【诺奖得主Wilczek科普专栏】真空：一个物理学家的噩梦

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Frank Wilczek

弗兰克·维尔切克是麻省理工学院物理学教授、量子色动力学的奠基人之一。因在夸克粒子理论（强作用）方面所取得的成就，他在2004年获得了诺贝尔物理学奖。

真空：一个物理学家的噩梦▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲

作者 | Frank Wilczek

翻译 | 梁丁当

校对 | 狄德罗

配音 | 李娜（蔻享学术）

仰望夏夜的星空，我们会看到皓白的月亮、闪烁的星星和偶尔划过的流星。人是视觉生物，我们根据平日所见来构建这个世界。

Looking up at the summer sky, it is the luminous moon, the brilliant stars and the occasional meteor that draw our attention. Human beings are visual creatures, and we build our everyday model of the world based on what we see.

可见光向我们传递了外部现实的大部分信息，它沿直线穿过空间。因此，当没有物质可见，我们就会很自然地认为空间本身是空的。不过，有许多东西是我们的裸眼看不见的，比如空气。那么，当利用先进的仪器更仔细地观察空间时，又何必惊讶于更多裸眼未见之物？这些深层的结构会帮助我们了解宇宙的起源吗？

Because visible light, our primary messenger from external reality, spreads in straight lines through space, when it is devoid of visible matter, we find it natural to regard space itself as empty. But unaided vision is blind to many things, starting with air. Why should it be surprising that a closer look at space, with sophisticated instruments, reveals much more? Could its deep structure point to clues about the origin of the universe?

当我还是孩子的时候，恐龙主宰着我的噩梦。长大后，我的噩梦变成了核战争。但最可怖的梦魇还在后面。那时我已经是个年轻的研究者，苦苦思索着我们物理学家所谓的“真空”：一种空得不能再空的空间。

When I was a child, dinosaurs powered my nightmares; as I grew up, it was nuclear war. But my scariest nightmare ever came much later, as a young researcher pondering what we physicists call Void: space as empty as it can be.

在感觉剥夺实验中，人被剥夺了一切外界刺激，关在没有声音的暗室中，漂浮在特殊的泳池里。在这种隔绝一切的环境里，人无一例外地开始自造刺激-他们产生了幻觉。

sensory deprivation experiments, people are isolated from external stimuli. They float in specialized swimming pools, within dark sound-insulated rooms. Under those conditions, people invariably begin to supply their own stimuli. They hallucinate.

我的噩梦比这种隔绝更深一层。它是关于真空的虚无感。一天，我紧张工作之后，它向我袭来。那天，我正努力实现自己关于宇宙的一个梦想：我尝试着清除空间，代之以一种更纯的东西，以此解释宇宙的起源。

My nightmare took this sort of isolation a step further. It was a vision of nothing—of Void. It came to me after a day in which my working goal was to substantiate a cosmological daydream, in which I’d empty out space, replace it with something purer and thereby explain the origin of the universe.

我无依无靠，漂浮着，沉浸在一种超乎自然的、茫茫然的明亮的纯白中，不知自己身处哪里，走向何方。这些问题没有答案-的确没有，而且没有意义。这里没有路标，没有方向指示，没有任何可供接近、可以触碰的东西。

Unmoored, floating, bathed in a featureless, preternaturally bright pure white, I didn’t know where I was or which way I pointed. Those questions had no resolution—indeed, no meaning. There were no landmarks, no sources of orientation, nothing to approach or to touch.

我开始意识到，这孤独的真空是没有缘起的，是永远也无法改变的。我在时间和空间里游走。既不在某处，也不在某时。

And it entered my mind that this lonely Void, being devoid of causes, would never change. I was adrift in time as well as in space. I was nowhere in particular, at no particular time.

就算睡着了，我也知道没有光就意味着黑暗。这反常的白色令我忧惧，它意味着我对这个新环境哪怕最基本的了解也没有。我寻找我的身体，但只能看到一片均匀的白色。

Even while asleep, I remained aware that the absence of light should present itself as black. That anomaly added to my unease. It meant that I did not understand even the most basic aspects of my new reality. I looked for my body, but saw no deviation from the uniform field of white.

为了理解我的处境，我想到了那种被许诺了永恒和无处不在的天堂之光的死亡-比如古希腊人的神殿和但丁的天堂。在抽象的层面，它令人鼓舞。但是在那个夜晚，它令我恐惧。 

Trying to make sense of my situation, I thought that this was death, delivering on the promise of eternal, omnipresent celestial light—the Empyrean of the ancient Greeks and of Dante’s “Paradiso.” It was inspiring, abstractly, but to me, that night, its realization was terrifying.

我在颤抖中醒来，过了好一会，我才确信我没有死去，开始慢慢找回熟悉的现实。最终我找回了理智，从夜晚的噩梦回到了白日的梦想。

Awaking with a quiver, it took me a few moments to grasp that I had not passed on, and to re-engage with familiar reality. I gathered my wits and returned from nightmare to daydream.

在法拉第和麦克斯韦的带领下，十九世纪的科学家发现电磁现象的主角是充满空间的电场和磁场，它们可以不需要任何媒介自由振荡变化。作为一个虔诚的基督教徒，麦克斯韦对这个发现非常满意，他写道：“宇宙中行星和恒星间广袤的空间不再会被看作荒芜。”

Nineteenth-century scientists, led by Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, discovered that the central players in electricity and magnetism are space-filling electric and magnetic fields, which have a life of their own. Maxwell, a devout Christian, was profoundly gratified by this development, writing: “The vast interplanetary and interstellar regions will no longer be regarded as waste places in the universe.”

今天，我们依然将光和其他电磁波理解成电磁场中的激发。我们用麦克斯韦的方程设计我们的无线 (Wi-Fi) 网络。

Today, we still understand light and its relatives as excitations in electromagnetic fields. We use Maxwell’s equations to design our Wi-Fi networks.

在二十世纪里，我们把所有的物质都描绘成无处不在的场的瞬变扰动的聚集。冷却下来后，有些场会产生充满空间的薄雾（希格斯场就其中之一）。像露珠一样，它们自发形成，是场趋于平衡时的遗物。

Over the 20th century, we came to picture all forms of matter as accumulations of transient disturbances in ubiquitous fields. Some of those fields, when cold, create space-filling mists (the Higgs field is one). Like morning dew, they are spontaneous emanations, thrown off as the fields settle into equilibrium.

我清醒时的梦想（也是我噩梦的源泉）是解释宇宙的起源。真空不是什么也没有，它实际上包含所有这些二十世纪发现的场。当这些场趋于平衡时，它们生成薄雾，释放出能量，最后催生了大爆炸并演生出我们现在感知到的现实。

My waking dream, which inspired my nightmare, was to explain the origin of the universe. The Void, after all, is not really nothingness since it contains our 20th-century fields. As those fields settle into equilibrium, emitting their mists, they liberate energy, which powered the big bang and gave rise to reality as we experience it.

为什么宇宙充满物质而不是虚无？因为，按照物理定律，虚无是不稳定的。 

Why is there Something rather than Nothing? Because Nothing is unstable, according to the laws of physics.

当感觉被剥夺，我们会自己制造一个幻境。若缺乏外物刺激，一心追求完美，造物主也会幻想出一个宇宙。

We can craft a related myth, based on sensory deprivation. Contemplating perfection, the Creator, lacking stimulation, was driven to hallucinate the universe.

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声明：该文章曾于2016年--2017年间以专栏形式发表于《赛先生》公众号，后经作者授权发布于蔻享学术平台。

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