Obituary: Joan Feynman
逝者：瓊·費曼
Getting to know the Sun
探知太陽
Joan Feynman, astrophysicist, died on July 22nd, aged 93
天體物理學家瓊·費曼於7月22日逝世，享年93歲。
In the dusty Spanish town of Tordesillas in 1494, Spain and Portugal divided the unclaimed world between them. The moment is famous. Less well known is that around 1963, she at Columbia, he at Caltech, Joan Feynman and her brother Richard divvied up the universe. She took auroras, the Northern and Southern Lights that shimmer through the night sky in the highest latitudes. He, nine years older and fast becoming a world star in physics, took all the rest, which was fine with her.
1494年，在塵土飛揚的西班牙小鎮託爾德西裡亞斯，西班牙和葡萄牙兩國瓜分了新世界。那是歷史上的著名時刻。而不那麼為人所知的是，1963年左右，在哥倫比亞大學的瓊·費曼，和她在加州理工學院的哥哥理察，兩人劃分了宇宙。瓊選了極光，即高緯度地區夜空中一閃而過的北極光和南極光。而年長瓊九歲的理察——當時正迅速崛起為物理學世界之星，選了其他所有，瓊也欣然接受。
The arrangement was serious. When, many years later, Richard was asked to look into auroras, he said he would have to ask Joan’s permission. She said no. They were hers, and besides, he had started the fascination. One night when she was small he dragged her out of bed, made her get dressed and took her to the golf course in Far Rockaway, near their house. Auroras did not normally come down to lower latitudes, but here was one. As she stared at a sky that was dancing with red, gold and green lights, he told her that no one knew how they happened, which was true back then. The mystery, with the lights, lodged in her head for good.
這個協定是來真的。多年後，有人讓理察研究極光，理察說他必須徵得瓊的同意。瓊拒絕了。極光是她的，而且正是理察讓她開始對極光痴迷。那是兒時的一個夜晚，理察把睡夢中的瓊拽下床，讓她穿好衣服，帶她去了家附近法洛克衛的高爾夫球場。極光通常不會在低緯度地區出現，但在那裡可以看到。當她凝視著那片紅、金、綠光交融起舞的天空，他告訴她，沒有人知道極光是怎麼發生的，當時確實如此。這個謎，連帶這片光，永遠印在了她的腦海中。
After years of looking into it, she found the answer. Auroras happened when particles from the solar wind, the stream of free electrons and heavy ions flowing out of the Sun, penetrated the magnetosphere that protected the Earth. The magnetic fields of the Earth and the solar wind, bound in different directions, intersected, and the colours were caused by solar particles colliding with oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. During coronal mass ejections, when huge flares of material were flung out of the Sun at speeds of up to 1,500km a second, auroras increased in frequency and range on the Earth. The faster the speed, the greater the geomagnetic disturbance.
經過多年的研究，她終於找到了答案。從太陽湧出的自由電子和重離子組成的粒子流稱作太陽風。當太陽風的粒子穿過保護地球的磁層時，就產生了極光。地球磁場和太陽風，各自朝著不同的方向，然後相交；太陽粒子與地球高層大氣中的氧和氮碰撞，產生了色彩。日冕物質拋射過程中，當巨大的耀斑以高達1500公裡/秒的速度從太陽噴出時，地球上極光發生的頻率和範圍都會增大。噴射速度越快，地磁擾動程度越大。
註：
1. 日冕物質拋射（coronal mass ejection）是巨大的、攜帶磁力線的泡沫狀氣體，在幾個小時中被從太陽拋射出來的過程。表現為在幾分鐘至幾小時內從太陽向外拋射一團日冕物質（速度一般從每秒幾十公裡到超過每秒1000公裡），使很大範圍的日冕受到擾動，從而劇烈地改變了白光日冕的宏觀形態和磁場位形。日冕物質拋射是日冕大尺度磁場平衡遭到破壞的產物，日冕物質拋射破壞了太陽風的流動，產生的幹擾會影響到地球，甚至引發悲劇結果。
2.地磁擾動/地磁暴：A geomagnetic disturbance (GMD), also known as a geomagnetic storm, is a major event in Earth’s magnetosphere. It’s caused by a very efficient transfer of energy from solar wind into the space environment surrounding Earth.
Her studies expanded, fuelled by data sent back by Explorer 33 in 1966, to cover as much as possible of the Sun’s behaviour: its 11-year sunspot cycles, its 88-year Gleissburg cycles, its strange peaks and troughs of activity. Most usefully for the Space Age, she found that coronal mass ejections could be detected by the presence of helium in the solar wind. They also came in groups. If these storms could to some extent be predicted, spacecraft could be designed to resist them better. In short, that night walk in childhood had led her to a lifetime of considering the interplay between the Earth and its giant, vital, fluctuating star: a star it faced with its magnetosphere flattened on the day-side like a shield, while on the night-side of Earth the magnetosphere relaxed, with a wide, long, open tail. That shape, too, she had discovered.
在1966年「探索者33號」傳回的數據的推動下，她的研究進一步擴展，儘可能多地囊括了太陽的行為：11年的太陽黑子周期，88年的格萊斯堡周期，太陽活動奇特的高峰期和低谷期。對太空時代最有價值的是，她發現太陽風中的氦可以用來檢測日冕物質拋射。而日冕物質拋射也是成群出現的。如果可以對這些風暴進行一定程度的預測，宇宙飛船就可以設計得更能抵抗風暴。簡言之，童年的那次夜行指引她一生去思索地球和它巨大、關乎生命又變幻不定的恆星之間的相互作用：面向太陽，地球日半球的磁層變得扁平如盾牌；而在夜半球一側，磁層則放鬆下來，變成一條又寬又長沒有盡頭的尾巴。這個形狀也是她發現的。
Yet she might never have done any of this work. At every turn people tried to put her off science as a career. Women couldn’t do it, her mother said. Their brains were too feeble. At Syracuse University, where her thesis was on absorption of infra-red radiation in crystals, she was told to write one on cobwebs, more useful for cleaning her house. When she tried, after graduating, to place an ad in the New York Times for a research job, she was told only men could do so, in the men’s section.
然而她原本可能永遠無法完成以上任何工作的。在人生的每個節點，都有人想讓她退出科學事業。女人不能從事科學工作，她媽媽說。女人的大腦太脆弱。她在錫拉庫扎大學寫的論文是關於晶體中紅外輻射的吸收，那時別人跟她說不如寫一篇關於蜘蛛網的文章，還更有助於她打掃房子。畢業後，她嘗試著在《紐約時報》上登廣告找研究工作，但卻得知只有男人可以這麼打廣告，在男人相關的版面裡。
Marriage and children therefore seemed inevitable as well as desirable, but full-time housewifery drove her to misery and then depression. Science was her life. Now it seemed mostly confined to her kitchen, observing how long it took to heat the baby food, or showing her elder son, as she baked, how to mix an acid with a base in a bottle to get an explosion. There were shades of her upbringing here, in a family jumping with curiosity, where everything—a napkin rolling across the table, a bug on a leaf, the wonder that the heavy waffle-iron was made of atoms—had been investigated. The how and why of everyday science still delighted her, but even part-time research was hard to fit in. And all the while the shining Sun reminded her what she should be working on.
因此，結婚生子看上去不僅是可取的選擇，而且不可避免。但是當全職家庭主婦讓她十分痛苦、進而抑鬱。科學是她的生活。而現在她能接觸的科學基本就局限在了她的廚房裡，她會觀察多長時間才能熱好嬰兒餐，或者在烘焙時給長子演示如何在瓶中混合酸和鹼產生爆炸。這裡有她兒時家庭教養的影子：她的家人對一切充滿好奇，什麼都可以調查研究一番，比如滾過桌子的餐巾紙，葉子上的甲蟲，以及沉重的鬆餅鐺是由原子構成的這等奇事。家常科學中的如何和為何仍然讓她感到開心，但即便是兼職研究也很難融進她的生活。而一直以來，頭頂燦爛的陽光都在提醒著她應該投身什麼事業。
The one person who had always encouraged her was Richard. Though she constantly doubted herself, ready to shrink into some background role, he told her to aim for the top. As soon as she could talk he had challenged her with sums and made her his assistant in his bedroom-lab, to throw switches and hold her finger in a spark-gap to feel the little shock. Bringing her water at night, he would whirl the glass around to show the magic of centrifugal force. On her 14th birthday, feeding her fascination with the night sky, he gave her a college textbook on astronomy. It was hard going, but on page 407 came a revelation as good as the aurora, or almost. Below a figure of a spectrum was a reference to a work by Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin on stellar atmospheres—a woman, a married woman at that, doing science. So the world was not closed to her. It could open. She just had to persist and, over 60 years, she did.
唯一一個一直在鼓勵她的人是理察。儘管瓊總是懷疑自己、想要退到某些幕后角色裡，但是理察告訴她要追求頂尖目標。她剛學會講話，理察就要求她學算術，後來讓她在他的臥室實驗室做小助手，讓她扳動開關，再將她的手指放到火花間隙感受輕微的電擊。理察晚上給她端水時會轉動水杯，向她展示離心力的神奇。瓊14歲生日時，為滿足她對夜空的痴迷，理察給了她一本天文學的大學課本。這本書深奧難懂，但是第407頁出現了一份啟示，跟極光一樣美好，或者說幾近一樣美好。在一幅光譜圖下面，文字提到了塞西莉亞·佩恩-加波希金關於恆星大氣的著作——一名女性、而且還是一名已婚女性，在從事科學工作。科學的大門並未向她關閉，她仍可以開啟它。她只需堅持下去，而在60多年裡，她確實堅持下去了。
Increasingly she was interested not simply in the science of Earth-Sun relations, but in their history. From 1985, working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, she studied observations of auroras from ancient China and medieval Europe, when people feared they portended war, famine, the return of spirits or the work of devils. She consulted records, kept methodically for centuries, of water levels in the Nile, to trace the impact of the Sun on the climate of north Africa. Though the Sun was in a historically stable phase, and had been for billions of years, to her eye it still showed considerable, often strange, variation—variation which, she thought, might explain the relative tardiness of Homo sapiens to take up agriculture, waiting until, round 10,000bc, the climate stabilised.
逐漸地，瓊的研究興趣不僅局限於地日關係，還擴展到了它們的歷史。從1985年起，她在加利福尼亞州帕薩迪納的噴氣推進實驗室，研究中國古代和歐洲中世紀的極光觀測記錄。那時人們擔心極光是戰爭、饑荒、亡靈回歸或者惡魔作惡的兇兆。瓊查閱幾個世紀以來保存有序的尼羅河水位記錄，追溯太陽對北非氣候的影響。儘管太陽處於歷史平穩期，並且已在數十億年間保持穩定狀態，但是在瓊看來，太陽仍然表現出了相當大的、不可思議的變化——她認為這些變化可能會解釋為什麼智人相對較晚才開始從事農耕，一直等到約公元前一萬年氣候穩定了才開始耕種。
To those who asked why, in her late 80s, she went on researching, her answer was partly that she still had plenty of questions. How, for example, did the Sun end up with a cycle of 88 years? And why did it act in the unexpected ways it did? The beauty of auroras was beguiling. But with one extra-high-speed ejection, as it had shown from time to time, the Sun could disable Earth’s communications. And it was also possible, with only a small bout of laziness, that it could turn the golf course in Far Rockaway—that golf course where Richard had told her, 「Nobody knows」—back into the ice rink it had been 12,000 years before.
有人問瓊，為什麼快90歲了還堅持研究工作。她回答說，部分原因是她仍然有很多問題。例如，為什麼太陽的活動周期就是88年？為什麼太陽表現出它這種出人意料的活動方式？極光美得迷人，但是太陽只需一次超高速日冕物質拋射——這種情況時有發生——就能中斷地球通信。而同樣有可能的是，太陽只需稍微偷下懶，就可以將法洛克衛的高爾夫球場變回到一萬兩千年前冰場的模樣。正是在這個高爾夫球場，理察曾告訴她「沒有人知道極光是怎麼發生的」。
翻譯組：
Ronnie，動物保護主義者
Alex，不務正業的理工男
Kemay，決心練好筆譯的未來口譯員
校對組：
Fiona，口筆譯小菜鳥，胡粉Lenka粉
Qianna，追求專業的非英專，很講邏輯，英倫搖滾迷
Rachel Zhang，學理工科，愛跳芭蕾，熱愛文藝的非典型翻譯