经济学人下载:物理学家弗里曼·戴森(3)

In 1958 he was briefly lured away from his professorship at the IAS to work on Project Orion: a plan to build a rocket, propelled by nuclear power, that would be faster and more efficient than any other. The basic principle was to throw a stream of nuclear bombs out of the back of the rocket, detonate them, and ride the shockwaves to Mars and beyond. On paper, it seemed to work. Flight tests on small models, using conventional explosives, were encouraging.
1958年，弗里曼被诱使暂时离开了航空科学学院的教授职位，为猎户座计划工作：猎户座计划是一个由核能推动的火箭建造计划，这种火箭将比其他任何计划都更快、更有效率。其基本原理是将大量核弹从火箭尾部发射出去，引爆它们，然后火箭利用冲击波飞向火星和更远的地方。理论上，这似乎是可行的。使用常规炸药对小型模型进行的飞行试验令人鼓舞。

Orion could reach Mars in weeks, where chemical rockets would take six months or more. A more powerful version could cross the vast void to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to the sun, in a bit over a century. Since the bigger the rocket, the more efficient it was, he proposed a 240m-ton ship 90 miles in diameter, designed to carry thousands of colonists and make humanity an interstellar species. Whether he was serious, even he may not have known.
“猎户座”火箭可以在几周内到达火星，而化学燃料火箭则需要6个月甚至更长时间。一个更强大的火箭可能在一个多世纪后穿过这片巨大的空间，到达离太阳最近的半人马座阿尔法星。由于火箭越大，效率越高，弗里曼提议建造一艘直径90英里、重2.4亿吨的飞船，用以运送成千上万的殖民者，使人类成为星际物种。弗里曼是否是认真的，即使他可能也不知道。

The project was scuppered in the end by a mix of political queasiness over the fallout (rather literally—later modelling suggested that each launch of a modestly-sized rocket from Earth's surface would kill about ten people) and the partial test ban treaty of 1963, which forbade nuclear explosions except underground. He was involved in that too, arguing in favour of the ban, in his clipped home-counties tones, in front of America's Senate. Since the power they had unleashed thrust physicists into high places, he also became a government adviser on science and grand strategy.

由于政治上对它带来后果的种种不安，该项目最终泡了汤。（更确切地说，后来的模型表明，从地球表面发射一枚中等大小的火箭，每发射一次，大约会造成10人死亡。）1963年的《部分禁止核试验条约》禁止了核爆炸，除非在地下进行。弗里曼也参与其中，在美国参议院，他以家乡县清脆快速的语调，为该禁令辩护。因为他们放权把物理学家猛地推向了高层，弗里曼还成为了政府科学和大战略的顾问。