课前准备 Warm-up

Who is Jeremy Bernstein? What does the title remind you of? Why did he choose such a topic? Before you read the text, think about the following questions:

1) What have read or heard about physicists like Oppenheimer?

2) What kind of people is merely good?

3) What kind of people is genius?

本章概览 An Overview

Jeremy Bernstein has been a professor of physics for many years and is a writer in this own right. How knows both physics and writhing well. Besides, he is related to Oppenheimer, Dirac and Spender in one way or another. Therefore, he is in a position to come to such a conclusion, whether the reader agrees with him or not.

There are two statements in the article which are worthy of notice. One is that great poetry and physics cannot be imitated. As Dirac put it, “The really good ideas in physics are had by only one person.” The other is Isidor Rabi’s comment on Oppenheimer: “I never ran into anyone who was brighter than he was. But to be more original and profound I think you have to be more focused.” The author makes similar comment on Dirac and Auden when he writes, “they focused like laser beams.” Apart form these two points, there is one more thing worthy of notice—that is the skill of the author in knitting seemingly scattered anecdotes of various characters into a coherent whole. The anecdotes take place in Gottingen, Princeton and other places and the time span is over half a century. Yet these anecdotes are carefully chosen and related, all going to illustrate the message the author wants to put across. Such a skill in writhing is truly admirable.

学习目标 Objectives

Through textual analysis and learning, the students should

1) Get the theme of the text

2) Get the technique of montage

3) To grasp the development of text

知识结构 Knowledge Structure

The text can be roughly divided into seven parts, which can be subdivided into several sections.

Part I (paras. 1)

Reason for not going to the conference

Part II (paras.2-3)

Earlier life of Oppenheimer

Part III (paras. 4)

the author’s decision to attend the conference in 1981, and the two pairs of contrast: Dirac & Oppenheimer and Auden & Spender.

Part IV (paras.5-7)

Spender’s journal entry on the description of Oppenheimer in 1956

Part V (paras. 8-9)

the author’s meeting with Oppenheimer and Dirac in Princeton University in 1958

Part VI (paras.10-16)

the author’s meeting with Spender in 1981

Part VII (paras. 17-20)

concluding, returning to the time of writing in 1996