《Braver Thing》作者： - Charles Sheffield【EPUB】

zaq

A BRAVER THING Charles Sheffield A DF Books NERD’s Release Copyright C1990 by Charles SheffieldFirst published in Isaac Asimovs Science Fiction Magazine February 1990 The palace banquet is predictably dull but while the formal speeches roll on with their obligatory nods tothe memory of Alfred Nobel and his famous bequest it is not considered good manners to leave or tochat with ones neighbors. I have the time and opportunity to think about yesterday and at last todecide on the speech that I will give tomorrow. A Nobel prize in physics means different things to different people. If it is awarded late in life it is oftenviewed by the recipient as the capstone on a career of accomplishment. Awarded early Lawrence Braggwas a Nobel Laureate at twenty-five it often defines the winners future an early Prize may alsoannounce to the world at large the arrival of a new titan of science Paul Dirac was a Nobel Laureate atthirty-one. To read the names of the Nobel Prize winners in physics is almost to recapitulate the history oftwentieth-century physics so much so that the choice of winners often seems self-evident. No one canimagine a list without Planck the Curies Einstein Bohr Schrdinger Dirac Fermi Yukawa BardeenFeynman Weinberg or the several Wilsons though Rutherford is bizarrely missing from the Physicsroster having been awarded his Nobel Prize in Chemistry. And yet the decision-making process is far from simple. A Nobel Prize is awarded not for a lifetimeswork but explicitly for a particular achievement. It is given only to living persons and as Alfred Nobelspecified in his will the prize goes to “the person