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導讀
5分鐘看完《霍金傳》
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音樂| 精讀 | 翻譯 | 詞組
The cosmos from a wheelchair
輪椅上的宇宙
本文英文部分選自經濟學人Obituary版塊
Stephen Hawking died on March 14th
斯蒂芬·霍金于3月14日去世(1942年1月8日-2018年3月14日)
The man who explained the universe was 76
一個終身探索宇宙奧秘的男人享年76歲
PREDESTINATION was not part of Stephen Hawking’s system of belief. It was mere coincidence that he was born 300 years to the day after Galileo Galilei died. But he did share something with him, other than being a great physicist; he became famous as much for his suffering as for his physics. His was caused not by ecclesiastical politicians who preferred obedience to free enquiry, but by muscle-wasting amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It meant that he, too, had to fight to be heard.
斯蒂芬·霍金從來都不相信命運。即便他剛好出生在伽利略逝世三百周年紀念日,他也認為僅僅是個巧合而已。(真的不是命運的安排?是巧合?扯犢子)但霍金的確和伽利略有很多相似之處,除了都是偉大的物理學家之外,他們所取得的物理成就,與遭受的苦難一樣為人所知。然而,他的苦難并不是來自那些因循守舊的教會政治家,而是因為肌肉萎縮性側索硬化癥(ALS)。但這也意味著霍金(需要和伽利略一樣),也必須進行抗爭才能讓自己不斷發(fā)聲。
1. 命運:小編查了一些資料,這似乎冥冥之中,一切早已注定,有時候不信命,但是卻總是掙脫不開,就像霍金1月8號出生,伽利略1月8號去世。愛因斯坦3.14號出生,馬克思3.14去世,霍金3.14號去世。和愛因斯坦享年76歲愛因斯坦霍金享年76歲,哈雷彗星周期76年,而且3.14是圓周率的開頭,無限循環(huán)?難道這只是巧合?俗話說:有趣的靈魂終將相遇,或許是上天也需要霍金去探索宇宙,去發(fā)現(xiàn)外宇宙。
2. 伽利略:宗教裁判所施加了哪些"迫害"
http://news.163.com/17/0126/10/CBMUV2ON000187UE.html
In youth he never lacked confidence. He once interrupted the great astrophysicist Fred Hoyle in mid-lecture, at the Royal Society, to correct him on the masses of particles. But once he could no longer write down equations, theories had to be translated into geometry in his head; and after a tracheotomy in 1985, the ocean of his thinking had to be forced through a cumbersome and narrow technological aperture. His words necessarily became so few that he had to stare hard at the universe in order to define, and refine as far as possible, the new things he had to say about it. His theories of everything emerged in a voice that was both robotic, and curiously laden with emotion.
年輕時霍金充滿自信。他曾經在皇家學會會議上,打斷著名的天體物理學家弗雷德·霍伊勒的演講,指出他在粒子質量上的相關錯誤。但一旦他再也不能用手寫下公式的時候,他只能在腦海中推演空間結構的理論。1985年,他做了氣管切開手術后(霍金因患肺炎做了穿氣管手術,失去了說話的能力),他所有的思維都只通過一些笨重且高精度的電子設備來實現(xiàn)。由此他的話語變得如此之少,以至于他不得不將所有精力放在探索宇宙的奧秘中,并盡可能地精煉出他不得不說的新發(fā)現(xiàn)。他所有的理論都是由一種聽起來既機械又奇怪地充滿感情的聲音呈現(xiàn)出來的。
1.霍金因患肺炎做了穿氣管手術,失去了說話的能力,那么霍金是如何說話的?
https://www.zhihu.com/question/23315298
2.The theory of everything:《萬物理論》是史蒂芬.霍金傳記電影,改編自英國物理學家史蒂芬·霍金的前妻簡·懷爾德的回憶錄《遨游至天涯海角》。如何評價這部電影?可詳細參看
https://www.zhihu.com/question/26769967
His books, too, made his case even to the man in the street. “A Brief History of Time”, published in 1988, sold in millions, though its difficulty meant that many copies languished on coffee tables. His “Briefer History” of 2005 was the same thing made plainer, at least to him. He hoped people would understand it, because it was important for scientists to explain what they were doing. His branch of science, cosmology, was now purporting to answer questions that were once asked of religion. In both books and several more he declared that the laws of science explained everything, without any need to bring God into it. If string theory and its 11 dimensions were understood, for example, it might show how the universe began.
他的書幾乎讓他家喻戶曉。1988年出版的《時間簡史》賣了好幾百萬冊,因其內容艱深,事實上很多時候淪為咖啡廳的擺設。2005年版的《時間簡史》普及版(也稱為時間簡簡史或者新時間簡史)更通俗易懂,至少對他自己而言如此。他希望人們能夠讀懂它,因為這對科學家來說,解釋他們在做什么很重要。他的研究方向宇宙學,如今正試圖回答那些以往都需由宗教來回答的問題。在這兩本書以及他其他的著作中,他聲稱科學規(guī)律闡釋了一切,而無需上帝來幫忙。例如,若(超)弦論和它的11維時空能夠被弄明白,那它就能夠說明宇宙的起源了。
In his day job, as Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University until he retired in 2009, it was black holes in particular that he worked on. He even proclaimed once that he was their master, added to his mystique. Black holes, which were predicted by maths before they were discovered in nature, are singularities—points where the familiar laws of physics cease to apply. They are surrounded, however, by surfaces known as event horizons. Anything crossing the event horizon is swallowed for ever.
2009年退休以前,他的日常工作是劍橋大學的盧卡斯數學教授。黑洞一直是他長期堅持研究的方向。他一度宣稱自己是這個方向的權威,這也增添了他的個人神秘感。人們發(fā)現(xiàn)黑洞之前,在數學上一直是用奇點加以描述的,而我們所熟悉的物理學定律不再適用。然而,它們被稱為“視界”的表面所包圍。任何穿越“視界”之物都將永遠被吞噬。
Lucasian Chair of Mathematics:盧卡斯數學教授席位是英國劍橋大學的一個榮譽職位,授予對象為數學及物理相關的研究者,同一時間只授予一人,牛頓、霍金、狄拉克都曾擔任此教席,此教席的擁有者稱為"盧卡斯教授"(Lucasian Professor)。現(xiàn)任此職的是英國物理學家邁克爾.蓋茨(Michael Cates)。
This was a problem. The second law of thermodynamics, the strictest of nature’s constraints, says that entropy, a form of disorder, must always increase. But if high-entropy systems could be sucked into nothingness by black holes, that would not be the case. Dr Hawking solved this problem by showing that black holes themselves had entropy, and that the more they swallowed, the greater it got. This in turn implied that black holes had a temperature, and thus must give off radiation.
這是一個問題。在自然界最嚴苛的約束熱力學第二定律中,作為熱力學系統(tǒng)無序狀態(tài)的量度單位熵,是不斷增加的(熵的增加是不可逆的) 。但如果高熵系統(tǒng)能被黑洞吞噬,那這個定律就不成立了?;艚鸾淌诮鉀Q了這個問題,他說明了黑洞本身也有熵,而吞噬的物質越多,黑洞就會變得越來越大。這轉而暗示了黑洞是有溫度的,因此也肯定會產生熱輻射。
He gave his name to it, but “Hawking radiation” surprised him as much as anyone; he claimed to have just tripped over it, to his annoyance. (His voice-synthesising machine included a button for jokes.) The radiation was not observed in his lifetime, which was why he never won a Nobel prize. But the link it provided between the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics was rich food for physicists’ imaginations。
他以自己的名字將其命名為“霍金輻射”,但同世人一樣,他對這種輻射也無從下手?;艚痖_玩笑稱,是自己被自己絆倒了。(他的聲音合成器有一個開玩笑的按鈕。)他在有生之年都沒有觀測到這種輻射,這也是他為什么從未獲得諾貝爾獎的原因。但其連通了相對論、量子力學理論和熱力學理論,這極大的豐富了物理學家的想象力。
Finite time, infinite space
時間有限,空間無限
His interest in singularities was not restricted to black holes. The universe itself can be viewed as a singularity, albeit one which human beings are seeing from the inside rather than the out. And he was intensely interested in its origin, coeval with that of time itself. To explain this concept, that before the Big Bang there was truly neither time nor space, he compared it to asking what lay south of the South Pole. He revelled in these unanswered, perhaps unanswerable, questions. When his disability left him behind in conversations, he happily drifted off to them again.
霍金對奇點的興趣并不僅局限黑洞理論層面上。宇宙本身就可以看作為奇點,盡管現(xiàn)在人類只能從內部而不是外部觀看宇宙。并且,霍金極為關注宇宙起源,包括它的初始時間。在“大爆炸”說提出之前,確實不存在時間和空間概念,為了解釋宇宙起源的概念,他將這一問題類比成“南極的南部有什么”。他沉迷于這些未被解答或許沒有答案的問題。雖然殘疾使他不能與人交流,但后來他慢慢能夠再次與人交談,他很高興。
His work also encompassed large N cosmology, Yang-Mills instantons and the S matrix, anti de Sitter space, quantum entanglement, the Brans-Dicke and Hoyle-Narlikar theories of gravitation and Euclidean quantum gravity. His contribution to scientific journals continued throughout, but he wanted most keenly to outline for non-experts, baffled by the weirdness of scientific terms and the apparent contradictions of modern theories, humanity’s place in the universe.
霍金研究領域包括宇宙學、楊米爾斯瞬子、S矩陣、反德西特空間、量子糾纏、布蘭斯-迪克和霍伊爾-納里卡引力理論、歐式量子引力。他在科學期刊上持續(xù)不斷地發(fā)表研究成果,作出了巨大貢獻,但他最熱衷于為并不精通這些研究的人勾畫綱要,這些人往往不太懂科學術語,看不出當代科學理論中有哪些明顯矛盾,也不明白人類在宇宙中處于什么樣的位置。
The departure of scientific reality from what common sense suggests is going on (the sun going round the Earth, for example) no longer threatens political institutions, but it threatens the human psyche just as much as it did in Galileo’s day. Dr Hawking’s South Pole of time was 13.7 billion years in the past—three times as old as the Earth. His mathematics showed that the universe, though finite in time, might be infinite in space.
科學現(xiàn)實與人們理解的常識依然有差距(比如,人們的常識是太陽圍著地球轉),這個事實也不再像伽利略時代那樣威脅國家政治體制,但它對人們心靈的沖擊卻始終如一?;艚鹫J為,南極時間(宇宙的起點)在137億年前,是地球壽命的三倍。他用數學證明宇宙雖然在時間上有限,但在空間上無限。
No philosophy that puts humanity anywhere near the centre of things can cope with facts like these. All that remains is to huddle together in the face of the over-whelmingness of reality. Yet the sight of one huddled man in a wheelchair constantly probing, boldly and even cheekily demonstrating the infinite reach of the human mind, gave people some hope to grasp, as he always wished it would.
世間哲學往往把人放在事物的中心地帶,他們自然無法接受這樣的事實。每當現(xiàn)實被揭開,人們的對應之策只剩聚在一起面面相覷。然而,這個蜷縮在輪椅上的人不斷大膽地探索科學,甚至略帶戲謔的展示人類智慧的極限,讓人類對探索未知懷抱希望,這也一直是霍金的愿景。
翻譯組:
Amber,女,文學研究生,經濟學人愛好者
Forest,女,自由職業(yè),經濟學人愛好者
Yi, 女,財務民工,經濟學人愛好者
Cece,女,消防工作者,CATTI三筆
Lucia,女,翻譯學碩士三年制,經濟學人愛好者
校核組:
Samantha,女,滑冰狂人,鄧倫未婚妻
Lee,男,醫(yī)學英譯 Timberland愛好者
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3觀點 |評論|思考
今天的內容過于專業(yè),所以小編在這里向大家推薦一個公眾號混子曰,推薦的理由也簡單:牛,它能夠把復雜深奧的問題用特別能夠理解的圖片展現(xiàn)出來,今天引用的這一篇很淺顯易懂的解釋了奇點定理和霍金輻射這兩個概念。(文后還有小編的一些膚淺感想,不要錯過)
(強烈推薦大家關注閱讀)
看完相信大家對于霍金的兩項主要成就奇點理論以及霍金輻射有了一個比較清晰的理解,那么小編想扯一扯ALS(肌肉萎縮性側面硬化病),相信很多人和小編一樣對于這個病應該是一臉懵逼的,但是我相信大多數人都聽說過或者參加過冰桶挑戰(zhàn)(ice bucket challenge),當時國外以及國內很多知名人士都發(fā)了自己參加挑戰(zhàn)的照片以及視頻。
毋庸置疑社交網絡加上名人效應讓這次活動迅速火了起來,但同時我們值得深思的時候有多少人是在作秀,而又有多少人是真的了解這背后實際是給ALS(漸凍人)募捐?
All in all(TMC最被吐槽的總結方式),不管是黑貓白貓,能抓住老鼠就是好貓,不管是采取哪種方式,作秀抑或是真心的宣傳,至少結果都是讓吾等普羅大眾對于ALS有了大概的了解,所以這也不得不贊嘆“冰桶挑戰(zhàn)”這一機制的厲害之處:大家雖然從一己之利出發(fā),卻能達到利他的效果,這也就夠了。好了,膚淺的小編今天就先扯到這了,如果喜歡請點贊轉發(fā),如果不喜歡請留言吐槽。
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愿景
小組
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