新航道雅思团队精选|Stephen Hawking-- An ordinary genius

发布时间：2018-11-15 14:02

Stephen Hawking-- An ordinary genius

（斯蒂芬.霍金—一个普通的天才）

摘自20 October 2018 | NewScientist

Most people as famous as Stephen Hawking face forensically intimate scrutiny. But in its way, Hawking’s personality was as insulated as the Queen’s, impermeably fortified by the role allotted to him. There’s a hint in Brief Answers that he knew this: “I fit the stereotype of a disabled genius,” he writes. It perhaps suited Hawking that the media were content with the cliché – he gave little impression of caring for the touchy-feely.

(大部分像是斯蒂芬.霍金一样的名人都面临着公众密切的关注。但是这样的话，霍金的性格就像是女王一样，被所指定给他的角色密不透风地包围着。在霍金的简单回复中我们可以看出他知道这个情况，他写道：“我符合(人们)对一个残疾天才的固有印象。媒体满足于对霍金陈词滥调似的报道貌似正和霍金的心意—他也不像那种多愁善感的人。)

In the foreword to Brief Answers, Eddie Redmayne, who played Hawking in the 2014 biopic The Theory of Everything, reminds us that the physicist would have preferred the film to have had “more physics and fewer feelings”.

(在(霍金遗作)大问小答这本书的前言中，Eddie Redmayne(他曾经在2014年传记电影万物理论中扮演过霍金)提醒我们霍金本来希望这部电影更多一些物理学，少一些情感。)

I approached this book with some trepidation. You know he won’t go wrong with cosmology, relativity or quantum mechanics, but when Hawking stepped outside that comfort zone the results were often touch and go.

(我是带着一些怯意读了这本书。大家知道霍金在宇宙学，相对论或者量子力学方面不会有错，但是当他走出舒适区情况就说不准了。)

The scientific essays included in this book supply Hawking’s Greatest Hits: his work with mathematician Roger Penrose on gravitational singularities and their relation to the big bang; his realisation that black holes will emit energy (Hawking radiation); his speculations about the origin of the universe in a chance quantum fluctuation; the debate (still unresolved) about whether black holes destroy information.

(这本书中包含的科学论文让我们看到霍金最流行的作品：他与数学家Roger Penrose合著的关于引力奇点及其与大爆炸的关系的文章;他认识到黑洞能发出能量(霍金辐射)的论述;他对于宇宙起源于一次偶然的量子涨落的看法;还有关于黑洞是否摧毁信息的辩论(还未有定论。)

Hawking, as fellow cosmologist and long-time friend Kip Thorne outlines in his introduction, helped to integrate some of the central concepts of physics: general relativity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and information theory. It is a phenomenal body of work.

(正如与霍金同领域的宇宙学家，同时也是他的老朋友Kip Thorne在引言中提到的，霍金为我们整合了物理学的核心概念：广义相对论，量子力学，热力动力学以及信息理论。工作量极其庞大。)

Sometimes there is a plainness to his prose that is touching even when it sounds like a self-help manual: “Be brave, be curious, be determined, overcome the odds. It can be done.” His plea for inspirational teaching, his concerns about climate change and environmental degradation, his contempt for Trump and the regressive aspects of Brexit, and (albeit not in this book) his championing of the UK’s National Health Service, made you glad to have Hawking on your side.

(有时候他的文章平实到令人触动，尽管听起来像是自救手册：“勇敢一些，好奇一些，坚定一些，克服困难。可以做到的。”他对启发式教学的主张，对气候变化以及环境恶化的关注，对于特朗普的不屑以及欧洲脱欧这种倒退现象的看法，以及尽管书中未提及的对英国的国民医疗保健制度的支持，让你觉的有霍金在身边真好。)

A common danger with such collections is repetition. But the recurring and familiar passages are themselves quite revealing, for they show Hawking curating his image: the boy always taking things apart but not always managing to put them together again, the man who told us to “look up at the stars and not down at your feet”.

(这种作品集最常见的问题就是重复。但是重复的一些熟悉的段落本身都非常有启发性，因为它们向我们展示了霍金的形象：一个总是想把东西拆开，但不能总是再装回去的小孩子;一个告诉我们要抬头仰望星空,而不是脚下的成年人。)

There’s no doubt that Hawking cared passionately about the future of humankind and the potential of science to improve it. His advocacy resembles the old-fashioned boosterism of H. G. Wells in later life, tempered by an awareness of the dire potential of technologies in the wrong hands.

(毫无疑问霍金非常关心人类的未来以及科学改善人类未来的能力。他的主张像是H.G. Wells(赫伯特·乔治·威尔斯)晚年的老派主张,意识到科技落到坏人之手的可怕后果。)

One of the most striking features of this book, however, is the lack of extracurricular context, from, say, art, music, literature, philosophy. In some pieces, this exposes gaps – for example, when Hawking begins an essay called “Is there a God?” with “people will always cling to religion, because it gives comfort, and they do not trust or understand science”. God, he tells us (as no theologian ever did), is all about explaining the origin of the universe. And on what grounds does he claim that most people define God as “a human-like being, with whom one can have a personal relationship”? Even if true, most people’s notions of a molecule also bear scant resemblance to what well-informed folk say on matter.

(然而这本书最显著的特征之一是缺少学科外的语境，比如来自艺术，音乐，文学还有哲学等领域的。在有些篇章中，暴露了一些欠缺。比如，在一篇“有上帝存在吗?”这篇文章的开头，霍金开头写道：人们总是信仰宗教是因为宗教给人宽慰，而他们并不相信或者理解科学。”他说上帝无非是解释宇宙起源而已。人们是基于何种理由认为大部人认为上帝是长得与人类相似，可以与人类有私下关系呢?就算可以，大部人对于分子的概念也不会与那些博识之人对于物质的看法有丝毫相似之处。)

There’s worse. “People might well have argued that it was a waste of money to send Columbus on a wild goose chase. Yet the discovery of the New World made a profound difference to the Old. Just think, we wouldn’t have had the Big Mac or KFC,” he writes, the joke perhaps hiding a reluctance to probe more deeply. The remark appears in a defence of space exploration, but he shows no more inclination to examine the real reasons for the space race than to reflect on the realities of Columbus’s mission.

(还有更糟糕的。霍金还写道：“人们有可能认为让哥伦布徒劳无益的出航纯属浪费钱。但是新世界的发现对旧世界产生深远影响。试想，(如果没有新大陆)我们就没有巨无霸(麦当劳的一种汉堡)或者肯德基了。”刚才这番话出现在支持太空探索的文章中，但是霍金并无意于反思哥伦布出航使命的真实情形，也无意于进一步探究太空竞赛的真正原因。)

But this is all, in a sense, unfair. Hawking was a great scientist who had a remarkable life, and in another universe, without motor neurone disease (well,

he did like the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics), we would have no reason to confer authority on his thoughts about all and sundry. We would not deny his right to ordinariness and would see his occasional arrogance for no more or less than it was.

(但是这在一定意义上来说是不公平的。霍金是一个伟大的科学家，有过非凡的一生，并且在另一个宇宙中没有运动神经元疾病(好吧，霍金并不喜欢量子力学里“平行世界”的解释)，我们没有理由将他对所有杂七杂八事情的想法视为权威。我们不应否认他作为普通人的权利，也不能放大或缩小他偶尔显示出的傲慢。)

There is every reason to believe Hawking enjoyed his fame, and that’s a cheering thought. That we seek to put him on a pedestal is our problem, not his. We should celebrate his extraordinary achievements, both personal and scientific – but to paraphrase Brecht’s Galileo, unhappy is the land that needs a guru.

(我们有理由相信霍金对于他的名声乐在其中，而这让人很开心。我们力求将他放上神坛是我们的问题，不是他的。我们应该为他非凡的成就喝彩，无论是个人成就还是科学成就，但是套用一下布莱希特在伽利略传中的话：需要英雄的国家是不幸的。)

essential words and expressions

intimate adj.亲密的，密切的

scrutiny n.详细审查，审视

insulate v.隔离，隔绝

stereotype n.刻板印象

cliché n.陈词滥调

biopic n.传记电影

cosmology n.宇宙学

quantum mechanics 量子力学

gravitational singularity 引力奇点

phenomenal adj.非凡的，惊人的