生命，多重宇宙以及一切
如果你看过最近刚刚获奖的《三体》，听说过黑暗森林，费米悖论和人择原理，那么你应该会对下面的文章感兴趣。它是对《经济学人》最近新开辟的Science brief系列的介绍，本系列预计有六篇文章，分别探讨当今科学界中的六个热门的未解之谜。本文对这些问题进行了简单的介绍，以便读者有个大概了解。文章论证充分而又条理清晰，非常值得借鉴学习，对文章中涉及到的大量背景知识，建议参看文后的背景扩展板块。
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Life, the multiver and everything
Science has remade the world, but scientists are not finished yet
科学春风吹满地，仍需再努力
Aug 8th 2015 | From the print edition
“I SEEM to have been only like a boy playing on the ashore, and diverting mylf in now
if是什么意思and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Tho words, ascribed to Sir Isaac Newton, might still be spoken, with the appropriate correction for x, by any scientist today.accord是什么意思
“我不过像是在海边玩耍的小男孩，为不时发现特别光滑的鹅卵石或是格外美丽的贝壳而欢欣雀跃，而在我面前，还有一大片真理的海洋尚未探索。”只要在必要时修正一下主语性别，这句艾萨克·牛顿爵士 (Sir Isaac Newton) 之言也许仍可以代表当今所有科学家的心声。
The discipline of natural science that Newton helped found in the cond half of the 17th century has extended humanity’s horizons to a degree he could scarcely have envisaged. Newton lived in a world that thought itlf 6,000 years old, knew nothing of chemical elements or dia-causing microbes, believed living creatures could spring spontaneously from mud, hay or dirty bed-linen, and had only just stopped assuming that the sun (and everything el in the univer) revolved around the Earth.
etu
17世纪后半叶，自然科学这一学科在牛顿的推动下创立，至今已将人类的眼界拓展到连牛顿本人也难以预料的程度。在牛顿生活的年代，人们认为世界只有6000年历史，对化学元素和致病微生物一无所知，还以为生物是从自己烂泥干草或者邋遢床单里产生的，甚至刚刚知道原来太阳（和宇宙中的其他一切）不是绕着地球转的。
Yet even today, deep problems and deeper mysteries remain. Science cannot yet say how life began or whether the univer is but one of many. Some things people take for granted—that time goes forwards but never backwards, say—are profoundly weird. Other mysteries, no less strange, are not even perceived. One is that 96% of the univer’s contents pass ghostlike and unnoticed through the minuscule remaining fraction, which solipsistic humans are plead to call “ordinary matter”. Another is how, after billions of years when the Earth was inhabited only by single-celled creatures, animals suddenly popped into existence. Perhaps the deepest mystery of all is how atoms in human brains can consciously perceive the desire to ask all of the questions in the first place, and then move other atoms around to answer them.
gaim
shall never surrender
然而，即使到了今天，难题奥秘也并未全部解开。科学依然不能解释生命是如何诞生的、我们的宇宙是否只是多重宇宙之一等问题。一些观念人们习以为常，比如时间一去不复返，仔细想来却十分古怪。还有些问题同样古怪，人们甚至难以察觉：一是宇宙的构成中有96%人们从未留意，就如幽灵一般，以体积极小的物质形式存在（唯我论者会高兴地称其为“普通物质”）；二是在地球被单细胞生物一统天下数十亿年后，动物是如何突然出现的；而最深奥的谜题也许在于，人类大脑中的微粒是如何先是有意识地感知到问出上述所有问题的渴望，然后动用另一些微粒回答这些问题的。
Known unknowns
mansion
已知的未知
Over the next six weeks we will be running a ries of briefs that explore the unsolved scientific questions. Some are more tractable than others. Our first brief, on life’s origin, looks at a chemical puzzle that may well be elucidated over the next decade or so (e article). The nature of the unen 96% of the univer may start to manifest itlf later this year, as the newly cranked-up Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest particle acc
jellyelerator, begins creating things massive enough to be particles of the “dark matter” that theory predicts.
在接下来的六周内，我们将会刊出一系列短文，探讨这些科学界的未解之谜。其中一些问题相对没那么难以解释。我们的第一篇短文关注生命起源，介绍一个在未来十来年内有望解决的化学难题。而宇宙中那96%的不可见物质本质为何也将在今年晚些时候拨云见日——世界上最大的粒子加速器大型强子对撞机新近启动，开始创造出质量极大的粒子，它们有可能就是理论预测中的“暗物质”粒子。
Other mysteries, such as the unidirectionality of time, probably await lightning-strikes of insight of the sort that produced the theories of relativity a century ago. By contrast, discerning the early history of animals will require a lot of hard graft—the painstaking reconstruction of a jigsaw in which the pieces include palaeontology, genetics and embryology.
如何保养头发诸如时间单向性等谜题，其解决也许只能等待灵感闪现，就像一世纪前创立相对论那样。理清动物早期史则与之相反，由于其中生物学、遗传学、胚胎学等问题错综复杂，需要艰
苦卓绝的工作才有望还原那段历史。
Some mysteries may remain so for ever. The idea of a multiver containing an indefinite, possibly infinite, number of univers, each with its own laws of physics, is mathematically plausible and would deal with the puzzling fact that if the physical laws of the actual, obrvable univer were only slightly different, life could never have come into existence. With multivers, every possible t of laws would exist somewhere. Unfortunately, unless the parate univers intrude onto one another, the idea is untestable. As for the nature of consciousness, this is one question which science has not yet fully worked out how to ask. Studying the bits of the brain that em to generate consciousness does not answer the question of what such perception really is.
>碰撞英文
