5 Chapter 4 The Best Years

Chapter 4 The Best Years When a person invents something—for example, a battery-powered back-scratcher for miniature poodles—the inventor sends a description of the invention to a patent office. An examiner looks at the idea and decides if it's really something new, or just something that is a little bit different from an already-invented gadget. If it's really a new idea, the inventor gets a patent, which means other people aren't allowed to copy it.

当一个人发明了什么东西——例如，一个用电池驱动的微型贵宾犬抓背器——发明者就会向专利局提交一份发明说明书。 考官会看这个创意，然后决定它是否真的是一个新东西，或者只是和一个已经发明出来的小玩意有点不同。 如果它真的是一个新想法，发明者就会获得专利，这意味着其他人不允许复制它。

It takes a very smart person to understand inventions when they're just at the idea stage. Albert was that person. Reading applications for new inventions was like solving puzzles. Albert was so good at his job that each day he completed his work long before it was time to go home. He then was able to turn his attention to his first love—thinking. Imagine what this must have been like for Albert. It would be like a kid going to school every morning, finishing all the schoolwork within an hour, and then playing for the rest of the day.

只有非常聪明的人才能在发明还处于创意阶段时就理解它们。 艾伯特就是那个人。阅读新发明的申请就像解谜一样。 阿尔伯特非常擅长他的工作，每天他在回家之前就完成了他的工作。 然后，他可以把注意力转向他的第一次爱情思考。 想象一下这对阿尔伯特来说是什么感觉。 这就像一个孩子每天早上去学校，在一个小时内完成所有的作业，然后在一天剩下的时间里玩耍。

With all that time to think, Albert ended up writing and publishing more scientific papers. In one year alone, he published five groundbreaking papers in a very famous German journal about physics. "A storm broke loose in my mind," explained Albert. So in some ways, his patent office job turned out to be a lot better than the teaching job that he had originally hoped for. Einstein in 4-D People measure objects in three ways: length, width, and depth. Anything—a piece of toast, a TV, a yo-yo—is so many inches high, so many inches wide, and so many inches thick. These three ways of measuring are known as dimensions. Albert threw in a fourth dimension—time. Albert said that the dimension of time was as important as length, width, and depth—especially when measuring something really big like outer space. To think about the size of outer

有了这么多思考的时间，阿尔伯特最终撰写并发表了更多的科学论文。 仅在一年的时间里，他就在一家非常著名的德国物理学杂志上发表了五篇开创性的论文。 “一场风暴在我的脑海里爆发了，”艾伯特解释说。 所以在某种程度上，他在专利局的工作比他最初希望的教书工作要好得多。 人们用三种方式测量物体:长度、宽度和深度。 任何东西——一片烤面包片、一台电视、一个溜溜球——都有那么多英寸高、那么多英寸宽、那么多英寸厚。 这三种测量方法被称为尺寸。 艾伯特加入了一个四维空间。 阿尔伯特说，时间的维度与长度、宽度和深度一样重要，尤其是在测量像外层空间这样大的东西时。 想想外层的大小

space but not the time it takes for something to travel through that space is like thinking about a song without the lyrics. Something important is missing. With steady work at the patent office, Albert felt that he could ask Mileva to marry him. So he did. She said "yes," and they were married in 1903. The following year, their son, Hans Albert, was born. Now Albert had the time to enjoy music, long dinners, and long walks with his family. Albert was happy and secure. Confident in his job, he could relax—be more himself. For Albert, that meant dressing carelessly, wearing the same wrinkled shirt day after day, and often forgetting to brush his hair. As someone once said, "Einstein looked as if he'd just smoked an exploding cigar."

空间，而不是时间，让东西穿过空间，就像思考一首没有歌词的歌。 缺少了一些重要的东西。 由于在专利局有稳定的工作，阿尔贝觉得他可以向米列娃求婚了。 于是他照做了。她答应了，他们于1903年结婚。 第二年，他们的儿子汉斯·阿尔伯特出生了。 现在，阿尔伯特有时间享受音乐，吃丰盛的晚餐，和家人一起散步。 阿尔贝感到幸福和安全。 对自己的工作充满信心，他可以放松下来——更自在一些。 对艾伯特来说，这意味着穿着随意，日复一日穿着同样皱巴巴的衬衫，经常忘记梳头。 正如有人曾经说过的，“爱因斯坦看起来就像刚刚抽了一根爆炸的雪茄。”

Albert's years at the patent office were wonderful. He had a family, time to think and write lots of scientific papers, and enough money. Many of the greatest scientific achievements of the twentieth century—electronics, the atomic bomb, space travel—were all suggested by Einstein in the papers he published while he worked at the patent office. Those ideas were then worked on further by other scientists in the decades that followed.

阿尔伯特在专利局的日子很美好。 他有家庭，有时间思考和写很多科学论文，还有足够的钱。 20世纪许多最伟大的科学成就——电子学、原子弹、太空旅行——都是爱因斯坦在专利局工作时发表的论文中提出的。 在接下来的几十年里，其他科学家对这些想法进行了进一步的研究。

Then in 1909, the University of Zurich convinced Albert to leave the patent office and become a professor. Albert would actually be paid to teach and study physics. Life was even more wonderful.

1909年，苏黎世大学说服阿尔伯特离开专利局，成为一名教授。 阿尔伯特教授和研究物理是有报酬的。 生活更加精彩。