很多小夥伴都想讀英文原著學英語，可每次看兩頁就放棄。為了幫助大家從閱讀中找到樂趣，曉梅老師就帶大家一起讀英文原著，看看有意思的故事，學學地道表達，分析長難句。先從A Short History of Nearly Everything《萬物簡史》開始。這本書從宇宙大爆炸開始講現代科學史，穿插了很多科學家的生平故事，妙趣橫生。本書作者Bill Bryson喜歡用口語化的語言敘述，因而裡面的英語要比一般的原著通俗易懂。今天讀第4章關於牛頓的片段。
牛頓的偉大之處
Once in a great while, a few times in history, a human mind produces an observation so acute and unexpected that people can't quite decide which is the more amazing - the fact or the thinking of it. The appearance of the Principa was one of those moments. It made Newton instantly famous. For the rest of his life he would be draped with plaudits and honours, becoming, among much else, the first person in Britain knighted for scientific achievement.
歷史上有那麼偶然的幾次，人類大腦的觀察敏銳、出乎意料到不可思議的地步，讓人們說不出是觀察出的事實還是思考的過程更神奇。《原理》（《自然哲學的數學原理》）的出現就是那樣一個時刻。它讓牛頓一夜成名。他的餘生將淹沒在掌聲和榮譽中，他會成為英國第一個因為科學成就而獲得爵士頭銜的人。
Even the great German mathematicianGottfried von Leibniz, with whom Newton had a long, bitter fight over priority for the invention of the calculus, thought his contributions to mathematics equal to all the accumulated work that had preceded him. 'Nearer the gods no mortal may approach,' wrote Halley in a sentiment that was endlessly echoed by his contemporaries and by many others since.
就連偉大的德國數學家戈特弗裡德·威廉·萊布尼茨也認為牛頓對數學的貢獻相當於他之前所有人成就的總和，儘管萊布尼茨和牛頓曾因為誰先發明微積分而有過長時間激烈的爭吵。「（牛頓）比任何凡人都更接近神」，哈雷（在《原理》的前言中）動情地寫道，和他同時代和後來的很多人深有同感。
Although the Principa has been called 『one of the most inaccessible books ever written』 (Newton intentionally made it difficult so that he wouldn't be pestered by mathematical 'smatterers', as he called them), it was a beaconto those who could follow it. It not only explained mathematically the orbit of the heavenly bodies, but also identified the attractive force that got them moving in the first place - gravity. Suddenly every motion in the universe made sense.
雖然《原理》被稱為「史上最難讀懂的書之一」（牛頓故意寫得很艱澀，以免他所謂的數學「半吊子」打擾他），但對於能讀懂的人來說這本書是盞明燈。它不僅從數學上解釋了天體的運行軌道，還找到了引發天體運動的引力，即重力。宇宙中的一切運動一下子有了道理。
At the Principa's heart were Newton's three laws of motion(which state, very baldly, that a thing moves in the direction in which it is pushed; that it will keep moving in a straight line until some other force acts to slow or deflect it; and that every action has an opposite and equal reaction) and his universal law of gravitation. This states that every object in the universe exerts a tug on every other. It may not seem like it, but as you sit here, now you are pulling everything around you - walls, ceiling, lamp, pet cat - towards you with your own little (indeed, very little) gravitational field. And these things are also pulling on you.
《原理》的核心是牛頓三大運動定律（定律非常明確地指出，物體朝著受力的方向運動；它會一直沿直線運動，直到有其他力的作用使它減速或偏轉；每個作用力都有相反且相等的反作用力）和萬有引力定律。萬有引力定律指出宇宙中的任何物體之間都有吸引力。雖然看不出來，但坐著的時候，你在用你小小的（確實非常小）重力場把周圍的一切，包括牆、天花板、燈和寵物貓吸引向自己。這些東西同時也在吸引你。
It was Newton who realized that the pull of any two objects is, to quote Feynman again, 'proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them'. Put another way, if you double the distance between two objects, the attraction between them becomes four times weaker. This can be expressed with the formula
正是牛頓發現兩個物體之間的吸引力，還是引用費曼的話，「與兩個物體的質量成正比，與二者之間距離的平方成反比」。換一種說法，如果把兩個物體之間的距離增大一倍，它們之間的引力會變成原來的四分之一。可以用以下公式表達這一概念：
which is of course way beyond anything that most of us could make practical use of, but at least we can appreciate that it is elegantly compact. A couple of brief multiplication, a simple division and, bingo, you know your gravitational position wherever you go. It was the first really universal law of nature ever produced by a human mind, which is why Newton is everywhere regarded with such profound esteem.
這個公式對我們大多數人根本沒有實際用處，但至少我們能欣賞它多麼巧妙精練。幾次相乘，一次相除，然後唰一下，你就知道自己的引力大小了。這是人類提出的第一個真正普遍適用的自然法則，這就是牛頓在世界各地都深受尊重的原因。
詞彙與短語
1. Newton's three laws of motion，牛頓三大運動定律。
2. straight line，直線。
3. opposite，[pzt]， adj. 相反的。
She turned and walked off in the opposite direction. 她轉身朝相反的方向走去。
4. the universal law of gravitation [ɡrvten]， 萬有引力定律。
5. object，[bdkt]，n. 物體。
He squinted his eyes as though he were studying an object on the horizon. 他眯著眼睛，好像在研究地平線上的某個物體。
長難句分析
Even the great German mathematicianGottfried von Leibniz [主語], with whom Newton had a long, bitter fight over priority for the invention of the calculus, thought [謂語] his contributions to mathematics equal to all the accumulated work [賓語從句，省略了that] that had preceded him [that引導的定語從句修飾work].
就連偉大的德國數學家戈特弗裡德·威廉·萊布尼茨也認為，牛頓對數學的貢獻相當於他之前所有人成就的總和，儘管萊布尼茨和牛頓曾因為誰先發明微積分而有過長久而激烈的爭執。