“霍金教授是特别的。全世界的人们都会满怀敬意地铭记他。”——剑桥大学悼念霍金教授
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——史蒂芬•霍金
”本文英文来源 | 剑桥大学官网
中文来源 | 新浪新闻 译•世界
剑桥大学悼念霍金(图片来源:剑桥大学主页)
Friends and colleagues from the University of Cambridge have paid tribute to Professor Stephen Hawking, who died today at the age of 76.
霍金于2018年3月14日去世,享年76岁。他生前就职于剑桥大学,同事及友人为他吊唁。
Widely regarded as one of the world’s most brilliant minds, he was known throughout the world for his contributions to science, his books, his television appearances, his lectures and through biographical films. He leaves three children and three grandchildren.
霍金是公认的最聪明的智者之一。他在科学领域的贡献,他的著作、演讲、在电视上的形象以及在大荧幕上的自传电影都为众人所熟知。他有三个子女,还有三个孙辈。
Professor Hawking broke new ground on the basic laws which govern the universe, including the revelation that black holes have a temperature and produce radiation, now known as Hawking radiation. At the same time, he also sought to explain many of these complex scientific ideas to a wider audience through popular books, most notably his bestseller A Brief History of Time.
霍金教授在宇宙学研究领域有开拓性的建树:他提出“霍金辐射”理论,即宇宙黑洞是有温度且有辐射的。同时,他还致力于将这些复杂深奥的科学理论介绍给普通大众。其中最为畅销的一本便是《时间简史》。
He was awarded the CBE in 1982, was made a Companion of Honour in 1989, and was awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. He was the recipient of numerous awards, medals and prizes, including the Copley Medal of the Royal Society, the Albert Einstein Award, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Fundamental Physics Prize, and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award for Basic Sciences. He was a Fellow of The Royal Society, a Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
1982年,霍金被授予大英帝国司令勋章;1989年,他获得白金汉宫荣誉勋爵;2009年,他又获得了总统自由勋章(美国和平时期授予个人的最高奖章)。他得过的奖章数不胜数,包括皇家学会科普利奖章、世界理论物理研究的最高奖-爱因斯坦奖、皇家天文学会金质奖章和BBVA基金会基础科学知识奖。他是英国皇家学会、教皇科学院和美国国家科学院三院会员。
He achieved all this despite a decades-long battle with motor neurone disease, with which he was diagnosed while a student, and eventually led to him being confined to a wheelchair and to communicating via his instantly recognisable computerised voice. His determination in battling with his condition made him a champion for those with a disability around the world.
在如此卓越的成就背后是霍金长达数十年与渐冻症的艰苦抗争。他早在学生时期就已经被确诊了。到后来,他不得不依靠轮椅和电脑语音识别系统活动与发声。他以惊人的毅力与病魔斗争,成为了全世界病友的榜样。
Professor Hawking came to Cambridge in 1962 as a PhD student, and rose to become the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a position once held by Isaac Newton, in 1979. In 2009, he retired from this position and was the Dennis Stanton Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery Director of Research in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics until his death. He was also a member of the University's Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, which he founded in 2007. He was active scientifically and in the media until the end of his life.
1962年,霍金来到剑桥大学攻读博士学位。1979年,他接替牛顿成为剑桥大学卢卡斯数学教授。2009年,他从这个职位上退休,并加入与剑桥大学丹尼斯-艾弗瑞 (Dennis Stanton Avery) 教授和剑桥大学研究主管徐惠宝 (Sally Tsui Wong-Avery)主管的应用数学与理论物理系研究工作。2007年,他创办了剑桥理论宇宙学中心,他也是中心成员之一。直至他过世之前,他都一直保持着在科研与媒体上的活跃度。
Professor Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, paid tribute, saying, “Professor Hawking was a unique individual who will be remembered with warmth and affection not only in Cambridge but all over the world. His exceptional contributions to scientific knowledge and the popularisation of science and mathematics have left an indelible legacy. His character was an inspiration to millions. He will be much missed.”
剑桥大学副校长史蒂芬·杜思齐说,“霍金教授是特别的。不仅是剑桥大学的师生,全世界的人们都会满怀敬意地铭记他。他在科学及科普领域的卓越贡献堪称传奇。他本人更是无数人的精神领袖。我们永远怀念他。”
Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8, 1942 in Oxford although his family was living in north London at the time. In 1959, the family moved to St Albans where he attended St Albans School. Despite the fact that he was always ranked at the lower end of his class by teachers, his school friends nicknamed him ‘Einstein’ and seemed to have encouraged his interest in science. In his own words, “physics and astronomy offered the hope of understanding where we came from and why we are here. I wanted to fathom the depths of the Universe.”
1942年1月8日,霍金出生于牛津。彼时,他的家人住在伦敦以北。1959年,霍金随家人搬至圣奥尔本斯,并在当地求学。虽然当时霍金的成绩排名并不靠前,但是他的同学们都叫他“小爱因斯坦”。这可能鼓励了他进一步探索科学。用他自己的话来说,“物理学与宇宙学告诉人类从何而来、为何在此。我的理想就是进一步探索宇宙。”
His ambition brought him a scholarship to University College Oxford to read Natural Science. There he studied physics and graduated with a first class honours degree.
怀着这份理想,他以全奖入读牛津大学自然科学系。他以一等荣誉毕业生的身份取得了物理学士学位。
He then moved to Trinity Hall, Cambridge and was supervised by Dennis Sciama at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics for his PhD; his thesis was titledProperties of Expanding Universes. In 2017, he made his PhD thesis freely available online via the University of Cambridge’s Open Access repository. There have been over a million attempts to download the thesis, demonstrating the enduring popularity of Hawking and his academic legacy.
之后,他进入剑桥大学三一学堂,师从应用数学与理论物理专业博士导师丹尼斯·夏玛。2017年,霍金在线向公众开放了博士论文《宇宙膨胀的属性》的免费阅读权限。上百万读者点击下载,霍金教授的学术感召力与超高人气可见一斑。
On completion of his PhD Hawking became a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College where he remained a fellow for the rest of his life. During his early years at Cambridge, he was influenced by Roger Penrose and developed the singularity theorems which show that the Universe began with the Big Bang.
获得博士学位后,霍金留校,加入了剑桥的冈维尔凯斯学院。此后他一直都在这里保留教职。早年,霍金受罗杰·彭罗斯爵士的影响提出了奇点定理,即宇宙始于大爆炸。
An interest in singularities naturally led to an interest in black holes and his subsequent work in this area laid the foundations for the modern understanding of black holes. He proved that when black holes merge, the surface area of the final black hole must exceed the sum of the areas of the initial black holes, and he showed that this places limits on the amount of energy that can be carried away by gravitational waves in such a merger. He found that there were parallels to be drawn between the laws of thermodynamics and the behaviour of black holes. This eventually led, in 1974, to the revelation that black holes have a temperature and produce radiation, now known as Hawking radiation, a discovery which revolutionised theoretical physics.
他的兴趣自然地从奇点扩展到黑洞。他的相关著作也为现代黑洞研究奠定了理论基础。他的研究证明,当黑洞出现的时候,黑洞最终的表面积必须膨胀。其膨胀程度受引力带走能量多少的影响。他还发现,热力学理论对黑洞活动有借鉴意义。最终于1974年,霍金提出了物理学界极具革命意义的理论:他提出“霍金辐射”理论,即宇宙黑洞是有温度且有辐射的。
He also realised that black holes must have an entropy – often described as a measure of how much disorder is present in a given system – equal to one quarter of the area of their event horizon: – the ‘point of no return’, where the gravitational pull of a black hole becomes so strong that escape is impossible. Some forty odd years later, the precise nature of this entropy is still a puzzle. However, these discoveries led to Hawking formulating the ‘information paradox’ which illustrates a fundamental conflict between quantum mechanics and our understanding of gravitational physics. This is probably the greatest mystery facing theoretical physicists today.
他还意识到黑洞必然具有熵值(译•世界注:熵通常用来描述在一个特定系统中的无序程度),霍金提出黑洞的熵等于事件视界表面积的四分之一。(译•世界注:事件视界在黑洞周围,在事件视界内,黑洞引力十分强大,任何事物都无法逃逸出视界。进入事件视界,就是进入了无法返回的区域)现在四十多年过去了,关于熵的原理仍然是个谜。但这一发现使得霍金的提出了“信息悖论”(译•世界注:信息悖论揭示量 49 38103 49 18733 0 0 6061 0 0:00:06 0:00:03 0:00:03 6062理论和重力理论具有根本的矛盾)。直到今日,这可能仍然是理论物理面对的最大谜题。
To understand black holes and cosmology requires one to develop a theory of quantum gravity. Quantum gravity is an unfinished project which is attempting to unify general relativity, the theory of gravitation and of space and time with the ideas of quantum mechanics. Hawking’s work on black holes started a new chapter in this quest and most of his subsequent achievements centred on these ideas. Hawking recognised that quantum mechanical effects in the very early universe might provide the primordial gravitational seeds around which galaxies and other large-scale structures could later form. This theory of inflationary fluctuations,developed along with others in the early 1980’s, is now supported by strong experimental evidence from the COBE, WMAP and Planck satellite observations of the cosmic microwave sky. Another influential idea was Hawking’s ‘no boundary’ proposal which resulted from the application of quantum mechanics to the entire universe. This idea allows one to explain the creation of the universe in a way that is compatible with laws of physics as we currently understand them.
为理解黑洞和宇宙的起源,人们需要发展量子重力学。量子重力学意在统一广义相对论、重力理论和量子理论中时空的理解, 但量子重力学尚未发展成熟。霍金关于黑洞的工作开启了这一理论的新篇章,他接下来的许多工作也都是关于这一领域的。霍金意识到在早期宇宙中量子理论的效应可能产生原始的引力种子,自此诞生银河系和其他宏大的结构。目前已经有来自宇宙背景探测者(COBE)、威尔金森微波各向异性探测器(WMAP)和普朗克巡天者(Planck satellite)对于宇宙微波背景提出强有力的观测证据,支持了20世纪80年代提出的宇宙膨胀波动理论。而另一个富有影响力的提议即是霍金提出的无边界宇宙学。无边界宇宙学从量子理论的应用阐发,解释了整个宇宙的运行,这一学说使人们能够用对现有的定律现有理解来解释宇宙的形成。
Professor Hawking’s influential books included The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime, with G F R Ellis; General Relativity: an Einstein centenary survey, with W Israel; Superspace and Supergravity, with M Rocek (1981); The Very Early Universe, with G Gibbons and S Siklos, and 300 Years of Gravitation, with W Israel.
霍金教授写的富有影响力的书包括与乔治·F·R·埃利斯合著的《时空的大尺度结构》,与W·以色列教授合著的《广义相对论评述:纪念爱因斯坦百年诞辰》,与G·吉本斯和S·希克洛什教授合著的《极早期的宇宙》和与W·以色列合著的《引力三百年》。
However, it was his popular science books which took Professor Hawking beyond the academic world and made him a household name. The first of these, A Brief History of Time, was published in 1988 and became a surprise bestseller, remaining on the Sunday Times best-seller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. Later popular books included Black Holes and Baby Universes, The Universe in a Nutshell, A Briefer History of Time, and My Brief History. He also collaborated with his daughter Lucy on a series of books for children about a character named George who has adventures in space.
不过,还是霍金教授所著的科普读物让他的名声走出学术圈外,变得家喻户晓。他著的第一本科普读物《时间简史》出版于1988年,很快就成为了一本意外走红的畅销书,这本书打破记录,在《星期日泰晤士报》连续237周蝉联畅销书榜首。后来,他又出版了《黑洞、婴儿宇宙及其他》《果壳中的宇宙》《新时间简史》《我的简史》等书。他还和她的女儿露西一起合著了一系列给孩子的书,故事主角名叫乔治,故事描写了乔治在宇宙中的一系列冒险。
In 2014, a film of his life, The Theory of Everything, was released. Based on the book by his first wife Jane, the film follows the story of their life together, from first meeting in Cambridge in 1964, with his subsequent academic successes and his increasing disability. The film was met with worldwide acclaim and Eddie Redmayne, who played Stephen Hawking, won the Academy Award for Best Actor at the 2015 ceremony.
2014年,基于霍金的人生故事改编的电影《万物理论》发行。电影取材自他的第一任妻子简所写的书,讲述了他1964年和简在剑桥初次见面,他的学术成就和他之后患疾的故事。这部电影受到了全球广泛的赞扬。饰演霍金的埃迪·雷德梅恩因此获得了2015英国电影学院奖的最佳男主角奖。
Travel was one of Professor Hawking’s pastimes. One of his first adventures was to be caught up in the 7.1 magnitude Bou-in-Zahra earthquake in Iran in 1962. In 1997 he visited the Antarctic. He has plumbed the depths in a submarine and in 2007 he experienced weightlessness during a zero-gravity flight, routine training for astronauts. On his return to ground he quipped “Space, here I come.”
霍金教授的爱好之一是旅游。1962年,他在最初的冒险中就曾遭遇伊朗布因扎赫拉地区7.1级的大地震。1997年,他造访南极。2007年,他参加了宇航员训练常用的失重飞行训练。返回时,他诙谐地说:“宇宙,我来了。”
Writing years later on his website, Professor Hawking said: “I have had motor neurone disease for practically all my adult life. Yet it has not prevented me from having a very attractive family and being successful in my work. I have been lucky that my condition has progressed more slowly than is often the case. But it shows that one need not lose hope.”
霍金在患病多年后在网站中写道:“我成年时期几乎一直在患肌肉萎缩性侧索硬化症病中度过。但这并没有阻止我拥有一个非常有美丽的家庭和在十分成功的工作。我非常幸运我的症状发展地比常见情形缓慢,但这证明了一个人应当永不失去希望。”
At a conference In Cambridge held in celebration of his 75th birthday in 2017, Professor Hawking said “It has been a glorious time to be alive and doing research into theoretical physics. Our picture of the Universe has changed a great deal in the last 50 years, and I’m happy if I’ve made a small contribution.”
2017年,在剑桥庆祝他的75岁生日时,霍金表示:“能够活着,进行理论物理学研究真的是一件光辉伟大的事情。过去五十年来,我们对宇宙的认知已经发生了极大的转变。如果我曾经对此做出微小的贡献,我十分开心。”
And he said he wanted others to feel the passion he has for understanding the universal laws that govern us all. “I want to share my excitement and enthusiasm about this quest. So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious, and however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.”
他还表示他希望别人也能感受到他对理解统治我们所有人的宇宙规律的热情。“我想要和你们分享我对追求宇宙真理的热忱。要记得抬头仰望星空,而不是只看着你的脚下。要试着去理解你看到的东西,去思考什么让宇宙存在。要保持好奇心,不管生活看起来多艰难,总会有你能做,并能成功的事情。重要的是,要永不言放弃。”
剑桥大学在Senate House纪念霍金教授的灯光秀
“宇宙没有边界,人的努力也应该是没有边界的。我们千差万别,不管生活看上去有多糟糕,总有你能够做的事,并能成功。有生命的地方就有希望。”
——《万物理论》
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