阅读徐一鸿教授的"Fearful Symmetry"实在令我心情愉快，除了对普通物理学的理解有了全面突破之外，还在文学艺术方面收益甚多！今天读到"gauge symmetry"这个专业术语居然典出1922年出版的著名晦涩难读小说《尤利西斯》，实在令人会心一笑。《尤利西斯》中先后有两处提到了"gauging the symmetry"，徐教授在书中引用的是第15章中的那段：

Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce

I. Chapter 7 --- Aeolus

...

A typesetter brought him a limp galleypage. He began to check it silently. Mr Bloom stood by, hearing the loud throbs of cranks, watching the silent typesetters at their cases.

Orthographical

Want to be sure of his spelling. Proof fever. Martin Cunningham forgot to give us his spellingbee conundrum this morning. It is amusing to view the unpar one ar alleled embarra two ars is it? double ess ment of a harassed pedlar while gauging au the symmetry of a peeled pear under a cemetery wall. Silly, isn't it? Cemetery put in of course on account of the symmetry.

I could have said when he clapped on his topper. Thank you. I ought to have said something about an old hat or something. No, I could have said. Looks as good as new now. See his phizthen.

...

II. Chapter 15 --- Circe

[ZOE]: ... Are you coming into the musicroom to see our new pianola? Come and I'll peel off.

[BLOOM]: (Feeling his occiput dubiously with the unparalleled embarrassment of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of her peeled pears.) Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she knew.

...

要读懂这两处的英文原文是要花不少时间的，幸亏网上有萧乾和文洁若夫妇合译的中文版，我今晚用了一些时间做中英对照阅读，感觉两位专家翻译得非常不错！建议有兴趣者可以通过这种方式获得英语水平大涨的感觉，呵呵。另外徐教授书中讲述"gauge symmetry"在物理学中缘起的段落值得分享：

Weyl names his symmetry gauge symmetry. The term "gauge" comes from low Latin "gaugia", referring to the standard size of casks ... Curiously, the word entered the permanent vocabulary of physics only because Weyl made a serious but justifiable mistake. ... Weyl was working before the advent of quantum physics, ... Instead, inspired by the geometric flavor of Einstein's work, Weyl proposed a transformation in which one changes the physical distance between spacetime points. Weyl was reminded of the distance, or gauge, between two rails --- hence the name for his symmetry. He showed Einstein his theory, but they were both deeply disappointed that it failed to describe electromagnetism. When the quantum era began, Weyl's theory was quickly repaired. Meanwhile, the term gauge symmetry, although a misnomer, remained.

Weyl 的文章是 1918 年发表的， 早于 Ulysses (1922)， 因此似乎不能说 Gauge Symmetry 典出 Ulysses。 虽然 Weyl 可能只引进了 gauge 一词， 而不是 gauge symmetry， 但 Ulysses (按上述引文) 也只是说 gauging the symmetry 而不是 gauge symmetry。 即便撇开用意不提 (论用意， 文学作品与物理术语的关系顶多只是巧合)， 只从字面上讲， 这看似细微的差别所导致的两者在词义上的差别也是很大的。

>> Weyl 的文章是 1918 年发表的， 早于 Ulysses (1922)， 因此似乎不能说 Gauge Symmetry 典出 Ulysses。

I forgot to check the publication date of Weyl's theory, you've made a good point. No matter who published first, the two usages of "gauge" had to be independent since Weyl didn't start writing in English before 1930s (his famous 1928 lecture notes "The Theory of Groups and Quantum Mechanics" was translated by H. P. Robertson into English in 1931). He chose the German word corresponding to "gauge" in English. I guess Weyl himself never read any English novels, let alone "Ulysses".

>> 虽然 Weyl 可能只引进了 gauge 一词， 而不是 gauge symmetry， 但 Ulysses (按上述引文) 也只是说 gauging the symmetry 而不是 gauge symmetry。 即便撇开用意不提 (论用意， 文学作品与物理术语的关系顶多只是巧合)， 只从字面上讲， 这看似细微的差别所导致的两者在词义上的差别也是很大的。

Of course, James Joyce used "gauge" as a verb whereas Hermann Weyl defined "gauge" as a noun. But it is really an intriguing coincidence between a great novelist and a great mathematician.

In "Fearful Symmetry", Tony Zee also mentioned another indisputable contribution of James Joyce to the modern physics vocabulary --- Gell-Mann chose the word "quark" based on his reading of Joyce's another influential novel "Finnegans Wake". Here are some excerpts from Wikipedia and American Heritage Dictionary:

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Joyce's influence is also evident in fields other than literature. The phrase "Three Quarks for Muster Mark" in Joyce's Finnegans Wake is often called the source of the physicists' word "quark", the name of one of the main kinds of elementary particles, proposed by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann.

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quark

NOUN: Any of a group of six elementary particles having electric charges of a magnitude one-third or two-thirds that of the electron, regarded as constituents of all hadrons. See table at subatomic particle.

ETYMOLOGY: From "Three quarks for Muster Mark!", a line in Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.

WORD HISTORY: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!/Sure he hasn't got much of a bark/And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.” This passage from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, part of a scurrilous 13-line poem directed against King Mark, the cuckolded husband in the Tristan legend, has left its mark on modern physics.

The poem and the accompanying prose are packed with names of birds and words suggestive of birds, and the poem is a squawk against the king that suggests the cawing of a crow. The word quark comes from the standard English verb quark, meaning “to caw, croak,” and also from the dialectal verb quawk, meaning “to caw, screech like a bird.” It is easy to see why Joyce chose the word, but why should it have become the name for a group of hypothetical subatomic particles proposed as the fundamental units of matter?

Murray Gell-Mann, the physicist who proposed this name for these particles, said in a private letter of June 27, 1978, to the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary that he had been influenced by Joyce's words: “The allusion to three quarks seemed perfect” (originally there were only three subatomic quarks).

Gell-Mann, however, wanted to pronounce the word with (ô) not (ä), as Joyce seemed to indicate by rhyming words in the vicinity such as Mark. Gell-Mann got around that “by supposing that one ingredient of the line ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark’ was a cry of ‘Three quarts for Mister . . . ’ heard in H.C. Earwicker's pub,” a plausible suggestion given the complex punning in Joyce's novel. It seems appropriate that this perplexing and humorous novel should have supplied the term for particles that come in six “flavors” and three “colors.”

Wow! When I first read your original post this morning, Gall-Mann's quark story did occur to my mind (I mentioned that story in my recent article on the origin of mass). But I didn't even think the two guys might be the same. What a surprise!

Is James Joyce a famous writer? The only thing I knew about him before this morning is his "Finnegans Wake" is very hard to read. Now it seems his "Ulysses" is also known to be hard. What kind of writer that guy is? You - equipped with your solid English - might try some of his novels. :)

>>Is James Joyce a famous writer? The only thing I knew about him before this morning is his "Finnegans Wake" is very hard to read. Now it seems his "Ulysses" is also known to be hard. What kind of writer that guy is? You - equipped with your solid English - might try some of his novels. :)

Extremely famous. Let me make an anology with biology:

In the history of biology (even looking back from hundreds of years later), there are only two landmark discoveries to be recognized as critical --- the publication of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" in 1859 and the discovery of DNA double helix in 1953.

In the history of English literature, there may also be only two writers standing taller than others. The first is the great insurmountable William Shakespeare and the second should be James Joyce because of "Ulysses".

My personal opinion is that James Joyce was highly overrated, but "Ulysses" is surely way more important than "Finnegans Wake". When Westerners talk about "Ulysses", they are talking about the counterpart of "Hong Lou Meng" in English literature. But I think "Hong Lou Meng" is much greater than "Ulysses" in terms of historical impact, Ulysses's fame benefits a lot from the world-wide dominance of the English language.

One more interesting thing about the publication date of Ulysses vs. Weyl's paper, Wikipedia says that "Ulysses is a 1922 novel by James Joyce, first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from 1918 to 1920, and published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on February 2, 1922, in Paris". So they were both published in 1918, we can loosely use Einstein's buzzword "simultaneity" to describe this, hehe.

In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on a list of the 100 best novels in English of the 20th century. I gave a little try on the English version when I first heard about Ulysses at Johns Hopkins in 1996, but I immediately decided it would consume too much of my precious time. When the Chinese translation became available online in 1999, I read more parts of the book. Only because of Tony Zee's great inspiration, I read the majority of Chapters 7 and 15 in English seriously last night for the first time. That two-hour reading exercise was a lot of fun thanks to the two Chinese translators' detailed annotations which saved me tremednous amount of time.

Even after this fun experience, I still won't recommend curious non-English-majored students to read Ulysses directly without the help of the Chinese translation. The time investment wouldn't be worthwhile, a bilingual selective reading exercise may end up saving you a lot of time. Even for those students majored in English literature, they should do some preparatory homework before jumping into the sea of Ulysses without any help from "swimming aids". It's better for them to read Homer's "Odyssey" first and to be willing to use a solid dictionary as frequent as necessary, the following comments from Wikipedia are pretty fair:

Ulysses chronicles the passage through Dublin by its main character, Leopold Bloom, during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The title alludes to the hero of Homer's Odyssey (Latinised into Ulysses), and there are many parallels, both implicit and explicit, between the two works (e.g. the correlations between Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus). June 16 is now celebrated by Joyce's fans worldwide as Bloomsday.

Ulysses is a massive novel: 250,000 words in total from a vocabulary of 30,000 words, with most editions weighing in at between 644 to 1000 pages, and divided into 18 chapters, or "episodes" as they are referred to in most scholarly circles. The book has been the subject of much controversy and scrutiny, ranging from early obscenity trials to protracted textual "Joyce Wars". Today the novel is regarded as a masterwork in Modernist writing, celebrated for its groundbreaking stream-of-consciousness technique, highly experimental prose—full of puns, parodies, allusions—as well as for its rich characterizations and broad humour.

看来我的英语是没有指望了。想必Omni兄已经大大的领教过了:)