Why Does This Book Turn Science into Mystery?为什么说这本书把科学变成谜,我来为大家科普一下关于哈维尔平行时空真实案例?以下内容希望对你有帮助!

哈维尔平行时空真实案例(媒库文选为什么说这本书把科学变成谜)

哈维尔平行时空真实案例

Why Does This Book Turn Science into Mystery?为什么说这本书把科学变成谜

Sometimes science aligns with the lyrical. “Perhaps poetry is another of science's deepest roots: the capacity to see beyond the visible,”writes quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli in his remarkable book “The Order of Time.”

Science writer Stefan Klein sets out to prove a similar point in his new book, “How to Love the Universe,” but he does not affiliate himself with the poets so much as attempt to correct them. As he explains, he hopes to assuage “sensitive people” — by which he means poets and their like — who supposedly worry that learning about the nature of things makes reality less mysterious.

Klein assures us: Poets need only recognize that nature's wonder is evident in the enigmas that emerge from new discoveries, enigmas that show just how complex our world can be. Borrowing an example from Richard Feynman, he writes that the botanist's gaze does not wilt the rose's beauty but amplifies it, leading us back to the dazzling origins of life itself and ultimately to the realization that the flower's delicate petals are “metamorphosed stardust.” Pushing ahead, Klein proposes to demonstrate “how twenty-first-century physics changes our thinking, the way we see the world.”

If he hopes to substantiate his central premise that science makes the world stranger, Klein must do two things. First, he has to explain challenging scientific discoveries. Second, he has to show us that new puzzles ensue once we make sense of those revelations. Over the course of 10 chapters, he tries to do just that, leading us through an array of topics, from the big bang to the seemingly limitless scope of the cosmos, touching on dark matter, the organization of time and the immateriality of matter.

Many of these topics already exude an inherent gee-whiz quality, but Klein wants to show us that they are even more peculiar than they seem. Tackling the immensity of space, he writes that there must be countless earthlike planets orbiting sun-like stars. From here, he leaps to another conclusion, arguing that, given the near-infinite multitude of stars, there must be other worlds that exactly duplicate the conditions of our own, such that “with a probability close to certainty, each one of us has an infinite number of doubles in the cosmos.”

Here we see Klein's method at work: Yes, there are a lot of stars. And yes, many of those stars have planets orbiting them. Once we acknowledge these established facts, we can let our minds wander. Are we alone in the universe? Almost certainly not. If not, is it possible that there are other worlds like our own, even if they are very far away? Almost certainly! If there are, is it possible that some of those worlds exactly re-create the conditions of our own, down to the precise details of our individual lives? Maybe! Always squinting at the fuzzy edge of the horizon, Klein insists we should be most amazed by the things we suspect but can never fully know.

He gets at this point most directly when he tackles the limitations of predictive systems such as meteorology. The more precise our attempts to anticipate the future become,he argues, the more data we require, and hence the more likely it is that errors will creep into our analysis. He writes, for example, of a storm that scientists failed to predict because the equipment at a single outlying weather monitoring station wasn't calibrated properly. By my read, this feels more like a failure of scientific instrumentation and process than like evidence that we can never fully untangle the knot of reality. Nevertheless, such events lead him to oddly metaphysical musings: “To me it seems that it is precisely this unpredictability that marks the boundary between life and death.”

Such nonsensical phrases suggest that Klein longs to be one with the poets he criticizes. Perhaps this is why he, a trained physicist, tends to treat hard-won scientific realizations as if they were still-mysterious puzzles, often making them more difficult to understand than they would be otherwise.

Eager to astonish, Klein prizes mystery over solution. Thus, we find him working by sleight of hand, often starting with questions before establishing a foundation of understanding. Science may well make the world stranger,but it helps no one to estrange us from science.

科学和诗歌有时是一样的。量子物理学家卡洛·罗韦利在他的杰作《时间的秩序》中写道:“或许,诗歌是科学的另一个最深层根源:洞察可视范围以外的能力。”

科普作家斯特凡·克莱因在他的新书《如何爱宇宙》中着手证明类似观点,但他没有加入诗人的行列,而是试图纠正他们。按照他的解释,他希望宽慰“敏感的人”——他是指诗人之流,据说这些人担心,了解事物的本质会减少现实的神秘性。

克莱因向我们保证:诗人只需意识到,在从新发现中浮现的谜团里,自然的奇迹显而易见,这些谜团表明我们的世界可以是多么的错综复杂。他借用理查德·费曼的例子写道,植物学家的凝视不会破坏玫瑰的美,反而将之放大,引领我们回溯到生命自身璀璨的起源,并最终意识到,这朵花的娇嫩花瓣是“变形的星尘”。克莱因更进一步,希望说明“21世纪的物理学是如何改变了我们的思维、我们看待世界的方式”。

如果克莱因希望证明自己的核心假设,即科学把世界变得更加陌生,那他必须做两件事。首先,他必须对具有挑战性的科学发现进行解释。其次,他必须向我们证明,每当旧谜破解之后新的谜题也就接踵而来。他用了十个章节的篇幅试图做的正是这个,带着我们了解了一系列问题,从宇宙大爆炸到似乎无穷大的宇宙,还谈到暗物质、时间的构造以及物质的非物质性。

这其中许多问题本身就已经具有令人惊叹的性质,但克莱因想要向我们证明,它们比表面看起来还要奇特。他在谈到太空的浩瀚无边时写道,肯定有无数地球这样的行星绕着太阳这样的恒星运行。写到这里,他跳到另一个结论,认为考虑到恒星近乎无穷的数量,肯定有其他世界完全复制了我们的境况,以至于“十有八九,我们每个人在宇宙中都有无数个复制品”。

到这儿,我们明白了克莱因采用的方法:没错,有很多恒星。没错,其中许多恒星有行星绕着它们运行。一旦我们承认这些既定事实,我们就可以放飞思维。我们是宇宙中的唯一吗?几乎可以肯定不是。如果不是,是否可能存在和我们一样的世界,哪怕它们非常遥远?几乎可以肯定是存在的!如果存在,其中有些世界是否可能完全复制了我们的状况,乃至我们个人生活的确切细节?也许!克莱因总是眯着眼睛打量地平线的模糊边缘,坚称最让我们惊叹的应该是我们怀疑但绝对无法完全知晓的东西。

在谈到气象学等预测体系的局限性时,他最直接地指出了这一点。他主张,我们预测未来的尝试越准确,获得的数据就越多,错误也就越有可能出现在我们的分析中。例如,他写到科学家未能预测的一场暴风雨,原因是单单一个偏远气象监测站的设备没有校正好。按照我的解读,这更像是科学仪器和程序的失误,并不能证明我们绝对无法彻底解开现实之结。然而,此类事件将他引向了奇怪的超自然的思索:“在我看来,恰恰是这种不可预见性标志着生与死的界限。”

此类荒谬说法表明,克莱因渴望与被他批评的诗人为伍。也许正因为如此,他作为训练有素的物理学家却往往把来之不易的科学发现视作仍然神秘的谜题,经常使之比经他解释前更难以理解了。

克莱因急于一语惊人,更看重谜团而非答案。因此,我们发现他在耍花招,经常先提出问题,然后再打造理解的基础。科学有可能使世界变得更陌生,但如果让我们疏远科学,对谁都没好处。(葛雪蕾译自美国《华盛顿邮报》网站1月13日文章)

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