双语译文 | 一代科学巨人霍金去世

导语：无论高中的你是文科生还是理科生，是否对物理有兴趣，想必都听说过他。时常出现在中学物理课本的物理学家、《时间简史》作者霍金，于 2018 年 3 月 14 日在剑桥家中去世，享年76岁。他的孩子们表示：“我们会永远怀念他”

原文链接：https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/mar/14/stephen-hawking-professor-dies-aged-76

Tributes poured in on Wednesday to Stephen Hawking, the brightest star in the firmament of science, whose insights shaped modern cosmology and inspired global audiences in the millions. He died at the age of 76 in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

本周三，世界各地的人纷纷悼念史蒂芬·霍金。他是科学界最闪亮的明星，他的深刻见解塑造了现代宇宙论，激励了全球数以百万计的读者。史蒂芬·霍金于本周三凌晨去世，享年76岁。

In a statement that confirmed his death at home in Cambridge, Hawking’s children said: “We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today. He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years. His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour inspired people across the world.

在确认史蒂芬·霍金于剑桥家中逝世的声明中，霍金的孩子们表示：“我们挚爱的父亲今日去世，我们深感悲痛。他是一名伟大的科学家，也是一个杰出的人，他的成就将流芳百世。他的勇气、执着、才智和幽默激励着全世界人民。

“He once said: ‘It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.’ We will miss him for ever.”For fellow scientists and loved ones, it was Hawking’s intuition and wicked sense of humour that marked him out as much as the fierce intellect that, coupled with his illness, came to symbolise the unbounded possibilities of the human mind.

“他曾说：‘如果宇宙不是你心爱之人的家，那么宇宙也没有存在的意义了。’我们将永远怀念他。”在科学家同事和他挚爱的人看来，霍金的直觉和调皮的幽默感正如他卓越的智力一样，同疾病一起象征了人类思维的无限可能。

Those who live in the shadow of death are often those who live most. For Hawking, the early diagnosis of his terminal disease, and witnessing the death from leukaemia of a boy he knew in hospital, ignited a fresh sense of purpose. 

活在死亡阴影下的人通常也是活的最精彩的人。对于霍金来说，不治之症的早期诊断，以及在医院亲眼目睹自己认识的白血病男孩死亡，这些经历让他对人生有了新的目标。

“Although there was a cloud hanging over my future, I found, to my surprise, that I was enjoying life in the present more than before. I began to make progress with my research,” he once said. Embarking on his career in earnest, he declared: “My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”

他曾说：“尽管我的未来乌云密布，但我惊讶的发现，我比以前更享受当下的生活。我已经开始在研究中取得进步。”当他正式开始事业时，他宣布：“我的目标很简单，就是要把宇宙整个明白，它为何如此，它为何存在。”

His proposal that black holes radiate heat stirred up one of the most passionate debates in modern cosmology. Hawking argued that if a black hole could evaporate, all the information that fell inside over its lifetime would be lost forever. It contradicted one of the most basic laws of quantum mechanics, and plenty of physicists disagreed. Hawking came round to believing the more common, if no less baffling, explanation that information is stored at a black hole’s event horizon, and encoded back into radiation as the black hole radiates.

他的黑洞辐射理论激起了现代宇宙学界最激烈的讨论。霍金曾认为，一旦黑洞蒸发，曾坠入其中的信息都将永远丢失。这一论断与量子力学的基本规律相悖，许多物理学家都不认可。霍金改变观点，是一件不能更让人迷惑的事了，即信息储存在黑洞的“事件穹界”中，并且在黑洞辐射时重新编码。

Hawking’s run of radical discoveries led to his election in 1974 to the Royal Society at the young age of 32. Five years later, he became the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, arguably Britain’s most distinguished chair, and a post formerly held by Isaac Newton, Charles Babbage and Paul Dirac, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics.

霍金的一系列激进发现帮助他于1974年当选皇家学会会员，年仅32岁。五年后，他成为剑桥数学的卢卡斯教授，无疑是英国最杰出的教授岗位，这一岗位以前由艾萨克·牛顿、量子力学创始人之一的查尔斯·巴贝奇和保罗·狄拉克担任。

Hawking’s seminal contributions continued through the 1980s. The theory of cosmic inflation holds that the fledgling universe went through a period of terrific expansion. In 1982, Hawking was among the first to show how quantum fluctuations – tiny variations in the distribution of matter – might give rise through inflation to the spread of galaxies in the universe. In these tiny ripples lay the seeds of stars, planets and life as we know it. “It is one of the most beautiful ideas in the history of science,” said Max Tegmark, a physics professor at MIT.

霍金的开创性贡献一直持续到20世纪80年代。 宇宙膨胀理论认为，最初的宇宙经历了一段惊人的扩张时期。1982年，霍金率先展示了量子涨落（物质分布的微小变化）如何通过膨胀引起宇宙中星系的扩散。在这些微小的涟漪中，孕育了我们所知道的恒星，行星和生命的种子。“这是科学史上最美丽的想法之一，”麻省理工学院物理学教授马克斯·特格马克说。

But it was A Brief History of Time that rocketed Hawking to stardom. Published for the first time in 1988, the title made the Guinness Book of Records after it stayed on the Sunday Times bestsellers list for an unprecedented 237 weeks. It sold 10m copies and was translated into 40 different languages. Some credit must go to Hawking’s editor at Bantam, Peter Guzzardi, who took the original title: “From the Big Bang to Black Holes: A Short History of Time”, turned it around, and changed the “Short” to “Brief”. Nevertheless, wags called it the greatest unread book in history.

但使霍金崛起成为明星的是《时间简史》。 这本书于1988年首次发行，在“星期日泰晤士报”畅销书排行榜上保持了前所未有的237周，创造了吉尼斯世界纪录。 它售出1000万份，并被翻译成40种不同的语言。 霍金的出版社编辑彼得·古扎尔迪也有一些功劳，他将原标题《从大爆炸到黑洞：时间短史》中的“短史”改为“简史”。 尽管如此，人们戏称它为“史上最棒的未读书籍”。

Hawking was not, perhaps, the greatest physicist of his time, but in cosmology he was a towering figure. There is no perfect proxy for scientific worth, but Hawking won the Albert Einstein award, the Wolf prize, the Copley medal, and the Fundamental Physics prize. The Nobel prize, however, eluded him.Hawking has argued that for humanity to survive it must spread out into space, and has warned against the worst applications of artificial intelligence, including autonomous weapons.

也许霍金不是他这个时代最伟大的物理学家，但在宇宙学中他是杰出的人物。在科学价值上没有完美的代言人，但霍金赢得了爱因斯坦奖、沃尔夫奖、科普利奖章和基础物理奖，唯独没有诺贝尔奖。霍金认为，人类为了生存必须去到太空，对包括自动化武器在内的最糟糕的人工智能应用，人类应提出警告。

初译：栾凤鸣

审校：申悦环

定稿：刘媛媛

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