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

天文学和人类事务的联系曾经比今天要紧密得多。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，并由此暗示了人类的未来和道德。19世纪后期，“天体物理学”这门新科学开启了对恒星内部的研究。通过本生灯、电线和气体管，人们可以接触到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由爱因斯坦新的万有引力定律推导出的时空模型。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，牛顿被一位来自德国的瑞士犹太人废黜，而一组英国天文学家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这个新理论是如何运作的。尽管所有的钱都被投入到日食探险、巨大的望远镜和华丽的实验室中，天文学家们已经不再讲道理了。一位贵格会的天文学家给了我们希望，他在战争期间曾因良心拒服兵役险些入狱。阿瑟·斯坦利·爱丁顿（Arthur Stanley Eddington）用四维空间讲述了关于光的重量和爱情的危险的故事，让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。在更严肃的层面上，坎特伯雷大主教想知道爱因斯坦会如何影响我们的道德，而主教们则从更神秘的科普书籍中获得了信心。文学精英们对这种误解的流行热情感到震惊，他们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形而上的爱情诗中把它牢记在心，并发现四维空间的浪漫确实是一场危险的游戏。《爱比光更快》首次将威廉·Empson的诗歌向广大读者开放，询问报纸上的讽刺和诗歌类比可以告诉我们复杂科学理论的社会含义。

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.