1.I’m sure that, throughout the hundred-thousand-odd years of our species’ existence, and even before, our ancestors looked up at the night sky,
我十分确信在人类诞生以来 的大概10万多年 甚至比这更长的时间里- 我们的祖先仰望夜空
2.and wondered what stars are.
想知道那些星星究竟是什么
3.Wondering, therefore, how to explain what they saw in terms of things unseen.
其实也就是想要 把他们看见的东西 用不可见的东西来解释
4.Okay, so, most people only wondered that occasionally, like today, in breaks from whatever normally preoccupied them.
这样的话，大多数人看似 只是偶尔如此想想，比如说像在今天 从日常活动中 抽空解脱出来的时候才行
5.But what normally preoccupied them also involved yearning to know.
但实际上人们的日常活动 同样富含着对知识的渴望
6.They wished they knew how to prevent their food supply from sometimes failing, and how they could rest when they were tired, without risking starvation,
人们希望知道 如何避免食物来源 不时的中断 如何在疲惫时得以充分休整 又不会因为停止劳作而断粮
7.be warmer, cooler, safer, in less pain.
如何创造更温暖，或更凉爽；更安全的环境 如何减轻痛苦
8.I bet those prehistoric cave artists would have loved to know how to draw better.
我敢打赌远古时代的岩洞画家们 都想知道 怎样画得更漂亮些
9.In every aspect of their lives, they wished for progress, just as we do.
我们的祖先在生活的方方面面 都像我们一样地期望进步
10.But they failed, almost completely, to make any.
但是他们得到的发展微乎其微
11.They didn’t know how to.
他们还不懂其中的秘诀
12.Discoveries like fire happen so rarely, that from an individual’s point of view, the world never improved.
像人工生火这样的重大发明 凤毛麟角，于是乎从一个个人的角度看来 世界几乎毫无改善
13.Nothing new was learned.
知识停滞不前
14.The first clue to the origin of starlight happened as recently as 1899: radioactivity.
星星闪光的奥秘初步被揭开 是在不久前的1899年- 放射现象
15.Within 40 years, physicists discovered the whole explanation, expressed, as usual, in elegant symbols.
而这之后的仅仅40年间 物理学家们发现了一个完整的解释 然后像往常一样用简明优雅的数学符号把它表示了出来
16.But never mind the symbols.
可别把这些符号不当回事
17.Think how many discoveries they represent.
想想它们表达了 多少人类的发现
18.Nuclei and nuclear reactions, of course.
这些么就是原子核 核反应
19.But isotopes, particles of electricity, antimatter, neutrinos, the conversion of mass to energy — that’s E=mc^2 — gamma rays, transmutation.
再看看这些：同位素 带电粒子 反物质 中微子 物质到能量的转化 E=mc^2 伽马射线 嬗变（一种元素通过核反应转化为另一种元素）
20.That ancient dream that had always eluded the alchemists was achieved through these same theories that explained starlight and other ancient mysteries,
那个古代炼金术师们为之枉费心机的梦想 现在由这些 解释了星光的实质 以及其他古代的谜团
21.and new, unexpected phenomena.
和意料之外新现象的理论变为现实
22.That all that, discovered in 40 years, had not been [discovered] in the previous hundred thousand, was not for lack of thinking about stars, and all those other urgent problems they had.
这40年中的所有发现 是数千年来所未有的 而这可不能归结为古人思维懒惰 对星星啊，还有那些迫切的问题不闻不问
23.They even arrived at answers, such as myths, that dominated their lives, yet bore almost no resemblance to the truth.
他们不光思考了，还给出了答案 比如说神话 可虽说神话统治了古人的生活，包罗万象 却与真正的现实 几乎搭不上边
24.The tragedy of that protracted stagnation isn’t sufficiently recognized, I think.
这种长期认知停滞所造成的悲哀 我觉得，并没有被古人足够重视
25.These were people with brains of essentially the same design that eventually did discover all those things.
古人们的大脑 和我们的这些发现了种种新知识的大脑 实质上没有分别
26.But that ability to make progress remained almost unused, until the event that revolutionized the human condition, and changed the universe.
但是其中那个用来产生进步的潜力 始终几乎没有被利用 直到有一件事 彻底更新了人们的生活状态 改天换地
27.Or so we should hope.
至少我们希望情况是这样的
28.Because that event was the scientific revolution, ever since which our knowledge of the physical world, and of how to adapt it to our wishes,
这个大事件就是 科学革命 从那以后我们对于 物质世界的认知 和对如何根据我们的意愿改造它的了解
29.has been growing relentlessly.
就一个劲地增长着
30.Now, what had changed?
现在想想，到底是发生了什么变化呢？
31.What were people now doing for the first time that made that difference between stagnation and rapid, open-ended discovery?
当时人们 究竟初次尝试了什么 就打破了僵局 开始了快速而无休无止的发现之旅？
32.How to make that difference is surely the most important universal truth that it is possible to know.
这一僵局的打破 肯定是一个极为重要的广泛真理 而我们是可以了解它的
33.Worryingly, there is no consensus about what it is.
让人担忧的是，对它究竟是怎么做到的人们众说纷纭
34.So, I’ll tell you.
我这就来说说我的解释
35.But I’ll have to backtrack a little first.
但先得稍稍回顾一下
36.Before the scientific revolution, they believed that everything important, knowable, was already known, enshrined in ancient writings, institutions,
在科学革命发生之前 古人相信一切重要而可知的事物 都已经被了解了 这些知识被高高供起在古籍里，经院中
37.and in some genuinely useful rules of thumb — which were, however, entrenched as dogmas, along with many falsehoods.
还在日常生活的惯用窍门中被深信不疑 而这些窍门，和许多谬论一同 都成了根深蒂固的教条
38.So they believed that knowledge came from authorities that actually knew very little.
那时人们相信知识来自权威 这些权威其实知道的不多
39.And therefore progress depended on learning how to reject the authority of learned men, priests, traditions and rulers.
所以知识的进步 取决于学会如何摈弃 学究 教士，传统习惯和统治者们的权威
40.Which is why the scientific revolution had to have a wider context: the Enlightenment, a revolution in how people sought knowledge,
这就是为什么科学革命 必须有一个大背景 那就是启蒙运动 对于求知方法的一场革命
41.trying not to rely on authority.
试着摆脱对权威的依赖
42.”Take no one’s word for it.”
“切勿轻信人言”
43.But that can’t be what made the difference.
可这还不够
44.Authorities had been rejected before, many times.
历史上摈弃权威的例子比比皆是
45.And that rarely, if ever, caused anything like the scientific revolution.
而这些事件的结果却很难，或根本不能 与科学革命同日而语
46.At the time, what they thought distinguished science was a radical idea about things unseen, known as empiricism.
在那个时候，启蒙学者们认为 科学的独特标志 是一个关于不可见事物的激进看法 叫做经验主义
47.All knowledge derives from the senses.
认为所有的知识来自我们的感官
48.Well, we’ve seen that that can’t be true.
呵呵，我们知道这样说有些偏颇
49.It did help by promoting observation and experiment.
但经验主义成就了 科学观察与实验
50.But, from the outset, it was obvious that there was something horribly wrong with it.
然而乍一看之下，似乎很明显地 经验主义存在着可怕的漏洞
51.Knowledge comes from the senses.
“知识源自感官”
52.In what language? Certainly not the language of mathematics, in which, Galileo rightly said, the book of nature is written.
那么感官得来的知识由什么语言承载呢？肯定不会是数学语言吧 可伽利略却有此精辟一语 “自然之书乃数学著成”
53.Look at the world. You don’t see equations carved on to mountainsides.
看看这世界，你看不到山崖上刻着方程式 刻着方程式
54.If you did, it would be because people had carved them.
就算碰巧看到了，那也是因为人们 刻上去的
55.By the way, why don’t we do that?
顺便问一句，我们干嘛不这样做呢？
56.What’s wrong with us?
这不是有毛病嘛？
57.(Laughter) Empiricism is inadequate because, well, scientific theories explain the seen in terms of the unseen.
（笑声） 经验主义本身是不足的 这大概是因为 科学理论用不可见的来解释可见的
58.And the unseen, you have to admit, doesn’t come to us through the senses.
而那些不可见的–你得承认– 可不是从感官得来的
59.We don’t see those nuclear reactions in stars.
我们可看不见恒星中的核反应
60.We don’t see the origin of species.
看不见物种起源
61.We don’t see the curvature of space-time, and other universes.
还有时空弯曲 其他的平行宇宙
62.But we know about those things.
但我们知道这些
63.How?
我们是怎么做到的呢？
64.Well, the classic empiricist answer is induction.
经验主义的经典的答案是“归纳法”
65.The unseen resembles the seen.
认为不可见的与可见的相似
66.But it doesn’t.
其实不然
67.You know what the clinching evidence was that space-time is curved.
你能找到一个决定性的反例 比如：时空是弯曲的这一事实
68.It was a photograph, not of space-time, but of an eclipse, with a dot there rather than there.
我们知道它的证据是一张照片，不是关于时空本身 而是拍摄的一次日食，上面有个小点在这儿而不在那儿
69.And the evidence for evolution?
至于物种起源的证据呢？
70.Some rocks and some finches.
一些岩石和雀类化石
71.And parallel universes? Again: dots there, rather than there, on a screen.
平行宇宙的证据何在啊？又是屏幕上这儿有些点 而不是那儿
72.What we see, in all these cases, bears no resemblance to the reality that we conclude is responsible — only a long chain of theoretical reasoning
这些事例中我们眼睛观察到的 和事实没有什么相似之处 –所以前面的“相似说”不成立– 只有一条长长的理论推导与解读的链条
73.and interpretation, connects them.
把它们（观察现象与真理）连在一起
74.”Ah!” say creationists, “So you admit it’s all interpretation.
于是那些神创论者就说:“啊哈！” “所以你承认这些科学理论都只是某种解读
75.No one has ever seen evolution.
没人知道答案是什么
76.We see rocks.
我们都看得见石头
77.You have your interpretation. We have ours.
你有你的理解，我们有我们的
78.Yours comes from guesswork; ours, from the Bible.”
你的理解来自理论猜测 我们的来自圣经。”
79.But what creationist and empiricists both ignore is that, in that sense, no one has ever seen a bible either, that the eye only detects light, which we don’t perceive.
可是有一点神创论者和经验主义者同时忽略了 那就是，从先前的那种意义上看 没有人真正切实“观察”到一本圣经 眼睛只是探测到阳光，而我们无法有意识地感知它
80.Brains only detect nerve impulses.
大脑只侦测神经脉冲
81.And they don’t perceive even those as what they really are, namely electrical crackles.
但却无法感知它们究竟本身是什么 而它们其实是带电粒子“小爆破”
82.So we perceive nothing as what it really is.
如此说来我们无法感知任何事物的现实究竟是什么
83.Our connection to reality is never just perception.
而我们与现实的联系 从不会只是感知
84.It’s always, as Karl Popper put it, theory-laden.
而是如卡尔·波普尔所说 充满着理论假设
85.Scientific knowledge isn’t derived from anything.
科学知识不是从什么直接推导而来
86.It’s like all knowledge. It’s conjectural, guesswork, tested by observation, not derived from it.
而是像所有其他知识一样，是假设性的，一种推测 由观察来检验 却不从观察直接推导而来
87.So, were testable conjectures the great innovation that opened the intellectual prison gates?
这么说来，是不是可以检验的假设 就是把人类放出认知牢笼的伟大发明呢？
88.No. Contrary to what’s usually said, testability is common, in myths and all sorts of other irrational modes of thinking.
不是。和人们常常所说的不同 可检验性其实不稀奇，就是 在神话和其他非理性的思维方式中都广泛存在
89.Any crank claiming the sun will go out next Tuesday has got a testable prediction.
随便哪个家伙想说下周二太阳将要熄灭 他的假设都是可检验的
90.Consider the ancient Greek myth explaining seasons.
让我们想想一个古希腊的神话 是用来解释季节更替的
91.Hades, God of the Underworld, kidnaps Persephone, the Goddess of Spring, and negotiates a forced marriage contract, requiring her to return regularly, and lets her go.
哈德斯，冥界之神 绑架了春之神普西芬妮 又强迫她签下一纸婚书 只允许她每年定时回到地面，然后就放她走了
92.And each year, she is magically compelled to return.
于是每一年 她都被某种魔力带回冥界
93.And her mother, Demeter, Goddess of the Earth, is sad, and makes it cold and barren.
她的妈妈迪米特 大地女神 十分伤心，土地于是冻结荒芜
94.That myth is testable.
这则神话是可以检验的
95.If Winter is caused by Demeter’s sadness, then it must happen everywhere on Earth, simultaneously.
如果迪米特的哀伤导致了冬天 那么它必须在地球上的所有地方同时发生
96.So if the ancient Greeks had only known that Austrailia is at its warmest when Demeter is at her saddest, they’d have known that their theory is false.
所以其实只要古希腊人知道澳大利亚 在迪米特最伤心时正经历着最热的天气 它们肯定知道自己的理论错了
97.So what was wrong with that myth, and with all pre-scientific thinking, and what, then, made that momentous difference?
那么这则神话究竟错在哪儿呢？ 科学到来前人们的思维有什么问题呢？ 又是什么改变了这一切呢？
98.I think there is one thing you have to care about.
我觉得有一样东西我们得关注
99.And that implies testability, the scientific method, the Enlightenment, and everything.
它同时意味着 可验证性，科学方法 启蒙运动，还有前面说的一切
100.And here is the crucial thing.
我现在要说的就是那个万分重要的东西：
101.There is such a thing as a defect in a story.
一个故事里可能出现缺陷
暂无讨论，说说你的看法吧
