经济学人下载: 冬有雪(1)

Books & arts 

文艺板块

Book review 

书评

Winter weather 

冬季的天气

The white stuff 

白色的物质

Snow. By Anthony Wood. 

《雪》。作者：安东尼·伍德

Anthony wood remembers sitting in the classroom one snowy morning as his teacher eyed the “saucer-size flakes” swirling outside the window. “Please boys and girls”, she implored, “pray that it stops snowing.” How little she grasped the mind of children, Mr Wood observes: “We were praying, alright—praying that it would snow until June.” 

安东尼·伍德还记得，在一个下雪的清晨，他坐在教室里，他的老师则看着窗外盘旋的“碟子大小的雪花”。她恳求道，“孩子们，请祈祷大雪停下来吧。”老师对孩子们的想法把握的太少了，伍德说：“我们其实是在祈祷雪能下到六月份。”

Everyone knows children love snow. Mr Wood’s new book is meant for adults who remain infatuated. It is less a systematic history than a meander through assorted snow-related subjects—beginning with the snowflake itself, which the author describes poetically as “the DNA of God”. 

每个人都知道，小孩子喜欢雪。伍德的新书是写给那些仍然热爱雪的成年人的。与其说这本书是一部系统性的历史书，倒不如说是一部讲述各种与雪有关的主题的漫谈。书的开端，作者阐述了雪花本身，并诗意地将雪花描述为“上帝的DNA”。

These miniature ice crystals were once neglected by scientists, who saw little practical benefit in studying them. Their disdain, however, was not shared by Wilson Bentley, a farm boy in Vermont who was given a microscope on his 15th birthday in 1880; later he acquired a bellows-camera, which he adapted to take the first-ever photomicrographs of snowflakes, being careful not to breathe on his evanescent subjects before tripping the shutter.

这些微型冰晶曾一度为科学家们所忽视，他们认为研究雪花没有什么实际效益。然而，威尔逊·本特利并不认同科学家对雪花研究的不屑一顾。威尔逊·本特利是佛蒙特州的一个农家男孩，1880年，15岁的威尔逊得到了一台显微镜作为生日礼物；后来，他买了一台折叠暗箱照相机，并用它拍摄了有史以来第一张雪花的显微照片。在按动快门之前，他万分小心，唯恐自己的呼吸影响到雪花这个瞬息即逝的对象。

Inspired by Bentley’s ethereal images, in 1936 Nakaya Ukichiro, a Japanese nuclear physicist, became the first person to manufacture snow in the lab. His research on how the crystals form showed that snowflakes develop on the fly, during their sometimes hours-long journey to the ground. The higher the humidity that they encounter on the way, the more intricate their architecture becomes. 

1936年，日本核物理学家中谷宇吉郎受到本特利超凡图像的启发，成为第一个在实验室制造雪的人。他对雪花晶体形成方式的研究表明，雪花有时要历经数小时飘落到地面，而它们就是在飘落的过程中形成的。飘落过程中，空气湿度越高，雪花的结构就越复杂。