实习生来了 (The Intern Arrives)
今天去上班，公司来了个实习生。我以为公司不招实习生呢。原来是我们组不招而已。所以说，天无绝人之路。
I went to work today and an intern had shown up. I thought the company did not hire interns at all—it turns out our team simply does not; other teams do. So the old saying still holds: heaven never blocks every path.
零零后，俄亥俄州立的数学博士，五年级。研究方向PDE。在搞点NSDE（Neural SDE）和GAN的东西。从学校开车过来，七个小时。很谦卑的一个小孩儿。
A Gen Z PhD student at Ohio State, fifth year, working on PDEs. On the side he is picking up NSDE (Neural SDE) and GAN work. He drove seven hours from campus. An unassuming kid.
从巴洛克到印象派 (From Baroque to Impressionism)¶
前阵子我购买了博物馆的VIP会员，但是一直没有时间去看。
I picked up a museum VIP membership a while back but still have not made it there.
最近有画展，而且是大名鼎鼎的卡拉瓦乔（Caravaggio）。我一定要抽空去看看。
There is a show on now—Caravaggio, no less. I need to carve out time to go.
Caravaggio是巴洛克的大神。
Caravaggio is the giant of the Baroque.
但是我最近更多想到的是印象派。
Lately, though, my mind keeps drifting to Impressionism instead.
印象派并不是从天上掉下来的。它诞生于十九世纪中叶的法国，是一代画家对学院派（Académie des Beaux-Arts）的集体反叛。沙龙（Salon）审美要求历史画、神话题材、光滑无痕的画面，在画室里面精雕细琢。而莫奈、雷诺阿、德加、毕沙罗这批人，更愿意跑到户外去画现代生活——巴黎扩建后的林荫大道、火车站的蒸汽、野餐、舞会、赛马。一八七四年，他们在纳达尔（Nadar）摄影棚楼上办了第一次独立画展；莫奈的《印象·日出》被评论家路易·勒鲁瓦（Louis Leroy）讥讽为"印象派"，没想到这个名字反而留了下来。
Impressionism did not fall from the sky. It took shape in mid-nineteenth-century France as a generation of painters pushed back against the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Salon taste favored history painting, mythological subjects, and flawlessly smooth canvases finished in the studio. Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, and their circle would rather paint modern life outdoors—the boulevards of Haussmann's Paris, steam at the railway station, picnics, balls, horse races. In 1874 they held their first independent exhibition upstairs in Nadar's photography studio. Louis Leroy, reviewing Monet's Impression, Sunrise, mocked the work as nothing but an "impression"—and the insult became the name of a movement.
摄影术的出现，是印象派得以成立的重要背景。一八三九年前后，达盖尔（Daguerre）把照相术公之于世，绘画一下子失去了"如实记录世界"的垄断地位。既然相机能在几秒钟内把面孔、建筑、街景固定下来，画家何必再花几个月去描摹每一根睫毛？这个危机反而解放了绘画——它不必再当镜子，可以去追问：人眼真正看见的是什么？光在那一瞬间是什么颜色？德加（Degas）大量参考照片构图，裁切大胆，人物常常被画面边缘切断，像抓拍一样；莫奈、西斯莱则痴迷于同一地点在不同光线下的变化，仿佛要跟相机比谁先抓住那一秒。更早还有迈布里奇（Muybridge）和马雷（Marey）的连续摄影，把奔跑的马、飞翔的鸟分解成一帧帧瞬间——印象派要画的，正是这种"来不及画完"的刹那。
Photography is part of what made Impressionism possible. Around 1839, Daguerre unveiled his process to the world, and painting lost its monopoly on recording reality. If a camera could capture a face, a building, or a street scene in seconds, why spend months rendering every eyelash? The crisis freed painting—it no longer had to serve as a mirror. It could ask instead: what does the eye actually see? What color is the light in that instant? Degas borrowed freely from photographic composition, with bold cropping and figures cut off at the frame's edge like snapshots. Monet and Sisley kept returning to the same place under different light, as if racing the camera to seize a single second. Even earlier, Muybridge and Marey used sequential photography to break a galloping horse or a flying bird into frame-by-frame instants—the very fleeting moment Impressionism wanted to paint, the one too quick to finish.
这里值得多说几句，因为很多人把摄影和绘画理解成你死我活。当时确实有人预言绘画会死——既然相机能更便宜、更快、更准确地留下一张脸、一栋楼、一条街道，画家为什么还要在画室里描摹每一根睫毛？但历史给出的答案恰恰相反：绘画没有消失，只是卸下了"如实记录"这副重担。印象派去追光与瞬间，野兽派把颜色从物体里解放出来，抽象派则让画面彻底离开地面。写实主义少了一种任务，后面的流派反而一条接一条地长出来。从卡拉瓦乔到莫奈，从马蒂斯到康定insky，近两百年里画布一直在回答同一个问题：既然不必再当镜子，那还可以是什么？
This is worth spelling out, because photography and painting are often framed as a zero-sum fight. At the time, plenty of people predicted painting would die—if a camera could record a face, a building, or a street more cheaply, quickly, and accurately, why keep rendering every eyelash in a studio? History answered the opposite way. Painting did not vanish; it simply stopped carrying the burden of faithful reproduction. Impressionism chased light and the instant. Fauvism freed color from the object. Abstraction let the canvas leave the ground altogether. Realism lost one job, and the movements that followed kept branching out. From Caravaggio to Monet, from Matisse to Kandinsky, the canvas spent nearly two centuries answering the same question: if it no longer has to be a mirror, what else can it be?
电影史上也有类似的转折。电视进入家庭之后，同样有人宣布电影院要完了——谁还愿意出门买票，坐在黑屋子里看一块银幕？但电影也没有死。它把客厅里的活让给了电视，自己转向宽银幕、奇观、沉浸感、只有大银幕才撑得住的场面：史诗、科幻、动作、IMAX。不是同一种活法，也不是同一种规模。新媒介拿走的，往往是旧媒介最省力、最像"工作"的那一部分；留下来的，反而被迫变得更自由、更极端、更像它自己。
Film went through a similar turn. Once television entered the living room, people declared the cinema dead—who would still buy a ticket and sit in the dark? But film did not die either. It ceded the living-room job to TV and moved toward widescreen spectacle, immersion, and scenes only a big screen can hold: epics, science fiction, action, IMAX. Not the same way of living, and not the same scale. What a new medium takes is usually the easiest, most mechanical part of the old one; what survives is pushed to become freer, more extreme, more itself.
可能有用的链接 (Useful Links)¶
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08182
https://ml4physicalsciences.github.io/2020/files/NeurIPS_ML4PS_2020_39.pdf