TE||The cosmos from a wheelchair
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导读
5分钟看完《霍金传》
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The cosmos from a wheelchair
轮椅上的宇宙
本文英文部分选自经济学人Obituary版块
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
一个终身探索宇宙奥秘的男人享年76岁
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·霍金从来都不相信命运。即便他刚好出生在伽利略逝世三百周年纪念日，他也认为仅仅是个巧合而已。（真的不是命运的安排？是巧合？扯犊子）但霍金的确和伽利略有很多相似之处，除了都是伟大的物理学家之外，他们所取得的物理成就，与遭受的苦难一样为人所知。然而，他的苦难并不是来自那些因循守旧的教会政治家，而是因为肌肉萎缩性侧索硬化症（ALS)。但这也意味着霍金(需要和伽利略一样），也必须进行抗争才能让自己不断发声。
1. 命运：小编查了一些资料，这似乎冥冥之中，一切早已注定，有时候不信命，但是却总是挣脱不开，就像霍金1月8号出生，伽利略1月8号去世。爱因斯坦3.14号出生，马克思3.14去世，霍金3.14号去世。和爱因斯坦享年76岁爱因斯坦霍金享年76岁，哈雷彗星周期76年，而且3.14是圆周率的开头，无限循环？难道这只是巧合?俗话说：有趣的灵魂终将相遇，或许是上天也需要霍金去探索宇宙，去发现外宇宙。
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.
年轻时霍金充满自信。他曾经在皇家学会会议上，打断著名的天体物理学家弗雷德·霍伊勒的演讲，指出他在粒子质量上的相关错误。但一旦他再也不能用手写下公式的时候，他只能在脑海中推演空间结构的理论。1985年，他做了气管切开手术后（霍金因患肺炎做了穿气管手术,失去了说话的能力），他所有的思维都只通过一些笨重且高精度的电子设备来实现。由此他的话语变得如此之少，以至于他不得不将所有精力放在探索宇宙的奥秘中，并尽可能地精炼出他不得不说的新发现。他所有的理论都是由一种听起来既机械又奇怪地充满感情的声音呈现出来的。
1.霍金因患肺炎做了穿气管手术,失去了说话的能力，那么霍金是如何说话的？
https://www.zhihu.com/question/23315298
2.The theory of everything：《万物理论》是史蒂芬.霍金传记电影，改编自英国物理学家史蒂芬·霍金的前妻简·怀尔德的回忆录《遨游至天涯海角》。如何评价这部电影？可详细参看
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.
他的书几乎让他家喻户晓。1988年出版的《时间简史》卖了好几百万册，因其内容艰深，事实上很多时候沦为咖啡厅的摆设。2005年版的《时间简史》普及版（也称为时间简简史或者新时间简史）更通俗易懂，至少对他自己而言如此。他希望人们能够读懂它，因为这对科学家来说，解释他们在做什么很重要。他的研究方向宇宙学，如今正试图回答那些以往都需由宗教来回答的问题。在这两本书以及他其他的著作中，他声称科学规律阐释了一切，而无需上帝来帮忙。例如，若(超)弦论和它的11维时空能够被弄明白，那它就能够说明宇宙的起源了。
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，他的日常工作是剑桥大学的卢卡斯数学教授。黑洞一直是他长期坚持研究的方向。他一度宣称自己是这个方向的权威，这也增添了他的个人神秘感。人们发现黑洞之前，在数学上一直是用奇点加以描述的，而我们所熟悉的物理学定律不再适用。然而，它们被称为“视界”的表面所包围。任何穿越“视界”之物都将永远被吞噬。
Lucasian Chair of Mathematics：卢卡斯数学教授席位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)。
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.
这是一个问题。在自然界最严苛的约束热力学第二定律中，作为热力学系统无序状态的量度单位熵，是不断增加的（熵的增加是不可逆的） 。但如果高熵系统能被黑洞吞噬，那这个定律就不成立了。霍金教授解决了这个问题，他说明了黑洞本身也有熵，而吞噬的物质越多，黑洞就会变得越来越大。这转而暗示了黑洞是有温度的，因此也肯定会产生热辐射。
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。
他以自己的名字将其命名为“霍金辐射”，但同世人一样，他对这种辐射也无从下手。霍金开玩笑称，是自己被自己绊倒了。（他的声音合成器有一个开玩笑的按钮。）他在有生之年都没有观测到这种辐射，这也是他为什么从未获得诺贝尔奖的原因。但其连通了相对论、量子力学理论和热力学理论，这极大的丰富了物理学家的想象力。
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.
霍金对奇点的兴趣并不仅局限黑洞理论层面上。宇宙本身就可以看作为奇点，尽管现在人类只能从内部而不是外部观看宇宙。并且，霍金极为关注宇宙起源，包括它的初始时间。在“大爆炸”说提出之前，确实不存在时间和空间概念，为了解释宇宙起源的概念，他将这一问题类比成“南极的南部有什么”。他沉迷于这些未被解答或许没有答案的问题。虽然残疾使他不能与人交流，但后来他慢慢能够再次与人交谈，他很高兴。
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.
霍金研究领域包括宇宙学、杨米尔斯瞬子、S矩阵、反德西特空间、量子纠缠、布兰斯-迪克和霍伊尔-纳里卡引力理论、欧式量子引力。他在科学期刊上持续不断地发表研究成果，作出了巨大贡献，但他最热衷于为并不精通这些研究的人勾画纲要，这些人往往不太懂科学术语，看不出当代科学理论中有哪些明显矛盾，也不明白人类在宇宙中处于什么样的位置。
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.
科学现实与人们理解的常识依然有差距（比如，人们的常识是太阳围着地球转），这个事实也不再像伽利略时代那样威胁国家政治体制，但它对人们心灵的冲击却始终如一。霍金认为，南极时间（宇宙的起点）在137亿年前，是地球寿命的三倍。他用数学证明宇宙虽然在时间上有限，但在空间上无限。
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.
世间哲学往往把人放在事物的中心地带，他们自然无法接受这样的事实。每当现实被揭开，人们的对应之策只剩聚在一起面面相觑。然而，这个蜷缩在轮椅上的人不断大胆地探索科学，甚至略带戏谑的展示人类智慧的极限，让人类对探索未知怀抱希望，这也一直是霍金的愿景。
翻译组：
Amber，女，文学研究生，经济学人爱好者
Forest，女，自由职业，经济学人爱好者
Yi, 女，财务民工，经济学人爱好者
Cece，女，消防工作者，CATTI三笔
Lucia，女，翻译学硕士三年制，经济学人爱好者
校核组：
Samantha，女，滑冰狂人，邓伦未婚妻
Lee，男，医学英译 Timberland爱好者
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3观点 |评论|思考
今天的内容过于专业，所以小编在这里向大家推荐一个公众号混子曰，推荐的理由也简单：牛，它能够把复杂深奥的问题用特别能够理解的图片展现出来，今天引用的这一篇很浅显易懂的解释了奇点定理和霍金辐射这两个概念。（文后还有小编的一些肤浅感想，不要错过）
(强烈推荐大家关注阅读）
看完相信大家对于霍金的两项主要成就奇点理论以及霍金辐射有了一个比较清晰的理解，那么小编想扯一扯ALS(肌肉萎缩性侧面硬化病)，相信很多人和小编一样对于这个病应该是一脸懵逼的，但是我相信大多数人都听说过或者参加过冰桶挑战（ice bucket challenge)，当时国外以及国内很多知名人士都发了自己参加挑战的照片以及视频。
毋庸置疑社交网络加上名人效应让这次活动迅速火了起来，但同时我们值得深思的时候有多少人是在作秀，而又有多少人是真的了解这背后实际是给ALS(渐冻人）募捐？
All in all（TMC最被吐槽的总结方式），不管是黑猫白猫，能抓住老鼠就是好猫，不管是采取哪种方式，作秀抑或是真心的宣传，至少结果都是让吾等普罗大众对于ALS有了大概的了解，所以这也不得不赞叹“冰桶挑战”这一机制的厉害之处：大家虽然从一己之利出发，却能达到利他的效果，这也就够了。好了，肤浅的小编今天就先扯到这了，如果喜欢请点赞转发，如果不喜欢请留言吐槽。
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