2F1
• 关键词: Loving; faster; than; light; romance

Astronomy and human affairs were once much more closely connected than they appear today. Revolutionary discoveries about the size, structure and mechanics of the universe had serious ramifications for religious doctrine and, by implication, human futures and morality.During the late nineteenth century the new science of 'astro-physics' opened up the interior of stars to investigation. The sources of stellar energy and the evolution of the stars became accessible to men with bunsen burners, electric wires and tubes of gas. Meanwhile, mathematicians began to grapple with models of space and time derived from Einstein's new law of gravitation. In November 1919, just days before the first anniversary of armistice day, newspapers in Britain and America announced that Newton had been deposed by a Swiss Jew from Germany / and that a team of British astronomers had helped to prove Einstein right. There was one serious problem, however: nobody could explain in plain terms how the new theory worked. For all the money being poured into eclipse expeditions, huge telescopes and fancy laboratories, astronomers had stopped talking sense. One man, a Quaker astronomer who had come within inches of jail for conscientious objection during the War, offered hope. Spinning stories about the weight of light and the perils of love in four dimensions, Arthur Stanley Eddington coaxed the English-speaking world into at least an illusion of understanding Einstein. Relativity captured the public imagination, featuring on cigarette cards, in limericks and even the Einstein cigar. On a more serious level, the Archbishop of Canterbury wanted to know how Einstein would affect our morals, while the Bishops took heart from the more mystical pages of popular science books. The literary elite, appalled by popular enthusiasm for such misconceptions, sought to contain and counteract the 'relativity effect' in their own writings. Yet the poet who understood most about relativity took it to heart in his metaphysical love poems / and found that romance in four dimensions was indeed a dangerous game. Loving Faster Than Light opens up William Empson's poems to a wide audience for the first time, asking what newspaper satires and poetic analogies can tell us about the social implications of complex scientific theories.

天文学和人类事务曾经比今天看起来更紧密地联系在一起。关于宇宙的大小、结构和力学的革命性发现对宗教教义产生了严重的影响，并暗示着对人类的未来和道德产生了严重的影响。在世纪后期，新的“天体物理学”科学打开了恒星内部的研究大门。人们用本生灯、电线和煤气管就可以了解恒星能量的来源和恒星的演化。与此同时，数学家们开始努力研究从爱因斯坦的新引力定律中推导出来的空间和时间模型。1919年11月，就在停战纪念日一周年的前几天，英国和美国的报纸宣布牛顿被一个来自德国的瑞士犹太人废黜，一个英国天文学家小组帮助证明了爱因斯坦是正确的。然而，有一个严重的问题：没有人能简单地解释新理论是如何工作的。尽管所有的钱都被投入到日食探险、巨大的望远镜和奇特的实验室中，天文学家们已经停止了理智的谈话。有一个人，一个贵格会天文学家，在战争期间因良心反对而入狱，他带来了希望。亚瑟·斯坦利·爱丁顿（Stanley Eddington）讲述了光的重量和四维空间中爱情的危险的故事，诱使英语世界至少产生了一种理解爱因斯坦的错觉。相对论抓住了公众的想象力，出现在香烟卡片、打油诗甚至爱因斯坦雪茄上。在一个更严肃的层面上，坎特伯雷大主教想知道爱因斯坦将如何影响我们的道德，而主教们则从科普书籍中更神秘的篇章中获得了勇气。文学精英们对这种误解的普遍热情感到震惊，试图在自己的作品中遏制和抵消“相对论效应”。然而，最了解相对论的诗人在他的形而上学爱情诗中把它铭记在心，发现四维浪漫确实是一个危险的游戏。《爱得比光还快》第一次向广大读者展示了威廉·燕卜荪的诗歌，询问报纸上的讽刺和诗歌类比能告诉我们什么是复杂科学理论的社会含义。