Introduction
We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwi nd us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on who stability we fundamentally depend. Except for children (who don’t know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is; where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here if time will one day flow backward and effects precede caus; or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know. There are even children, and I have met some of them, who want to know what a black hole looks like; what is the smallest piece of matter; why we remember the past and not the future; how it is, if there was chaos early, that there is, apparently, order today; and why there is a univer.
In our society it is still customary for parents and teachers to answer most of the questions with a shrug, or with an appeal to vaguely recalled religious precepts. Some are
uncomfortable with issues like the, becau they so vividly expo the limitations of human understanding.
But much of philosophy and science has been driven by such inquiries. An increasing number of adults are willing to ask questions of this sort, and occasionally they get some astonishing answers. Equidistant from the atoms and the stars, we are expanding our exploratory horizons to embrace both the very small and the very large.
In the spring of 1974, about two years before the Viking spacecraft landed on Mars, I was at a meeting in England sponsored by the Royal Society of London to explore the question of how to arch for extraterrestrial life. During a coffee break I noticed that a much larger meeting was being held in an adjacent hall, which out of curiosity I entered. I soon realized that I was witnessing an ancient rite, the investiture of new fellows into the Royal Society, one of the most ancient scholarly organizations on the planet. In the front row a young man in a wheelchair was, very slowly, signing his name in a book that bore on its earliest pages the signature of Isaac Newton. When at last he finished, there was a stirring ovation. Stephen Hawking was a legend even then.
Hawking is now the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a post once held by Newton and later by P. A. M. Dirac, two celebrated explorers of the very large and the small. He is their worthy successor. This, Hawking’s first book for the nonspecialist, holds rewards of many kinds for the lay audience. As interesting as the book’s wide-ranging contents is the glimp it provides into the workings of its author’s mind. In this book are lucid revelations on the frontiers of physics, astronomy, cosmology, and courage.
This is also a book about God…or perhaps about the abnce of God. The word God fills the pages. Hawking embarks on a quest to answer Einstein’s famous question about whether God had any choice in creating the univer. Hawking is attempting, as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of God. And this makes all the more unexpected the conclusion of the effort, at least so far: a univer with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a Creator to do.
去散步的英文
重庆洪崖洞- Carl Sagan
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
我们在几乎对世界毫无了解的情形下进行日常生活。我们对于使生命得以实现的阳光的产生机制，对于将我们束缚在地球上，否则我们就会以涡旋的轨道被抛到太空去的重力，对于我们由之构成并依赖其稳定性的原子思考得很少。除了小孩（他们知道太少，会不知轻重地问重要的问题），我们中很少人会用大量时间惊讶 自然界为何这个样子；宇宙从何而来或它是否总在这儿；时间会不会有朝一日倒流，并因此导致果先于因；或者人类认识是否有一最终的权限。甚至我曾遇到一些小孩，他们想要知道黑洞是什么样的？物质的最小的部份是什么？为何我们记住过去而不是将来；如果早先是紊乱的，则今天显然是有序的，这究竟是怎么回事？为何存在一个宇宙？
在我们社会里，父母或老师仍然依惯例用耸肩膀或借助模糊回想起的宗教格言 子惠思我去回答这些问题的大部份。有一些人则对这一类的问题感到不舒服，因为它们如此生动地暴露了人类理解的局限性。
但是，哲学和科学的大部份即是由这种好奇心所驱动的。越来越多的成年人愿 意问这类问题，并且他们偶尔得到一些使其惊奇的答案。我们这些离开原子和恒星同样远的人类，正在扩大自己探索的视野去拥抱这非常小和非常大的对象。
蝉蜕的作用
1974烤辣椒江苏政府年初，大约在海盗空间飞船登陆火星之前两年，我参加在英国由伦敦皇家学会主办的关于探索如何寻找天外生命的会议。在会议中间休息时，我注意到在隔壁的大厅里正举行一个更大得多的会议，出于好奇心我进去了。我很快意识到自己见证了一个古代的仪式，是一个新会员参加皇家学会——这个本行星上最古老的学术组织的授职式。前排一位在轮椅中的年轻人正非常缓慢地将他的名字签在一本书上，而这本书的最前页是伊萨克·牛顿的签名。当他最后签好时，大厅里响起了一阵响亮的掌声。史蒂芬·霍金，甚至在那时就是一位传说中的人物。喝酒后吐血
现在霍金是剑桥大学的卢卡逊数学教授。这个职务曾为牛顿，后来又为狄拉克，这两位非常大和非常小的世界的有名的探索者担任过。他是他们的毫不逊色的继承人。这本霍金首次为非专家写的书，会给外行读者以多种类的酬劳。和这本书的广泛的内容一样有趣的是对作者智力工作的浏览。物理、天文、宇宙学和勇气的前沿被清晰地呈现在本书之中。
河南饥荒
这又是一本关于上帝……或许是关于上帝不存在的书。处处充满了上帝这个字眼。霍金着手回答爱因斯坦著名的关于上帝在创生宇宙时有无选择性的问题。正如霍金明白声称的，他企图要去理解上帝的精神。这使得迄今所有努力的结论更加出人意外：一个空间上无边缘、时间上无始无终、并且造物主无所事事的宇宙。
——卡尔·沙冈
康奈尔大学
绮色佳，纽约州
