（外文电子版资料）Charles Sheffield - A Braver Thing.pdf

A BRAVER THING Charles Sheffield A DF Books NERD’s Release Copyright (C)1990 by Charles Sheffield First 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 to the memory of Alfred Nobel and his famous bequest, it is not considered good manners to leave or to chat with ones neighbors. I have the time and opportunity to think about yesterday; and, at last, to decide 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 often viewed by the recipient as the capstone on a career of accomplishment. Awarded early (Lawrence Bragg was a Nobel Laureate at twenty-five) it often defines the winners future; an early Prize may also announce to the world at large the arrival of a new titan of science (Paul Dirac was a Nobel Laureate at thirty-one). To read the names of the Nobel Prize winners in physics is almost to recapitulate the history of twentieth-century physics, so much so that the choice of winners often seems self-evident. No one can imagine a list without Planck, the Curies, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Dirac, Fermi, Yukawa, Bardeen, Feynman, Weinberg, or the several Wilsons (though Rutherford is, bizarrely, missing from the Physics roster, 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 lifetimes work, but explicitly for a particular achievement. It is given only to living persons, and as Alfred Nobel specified in his will, the prize goes to “the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics. It is those constraints that make the task of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences so difficult. Consider these questions: . What should one do wh