By Jacey Fortin
作者 Jacey Fortin
Oct 2, 2018
2018年10月2日
Since 1901, when the annual Nobel Prize in Physics was first awarded, it has been given almost exclusively to men, year after year. Women had won the award exactly twice.
自从1901年年度诺贝尔物理学奖被第一次颁发，年复一年，它几乎全部被授予给了男性。女性只有两次获得该奖。
That changed this week, when the number rose to three. Donna Strickland, a Canadian who is an associate professor of physics at the University of Waterloo, received the prize on Tuesday for her work on high-intensity laser pulses.
这周情况发生了改变，女性获奖数字从2上升到了3。 Donna Strickland ——一个在滑铁卢大学担任物理学副教授的加拿大人在星期二的时候因为其在高强度激光脉冲所做的工作获得该奖。
Dr. Strickland, 59, shared the award with the French physicist Gérard Mourou, 74, with whom she was working as a graduate student when they published a groundbreaking scientific paper in 1985; and Arthur Ashkin, 96, an American scientist who pioneered a way of using light to manipulate physical objects.
59岁的斯特里克兰博士和74岁的法国物理学家Gérard Mourou分享了这一奖项，1985年她们发布了一篇重大的科学论文时她以研究生的身份和他一起工作；以及96岁的美国科学家Arthur Ashkin，他首创了一种用光来操纵物体的方法。
Dr. Ashkin will receive half of the monetary prize, worth about $1 million. Dr. Mourou and Dr. Strickland will split the remainder.
埃西肯博士将获得一半的奖金，价值大约100万美元。穆鲁博士和斯特里克兰博士将分得剩余的奖金。
In an interview with NobelPrize.org, the official website of the prize, Dr. Strickland said that when she first learned that she had won, she wondered if it might be a prank. “It was just a fun thing to do, and so I enjoyed putting many hours into it,” she said of her work with short-pulse lasers more than 30 years ago.
在接受诺贝尔官方网站的采访时，斯特里克兰博士说，当她刚开始知道自己获得了诺贝尔奖时，以为这也许是一个恶作剧。“这对我来说只是一件有趣的事情，所以我非常享受花很多时间在里面，” 她谈到她30多年前就开始了短脉冲激光器的工作。
That work resulted in Dr. Strickland’s first published scientific paper in 1985, and she went on to base her doctoral dissertation on it.
1985年，斯特里克兰博士就该项工作第一次发表科学论文，并继续以此作为博士论文的基础。
At the time, scientists had been trying to figure out how to amplify high-energy laser pulses without destroying the amplifiers. Dr. Strickland suggested stretching out the pulses in time, amplifying them and then compressing them again to the desired level of intensity.
当时，科学家们致力于发现，在不毁坏放大器的情况下放大高能激光脉冲的方法。斯特里克兰博士建议迅速拉伸脉冲，放大然后压缩其到需要的强度水平。
Her work with Dr. Mourou “paved the way towards the shortest and most intense laser pulses ever created by mankind,” according to NobelPrize.org.
根据NobelPrize.org的说法，她和穆鲁博士的工作“为人类创造最短且最强的激光脉冲铺平了道路”。
Their method, known as chirped pulse amplification, allowed for more precision in laser technology and has allowed for several real-world applications, including Lasik eye surgery. Some physicists think it can one day be used to accelerate subatomic particles, just like the Large Hadron Collider.
他们的方法，被称为啁啾脉冲放大，使激光科技更为精密，并被应用于现实生活中，包括 Lasik眼睛手术。一些物理学家认为它未来也可被用于加速亚原子粒子，就像大型强子对撞机那样。
A self-described “laser jock,” Dr. Strickland was born in Guelph, Ontario, in 1959. Today she runs a laboratory for students at Waterloo called the Ultrafast Laser Group, where one of her favorite activities is to generate a full color spectrum of white light from a narrow bandwidth of wavelengths.
自称“激光运动员”的斯特里克兰博士，出生于1959年安大略省的圭尔夫。如今她为滑铁卢大学的学生开设了一个名为“超快激光组”的实验室，在那里她最喜欢的活动之一就是从窄带宽波长生成全色光谱。
But her work did not get widespread public attention before she won the Nobel. In fact, Wikipedia rejected a draft page about her in May, saying that she had not met “notability guidelines.” (She now has a detailed Wikipedia page.)
但是在获得诺贝尔前，她的工作并没有引起公众的广泛关注。事实上，维基百科在五月时拒绝了为她建立简单的介绍页，声称她没有达到“知名度指南”。（现在她已经拥有了一个详细的维基页面。）
Dr. Strickland said that her work depended in part on the work of the two women who won the Nobel Prize in Physics before her.
斯特里克兰博士说她的工作部分建立在，于她之前获得诺贝尔物理学奖的两位女性的工作之上。
Marie Curie was the first woman to win the prize in 1903, for the discovery of radioactivity. (Eight years later, she also won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on isolating pure radium.) The second was Maria Goeppert Mayer, who won in 1963 for developing a model that could predict the properties of atomic nuclei.
1903年，玛丽·居里因为发现放射性成为首个获得该奖的女性。（八年后，她再次因为离析出纯镭获得诺贝尔化学奖。）第二位是玛丽·朱伯特·梅耶，她在1963年因为开发可以预测原子核性质的模型而获奖。
But for 54 years after that, only men won the Nobel Prize in Physics. And only a handful of women won the prize in either of the other two scientific categories: chemistry and physiology or medicine. Last year, the nine people who won Nobel Prizes in all three of the scientific categories were men from Western countries.
在此之后54年里，只有男性获得诺贝尔物理学奖。只有少数女性在其他两个科学类别获奖：化学和生理学或医学。
The Nobel Prizes have come under criticism in recent years for the lack of female laureates across all categories.
近年来，诺贝尔奖因其所有类别都缺乏女性获奖者而备受批评。
While women are generally underrepresented in fields like science and technology, the disparities in physics seem to be particularly pronounced, said Rachel Ivie, the director of the Statistical Research Center at the American Institute of Physics.
美国物理学会研究中心主任Rachel lvie说，女性通常在科技领域内缺乏代表性，在物理学中的差异似乎尤为显著。
She cited institutional issues that have made it more difficult for women to advance their careers, mentioning maternity leave, which can take women out of the workplace for months or years at a time, as one example.
她列举了令女性难以提升职业生涯的制度问题，例如修产假，会让女性一次离开工作数月甚至数年。
But Dr. Ivie added that there seemed to be cultural reasons for the disparities, too. That could explain why the change has been especially slow in physics even though women are increasingly represented in the field.
但艾维博士补充说，这种差异也有文化原因。这就可以解释，为什么该领域的女性代表在增加，物理学依然改变的特别缓慢。
“It hasn’t really caught up yet to the other fields,” she said. “And I think a lot of that is the cultural perception that this is a man’s science, for whatever reason.”
“它还没有真正赶上别的学科，”她说。“并且我认为绝大部分是因为文化观念，认为这是男人的科学，不论出于何种原因。”