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Wanted: Einstein Jr 寻找：爱因斯坦二世
Mar 6th 2007
From The Economist

Might oaks from little acorns grow. In the 1840s an astronomer called Urbain Le Verrier noticed there was something wrong with the orbit of Mercury. The main axis of the planet's orbital ellipse shifts each time it goes round the sun. That was well known, and is caused by the gravitational pull of Venus. Le Verrier, however, realised that the orbit was shifting too fast. The excess was a tiny fraction of a degree. But it was a disturbing departure from the purity of Newton's majestic clockwork-a departure that was explained only 70 years later, when Einstein's general theory of relativity swept Newton away by showing that gravity operates by distorting space itself.

大橡树生于小橡实。1840年一位叫做勒威耶的天文学家发现水星的轨道有些奇怪：其椭圆轨道的主轴每当靠近太阳的时候会产生偏移。众所周知这种偏移是金星的引力作用的结果。可是，勒威耶却认为轨道偏移得过于快速。虽然差异只有极小的角度，但是却与牛顿正统的理论相左。这种差异在70年后才被爱因斯坦的广义相对论解释清楚，这种偏角是因为引力作用将空间本身扭曲的结果。

Even Einstein, however, may not have got it right. Modern instruments have shown a departure from his predictions, too. In 1990 mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, which operates America's unmanned terplanetary space probes, noticed something odd happen to a Jupiter-bound craft, called Galileo. As it was flung around the Earth in what is known as a slingshot manoeuvre (designed to speed it on its way to the outer solar system), Galileo picked up more velocity than expected. Not much. Four millimetres a second, to be precise. But well within the range that can reliably be detected.

但就算是爱因斯坦的理论可能也不是完全正确的：现代的先进设备结果显示爱因斯坦的预测同样和实际情况有偏离。1990年位于加州火箭推进实验室（JPL）任务控制系统发现木星探测器伽利略号的奇怪现象，这个控制系统控制着美国所有的无人空间探测器。当伽利略号俯冲通过木星表面，形成弹弓机动（一种探测器用来加速飞到外太阳系的方法）时，探测到速度比预想的要快。虽然不是快太多，精确来说，仅仅快了5毫米每秒。但却是可以被测量并确实可靠的。

Once might be happenstance. But this strange extra acceleration was seen subsequently with two other craft. That, as Goldfinger would have put it, looks like enemy action. So a team from JPL has got together to analyse all of the slingshot manoeuvres that have been carried out over the years, to see if they really do involve a small but systematic extra boost. The answer is that they do.

一次有可能是偶然事件，但是这种奇怪的加速却同样在后来其他两个飞行器上出现。这种现象看似敌对行为，就像有一个金手指在推动它一样。所以JPL的科学家们成立一个小组分析这些年来所有的弹弓机动，设法找到是否真的存在微小但是系统的额外推进力。结果这个答案是肯定的。

Altogether, John Anderson and his colleagues analysed six slingshots involving five different spacecraft. Their paper on the matter is about to be published in Physical Review Letters. Crucially for the idea that there really is a systematic flaw in the laws of physics as they are understood today, their data can be described by a simple formula. It is therefore possible to predict what should happen on future occasions.

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