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The cosmos from a wheelchair
轮椅上的宇宙
英文部分选自经济学人20180317期讣告版块
The cosmos from a wheelchair
轮椅上的宇宙
Stephen Hawking died on March 14th
斯蒂芬·霍金于2018年3月14日逝世
The man who explained the universe was 76
他的生命终于76岁，他曾解释宇宙奥秘
Mar 14th 2018
2018年3月14日
PREDESTINATION was not part of Stephen Hawking’ssystem 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（Stephen Hawking）的字典里没有“命中注定”一说。他在伽利略逝世三百年后的同一天出生，只不过是个巧合而已。除了都是伟大的物理学家之外，两人确有相似之处。他因物理学声名远扬，同时也因所经历的苦难广为人知。他所遭受的苦难并不是由于教廷掌权人员要求服从，禁止自由探索，而是由于患上肌萎缩侧索硬化症（注：俗称渐冻症），但这意味着，为了让别人听到他的声音，他也同样需要进行一番斗争。
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 atracheotomyin 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.
年轻时，他从不缺乏信心。在皇家学会，他中途打断著名天体物理学家弗雷德·霍伊尔（Fred Hoyle）的演讲，纠正其关于粒子质量的错误说法。后来因为患病不能手写公式，他只能在脑中利用几何图形演算理论。1985年，他接受了气管切开术，从此他那浩瀚如海的想法只能通过笨重、有限的科技手段向外界传达。于是他只好减少言语，更多时候深深凝视宇宙，以尽可能精炼的方式表达新的想法。他关于万物的理论都以一种既机械又带着奇怪情绪的声音传递出来。
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.
他的几本著作也风靡大街小巷。1988年出版的《时间简史》，销量超过百万册，不过内容晦涩难懂，许多都沦为咖啡桌上的摆设。2005年，他又出版了《时间简史（普及版）》，至少对他来说是普及版。他希望这样读者可以看懂，因为科学家理应向大众解释自己的研究内容。他所研究的宇宙学旨在回答曾经属于宗教范畴的问题。在这两本书以及其他著作中，他宣称应该通过科学规律而不是上帝来解释万物，例如宇宙的起源就可以通过弦理论及其11个维度来解释。
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, adding 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.
他平常在剑桥大学担任“卢卡斯教授”，专门研究黑洞，一直到2009年退休。他有一次声称自己是他们的大师，这让人们觉得他更加神秘。黑洞先是由人类通过数学预测出来，然后才在自然界中发现的，因此被人们称为奇点，也就是人们熟悉的物理定律不再适用的点。但是，黑洞被“事件视界”那样的边界所包围。任何东西在经过“事件视界”时，都会被永远吞噬。
注释：
1.卢卡斯数学教授席位（Lucasian Chair of Mathematics）是英国剑桥大学的一个荣誉职位，授予对象为数学及物理相关的研究者，同一时间只授予一人，牛顿、霍金、狄拉克都曾担任此教席，此教席的拥有者称为“卢卡斯教授”（Lucasian Professor）。现任此职的是英国物理学家迈克尔·盖茨（Michael Cates）。
2.霍金提出的黑洞理论：黑洞的“事件视界”（event horizons）——即任何东西都无法逃脱的边界——永远不会缩小。
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.
这里就存在一个问题。最严格的自然界定律热力学第二定律认为：熵作为一种无序形式，总在增加。但如果高熵系统可以被黑洞吸入虚无，情况与热力学第二定律的说法就不同了。霍金通过证明黑洞本身也有熵值来解决这个问题，黑洞吞噬的东西越多，熵值就变得越大。反之，这意味着黑洞存在温度，因此必然向外辐射。
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.
他用自己的名字给这种现象命名，但“霍金辐射”出乎世人的意料，也让他本人深感诧异；他声称，刚被这辐射绊倒，真是令人生气。（他的语音合成机上有个笑话按钮。）终其一生，该辐射也未被实际观测到，这也是他没有获得诺贝尔奖的原因。但是，“霍金辐射”为相对论、量子力学和热力学等各大理论间架起了桥梁，为物理学家发挥想象提供了沃土。
Finite time, infinite space
时间有限，空间无限
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.
他对奇点的兴趣不仅限于黑洞。宇宙本身也可以看作一个奇点，尽管人类是在宇宙内部进行观测，而非从外向内看。他对宇宙的起源很感兴趣，也就是与时间同在的宇宙。为了解释在大爆炸之前时空皆无的概念，他用“南极之南什么都没有”作类比。他沉迷于这些没有得到解答、也可能永远无法解答的问题。身体的残疾让他跟不上与他人的对话，但他会很欣喜地再次回头思考那些问题。
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.
霍金的研究内容还包括大N宇宙学、杨·米尔斯瞬子与S矩阵、反德西特空间、量子纠缠、布兰斯·迪克-霍伊尔·纳里卡引力理论以及欧几里德量子引力等。他从未停下科研的脚步，但他最想做的，还是帮助非专业人士看穿晦涩科学术语的迷雾、厘清现代物理理论中明显的矛盾，从而认识到人类在宇宙中的位置。
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.
今天，我们不再身处伽利略的年代，提出日心说这种有悖于常识的理论，也不需要担心会遭到政治势力的迫害，然而超前的理论依旧是对大众心智的巨大考验，从这个意义上说，我们和伽利略的时代并无二致。霍金认为，时间南极是137亿年前，地球的年龄只有其三分之一。他通过数学推演得出结论，时间虽有尽头，空间却无穷尽。
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 overwhelmingness 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.
任何人本主义哲学观都断然无法接受这种论断。排山倒海的现实面前，他们唯一能做的只有蜷缩一隅、紧紧相拥。然而，如霍金所愿，人们每每看到这位蜷缩在轮椅上的思想巨人不懈地探索，无所畏惧、甚至近乎鲁莽地上下求索时，就能感受到人类智慧的无限可能，也在心中燃起探寻真相的希望。
翻译组：
Alison，女，翻译路上的小蜗牛
Cece，消防人+经济学人粉丝（组长）
Des，男，自古皆有死，莫不饮恨而吞声
校对组：
Mosy，绘本、演讲、戏剧英文教育践行者
Claire，进进退退，摇摇摆摆，探索世界ing
Luc，男，在北京，喜欢睡觉（翻译校对）
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