—— 选自Rediff.com 网站节选（吉玛译)
Being a genius is different than merely being supersmart. Smart people are a dime a dozen, and many of them don’t amount to much. What matters is creativity, the ability to apply imagination to almost any situation.
成为天才与仅仅成为聪明人是不一样的。聪明的人比比皆是的，他们中的许多人并没有多有出息。重要的是创造力，把想象力运用到任何情况的能力。
Take Benjamin Franklin. He lacked the analytic processing power of a Hamilton and the philosophical depth of a Madison. Yet with little formal education, Franklin taught himself to become the American Enlightenment’s best inventor, diplomat, scientist, writer and business strategist. He proved, by flying a kite, that lightning is electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He devised clean-burning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream, bifocal glasses, enchanting musical instruments and America’s unique style of homespun humor.
以本杰明·富兰克林举例。他缺乏汉密尔顿的分析处理能力和麦迪逊的哲学深度。然而，在没有受过正规教育的情况下，富兰克林自学成为美国启蒙运动的最佳发明家、外交家、科学家、作家和商业战略家。他通过放风筝证明了闪电是电，他发明了一根棍子来驯服它。他发明了清洁炉灶、墨西哥湾流的图表、双焦眼镜、迷人的乐器以及美国独特的朴素幽默风格。
Albert Einstein followed a similar path. He was slow in learning to speak as a child–so slow that his parents consulted a doctor. The family maid dubbed him “der Depperte,” the dopey one, and a relative referred to him as “almost backwards.” He also harbored a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one schoolmaster to send him packing and another to amuse history by declaring that he would never amount to much. These traits made Einstein the patron saint of distracted schoolkids everywhere.
阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦也有类似的经历。当他还是个孩子的时候，他学习说话的速度很慢，以至于他的父母咨询了医生。她的家庭女仆给他起了个绰号叫“德伯蒂”，迟钝的人，一个亲戚叫认为他“几乎是倒过来的”。他还怀有一种对权威顽固叛逆，这导致一位校长让他收拾东西走人，另一位校长则宣称他永远不可能有出息。这些特点使爱因斯坦到哪都成为分心的学生的代表。
But Einstein’s contempt for authority also led him to question received wisdom in ways that well-trained acolytes in the academy never contemplated. And his slow verbal development allowed him to observe with wonder the everyday phenomena that others took for granted. “The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time,” Einstein once explained. “But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up.” So it was that in 1905, while he was toiling away as a third-class examiner in the Swiss patent office after graduating fourth out of the five students in his class at the Zurich Polytechnic, Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the universe by coming up with the two pillars of contemporary physics: relativity theory and quantum theory. And he did so by rejecting one of the basic assumptions that Isaac Newton made at the beginning of The Principia, that time marches along, second by second, irrespective of how we observe it. Today Einstein’s name and likeness–the wild halo of hair, the piercing eyes–are synonymous with genius.
但是，爱因斯坦对权威的蔑视也让他质疑了学术界公认的从未质疑的训练有素的助手们的智慧。他缓慢的语言发展使他能够观察并思考别人认为理所当然的日常现象。爱因斯坦曾解释说:“普通的成年人从被空间和时间的问题而困扰。”“但是我发展得很慢，直到我长大了才开始思考空间和时间。”所以,在1905年,在他以第四名的成绩从苏黎世理工毕业之后，他作为三等审查员在瑞士专利局挥埋头苦干,爱因斯坦彻底改变了我们对宇宙的理解,提出现代物理学的两大支柱:相对论和量子理论。他拒绝了艾萨克·牛顿在《原理》开头提出的一个基本假设，无论我们如何观察它， 时间在一秒一秒的流逝。今天，爱因斯坦的名字和肖像——野晕的头发，敏锐的眼睛——是天才的代名词。
Then there’s Steve Jobs. Much like Einstein, who would pull out his violin to play Mozart when he was stymied in pursuit of theories (he said it helped him reconnect with the harmonies of the cosmos), Jobs believed that beauty mattered, that the arts, sciences and humanities should all connect. After dropping out of college, Jobs audited classes on calligraphy and dance before seeking spiritual enlightenment in India–which meant that every product he made, from the Macintosh to the iPhone, had a beauty that was almost spiritual in nature, unlike the products of his competitors.
还有史蒂夫·乔布斯。就像爱因斯坦一样，当他在追求理论遇到阻碍时，他会拿拉出他的小提琴演奏莫扎特的音乐，(他说这有助于他重新与宇宙和谐联系起来)，乔布斯认为美丽在于，将艺术、科学和人文学科都紧密联系。从大学辍学后，乔布斯在印度寻求精神启蒙之前，去上书法和舞蹈课--这意味着他所做的每一件产品，不像竞争对手的产品，从麦金塔电脑到苹果手机，都有一种近乎自然精神的美。
Studying such people led me to Leonardo da Vinci, who I believe is history’s greatest creative genius. Again, that doesn’t mean he was the smartest person. He did not have the superhuman theoretical brainpower of a Newton or an Einstein, or the math skills of his friend Luca Pacioli.
研究这些人让我知道了列奥纳多·达·芬奇，我认为他是历史上最伟大的创造天才。再次声明，这并不意味着他是最聪明的人。他没有牛顿或爱因斯坦的超人般的理论头脑，也没有他的朋友卢卡·帕乔利的数学能力。
But he could think like an artist and a scientist, which gave him something more valuable: the ability to visualize theoretical concepts. Pacioli may have extended Euclid’s theories to produce influential studies on mathematical perspective and geometric proportions. But da Vinci’s illustrations–of rhombicuboctahedrons and dozens of other multifaceted geometric shapes–brought it to life, which was ultimately more important. Over the years, he did the same thing for geography (through the aerial three-dimensional maps he drew for warlord Cesare Borgia), anatomy (through his memorable drawings of Vitruvian Man and a fetus in the womb) and more–all while creating some of the world’s greatest works of art.
但他可以像艺术家和科学家那样思考，这赋予了他更有价值的东西:形象化理论概念的能力。帕乔利可能扩展了欧几里德的理论，从而产生了具有影响的对数学观点和几何比例的研究。但是达·芬奇的插图—菱形以及几十个其他的几何形状—赋予了生命，这是至关重要。多年来，他在其他方面也同样做了贡献：地理学(通过他绘制的空中三维地图，他画出军阀恺撒·博尔吉亚)，解剖学(通过令人难忘的维特鲁威人和子宫中的胎儿画作)，等等，同时创造了一些世界上最伟大的艺术品。
Like Franklin, da Vinci was largely self-taught. He was born out of wedlock, which meant that he could not follow in the family tradition of being a notary and was not eligible to attend one of the “Latin schools” that taught the classics and humanities to well-groomed young men of the early Renaissance. And like Einstein, da Vinci had a problem with authority. He often seemed defensive about being an “unlettered man,” as he dubbed himself with some irony, but had little patience for the “foolish folk” who thought less of him. “They strut about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned not with their own labors, but by those of others,” he wrote in one of his notebooks.
和富兰克林一样，达芬奇也是自学成才。他是位婚生子，这意味着他不能继承家族传统的公证，也没有资格参加一所“拉丁学校”，该学校是教古典文学和人文学科，培养文艺复兴时期早期的年轻男子。和爱因斯坦一样，达芬奇也有权威的问题。他常常为自己是一个“未受教育的人”而辩护，他给自己起了个讽刺的绰号，但对那些比他还没有想法得“愚蠢的人”却没有耐心。“他们趾高气扬，装扮华丽，不用自己的劳动，而是用别人的劳动来装饰自己，”他在自己的笔记本上写道。
So it was that da Vinci learned to challenge conventional wisdom, ignoring the dusty scholasticism and medieval dogmas that had accumulated in the millennia since the decline of classical science. He was, by his own words, a disciple of experience and experiment–“Leonardo da Vinci, disscepolo della sperientia,” he once signed himself. That approach to problem-solving was nothing short of revolutionary, foreshadowing the scientific method developed more than a century later by Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei. And it elevated da Vinci beyond even the smartest of his peers. “Talent hits a target that no one else can hit,” wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
因此，达·芬奇学会了挑战传统智慧，忽略了自古典科学衰落以来数千年来积累起来的枯燥的经学和中世纪教条。用他自己的话来说，他是一个经验和实验的信徒——“Leonardo da Vinci，disolo della speri，”他曾经签名。这种解决问题的方法完全是革命性的，它预示了一个世纪后弗朗西斯·培根和伽利略·伽利雷发明的科学方法。这使达·芬奇甚至超越了最聪明的同龄人。德国哲学家叔本华写道:“天才击中了一个无人能击中的目标。”“天才击中了别人看不到的目标。”
Like Einstein, da Vinci’s most inspiring trait was his curiosity. The thousands of pages of his notebooks that survive sparkle with questions he listed to pursue. He wanted to know what caused people to yawn, how they walked on ice in Flanders, methods for squaring a circle, what makes the aortic valve close, how light was processed in the eye and what that meant for the perspective in a painting. He instructed himself to learn about the placenta of a calf, the jaw of a crocodile, the muscles of a face, the light of the moon and the edges of shadows. “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker,” he wrote in one of my favorite entries. Da Vinci’s grand and noble ambition was to know everything there was to know about everything that could possibly be known–including our cosmos, and how we fit in.
和爱因斯坦一样，达芬奇最令人鼓舞的特质是他的好奇心。他成千上万页笔记本,因罗列着他说追求的问题而熠熠生辉。他想知道是人们为什么打哈欠，他们如何在佛兰德斯的冰上行走，如何形成一个圆圈，什么使主动脉瓣关闭，眼睛如何处理光线以及从绘画的角度来说这意味着什么。他去了解小牛的胎盘、鳄鱼的下颚、脸的肌肉、月亮的光和阴影的边缘。“描述啄木鸟的舌头，”他在我最喜欢的作品中写道。达·芬奇伟大而崇高的抱负是要知道所有可能知道的一切，包括我们的宇宙，以及我们如何融入其中。
Much of his curiosity was applied to topics that most of us have outgrown even noticing. Take the blue sky, for example. We see it almost every day, but not since childhood have most of us stopped to wonder why it is that color. Da Vinci did. He wrote page after page in his notebook exploring how the scattering of light by water vapor creates various misty or vibrant shades of blue. Einstein puzzled over that question too: building on Lord Rayleigh’s work, he worked out the mathematical formula for light-spectrum scattering.
他的很多好奇心都被应用到我们大多数人甚至都没有注意到的话题上。以蓝天为例。我们几乎每天都能看到它，但从孩提时代起，我们大多数人就不再思考为什么它是那种颜色。达·芬奇就思考。他在他的笔记本上写了一页又一页，研究了水汽的散射如何创造出各种模糊或充满生气的蓝色。爱因斯坦也对这个问题感到困惑:在瑞利勋爵的作品基础上，他计算出了光谱散射的数学公式。
Da Vinci never stopped observing. When he visited the moats surrounding Milan’s castle, he looked at the four-wing dragonflies and noticed how the wing pairs alternated in motion. When he walked around town, he tracked how the facial expressions of people talking related to their emotions. When he saw birds, he noted which ones moved their wings faster on the upswing than on the downswing, and which ones did the opposite. When he poured water into a bowl, he watched how the eddies swirled.
达·芬奇从未停止过观察。当他参观了环绕米兰城堡的护城河时，他看到了四翼的蜻蜓，并注意到它们的翅膀是如何交替运动的。当他在镇上四处走动时，他会追踪人们的面部表情与他们的情绪有何关系。当他看到鸟的时候，他注意到那些鸟在上升的时候比在下降的时候更快地移动它们的翅膀，而有些是相反的。当他把水倒进碗里的时候，他看到漩涡是如何打旋。
Much like Franklin–who sailed for England as a teenage runaway and later measured the temperature of the ocean currents, thereby becoming the first person to chart the Gulf Stream accurately–da Vinci could not resist chasing and studying whirlwinds of air when he was out on a ride.
就像富兰克林一样，他在十几岁的时候乘船逃亡去了英国，后来又测量了洋流的温度，因此成为了第一个精确绘制墨西哥湾流的人。达芬奇外出骑行时，忍不住要去追逐和研究空气的漩涡。
Those observations led him to create some of his most brilliant strokes of art, from the ripples of the River Jordan around the ankles of Jesus in the Baptism of Christ to the disturbingly powerful Deluge drawings. He was also the first person to explain how the eddies of blood from the heart cause the aortic valve to close. And his drawing of Vitruvian Man–a work of anatomical exactitude combined with stunning beauty–became the preeminent icon of the connection of art and science.
这些观察使他创作出了一些他最辉煌的艺术作品，从基督的洗礼中约旦河的涟漪围绕着耶稣的脚踝，到令人不安的强力洪水图。他也是第一个解释心脏的血液漩涡是如何导致主动脉瓣关闭的。他对维特鲁威人的描绘——解剖学上的精雕细琢，伴随着令人惊叹的美丽——成为了艺术与科学结合的卓越标志。
Some people are geniuses in a particular field, like Leonhard Euler in math or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in music. But to me the most interesting geniuses are those who see patterns across nature’s infinite beauties. Da Vinci’s brilliance spanned multiple disciplines. He peeled flesh off the faces of cadavers, delineated the muscles that move the lips and then painted the world’s most memorable smile. He studied human skulls, made layered drawings of the bones and teeth and conveyed the skeletal agony of St. Jerome in St. Jerome in the Wilderness. He explored the mathematics of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea and produced magical illusions of changing visual perspectives in The Last Supper.
有些人是某个领域的天才，比如数学天下的莱昂哈德·欧拉，或者音乐天才莫扎特。但对我来说，最有趣的天才是那些从自然界无限美丽中看到图案的人。达芬奇的才华跨越了多个学科。他剥掉脸上的皮肤，勾勒出嘴唇的肌肉，然后画出世界上最令人难忘的微笑。他研究了人类的头骨，绘制了骨骼和牙齿的层状图，并在荒野中传达了圣杰罗姆的骨骼痛苦。他探索了光学的数学原理，展示了光线如何撞击角膜，并在最后的晚餐中表现出改变视觉视角的神奇幻想。
There have been, of course, many other insatiable polymaths, and the Renaissance produced other Renaissance men. But none painted the Mona Lisa, much less did so at the same time as producing unsurpassed anatomy drawings based on multiple dissections, coming up with schemes to divert rivers, explaining the reflection of light from the earth to the moon, opening the still-beating heart of a butchered pig to show how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants, using fossils to dispute the biblical account of the Deluge and then drawing a deluge. Da Vinci was a genius, but not simply because he was smart. He was, more important, the epitome of the universal mind, the person most curious about more things than anyone else in history.
当然，也有许多其他不知足的博学，文艺复兴造就了其他文艺复兴人。但没有人能画蒙娜丽莎，更不用说画出了基于多重解剖的未被超越的解剖图, 提出河流改道方案, 解释了光从地球到月球的反射, 剖开屠宰猪仍在跳动心脏揭示心室的工作原理,设计乐器、编排游行,使用化石争论圣经记载的洪水,然后画洪水。达芬奇是个天才，但不只是因为他聪明。更重要的是，他是宇宙意识的缩影，他是历史上最好奇的人。
Link: What Makes a Genius The World's Greatest Minds Have One Thing in Common
