雙語美文欣賞《天才的養成攻略》

引導語:面對新挑戰,要有新思路。以下是本站小編分享給大家的雙語美文欣賞《天才的養成攻略》,歡迎閱讀!

雙語美文欣賞《天才的養成攻略》

 Lesson one: New challenges require new ways of thinking

  1.面對新挑戰,要有新思路

Part car, part jet fighter, part spaceship, Bloodhound SSC aims to be the first land vehicle to break the 1,000mph barrier. One of the key challenges has been to design the wheels. How do you create the fastest wheels in history, make them stable and reliable at supersonic speeds, and with limited resources?

部分汽車、部分噴氣式飛機、部分宇宙飛船,獵犬號超級汽車的目標是做世界上第一輛時速突破1000英里的汽車。而這面臨的一項關鍵挑戰是車輪的設計。如果換做是你,你會如何在有限的資源下發明出超音速汽車上用的輪子呢?

After much deliberation, and devising ideas that pushed the boundaries of material technology, Mark Chapman, chief engineer of the Bloodhound project said the team decided to take a step back and change the way they were trying to solve problems. “There’s very little we’ve actually developed that’s new,” he says, “what’s unique is how we apply technologies.”

獵犬號項目的總工程師馬克·查普曼思來想去,覺得材料還是不夠好。最後他和他的團隊決定退回一步、換個角度看有沒有別的辦法。“我們實際創新的東西並不多”,馬克說:“我們的獨特之處在於應用技術的'方式別具一格。”

They adopted an approach called the design of experiments – a mathematical technique of problem solving through doing lots of little experiments and then looking at the statistics all glued together. “All of a sudden, where we’d been knocking our head against the wall for maybe two, three, four months, we came up with a wheel design that would hold together and was strong enough,” he says.

他們採用實驗設計的方法做了很多的小實驗,綜合所得的數據再得出精確設計。“花了三四個月絞盡腦汁做盡各種實驗之後,很突然地我們做出了一個大膽的設計:把各種可用的(飛機、飛船所用的)技術都融合在一輛車上,從而使它足夠強大。”馬克說。

 Lesson two: Let evidence shape your opinion

  2.觀點要用證據來證明

Like his peers, geophysicist Steven Jacobsen from Northwestern University believed that water on Earth originated from comets. But by studying rocks, which allow scientists to peer back in time, he discovered water hidden inside ringwoodite, which lies in the Earth’s mantle, and which suggests that the oceans gradually made its way out of the planet’s interior many centuries ago.

美國西北大學地球物理學家史蒂文·雅各布森曾認爲,地球上的水源於彗星。但通過對岩石的研究,他發現地幔的林伍德石裏面也藏有水,這一發現表明或許在N個世紀之前,海洋是從地球內部自己慢慢溢出來的。

“I had a pretty hard time convincing others,” he admits. Yet two key pieces of evidence uncovered this year seem to support his point of view. Time will tell whether the new theories are true, and there may be further twists to the tale. “But thinking about the fact that you may be the first person to see something for the first time doesn’t happen very often,” he says. “When it does it’s thrilling.”

“那時候我難說服別的學者相信這個。”史蒂文說。但是今年新發現的兩個關鍵證據似乎支持了他的理論。所以,一個新理論的正確與否可能需要時間來慢慢印證,在被世人接受前可能會經歷很多曲折。“但是如果你發現你是第一個發現這個規律的人,且時間又證明你是對的之後,你會倍受鼓舞的。”史蒂文說。

 Lesson three: It really is 99% perspiration

  3.天才的99%確實是汗水

Sheila Nirenberg at Cornell University is trying to develop a new prosthetic device for treating blindness. Key to this was cracking the code that transmits information from the eye to the brain. “Once I realised this, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep – all I wanted to do was work,” says Nirenberg.

康奈爾大學希拉·尼倫伯格正在研究治療失明的新型假體,其中破解眼睛與大腦的信息交流密碼是最關鍵的。“我意識到這一點之後,就吃不下飯、睡不着覺,只想全身心投入工作。”尼倫伯格說。

“Sometimes I’m exhausted and I get burnt out,” she adds. “But then I get an email from somebody in crisis or somebody who’s getting macular degeneration, and they can’t see their own children’s faces, and it is like, ‘How can I possibly complain?’ It gives me the energy to just go back and keep doing it.”

“每次覺得筋疲力盡、江郎才盡的時候,我都會收到一些到正處於危險狀態馬上要失明的、或是患有黃斑部退化症的病人的郵件,這些人將沒辦法看清自己孩子的長相、無法看這五顏六色的世界。每當這個時候,我就跟自己說‘我怎麼能夠抱怨呢’,然後就又動力十足的繼續工作。”