时光里的巨人

开篇：润墨网以专业的文秘视角，为您筛选了一篇时光里的巨人范文，如需获取更多写作素材，在线客服老师一对一协助。欢迎您的阅读与分享！

翻译：洪馥芝

阅读提示：由于本文提出的是假设性问题，所以文中出现了大量虚拟语气。对虚拟语气这种常见语法不清楚的同学可以多加留意，并查阅语法书，学习这种语气的用法。

Which scientists do you admire from the past? If you had the chance to travel back in time, who would you most like to meet and what would you ask them?

Find out who the heroes of some of the UK’s top scientists are.

Susan Greenfield is professor of 1)pharmacology at Oxford University and the director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

If I had to choose to meet a scientist who is long gone, I’d love to have thought of a female scientist, so I suppose Marie Curie would be one. I’d like to ask her what difficulties she faced as a woman, if they are any different from nowadays and how hard it was for her to 2)establish herself.

I think I’d also like to meet Galileo because he had to 3)defiantly stand up and 4)confront all the 5)prejudices and the 6)dogma of his time――to understand what 7)motivated him. So it’s a bit like Marie Curie I suppose in both cases. It’s not so much to talk about their science, but to find out how they got the courage and the inner strength to stand up to the dogma of their day.

Frank Close is professor of physics at Oxford University. He has written popular books, including The 8)Cosmic Onion.

I don’t know who this person is but I know what they did. I would have liked to have been there when fire was discovered and when the wheel or what we can do with the wheel was first realised. I would love to know whether those discoveries were made by one 9)individual――the Einstein of their time――and if so, what other things that individual did in their probably only 25 years of life because in those days people didn’t live very long. Or was it discovered all over the place by many, many different people? I’ve no idea but I would have loved to have known.

If I’m allowed to have one further choice of a scientist who everybody knows, Isaac Newton, because in addition to doing remarkable things in founding the basic of science as we know it, he was also a pretty 10)bizarre character, but I would only like to meet him on the condition that I’m allowed to know the things that we have discovered in the three hundred years since――to meeting him on a 11)level playing field I think would probably be a bit tough!

Lewis Wolpert is professor of biology as 12)applied to medicine at University College London.

I have absolutely no doubt it would be Archimedes. Archimedes in my view is the greatest scientist who ever lived. And let me try and explain why. First of all he had 13)virtually no one’s shoulders to stand on, but his contributions are simply 14)mind-blowing――he worked out why bodies floated; he worked out why 15)levers worked; he invented the concept of centre of gravity――I mean these are mind-blowing?6)Originality. And even Galileo many, many years later spoke about how important Archimedes?ideas were to him. So for me Archimedes is the greatest of them all, by far. What would I ask Archimedes? I would try to understand how he’d come to all these amazing ideas. Alright so we all know he said Eureka注1. But what led him to these things? How, you know, what was his background, what was his 17)schooling that led him to realise that he could work out whether the crown was 18)brass or gold? It just would be very interesting to know his mode of thought and who had really 19)influenced him. It’s simply amazing. And I think that’s always important to bear in mind that all science――and I mean, all science――has its origin in Greece.

Matt Ridley has a background in zoology. He’s an author and his books include Nature via Nurture and a biography of Francis Crick注2.

Which scientist would I like to go back and meet from the past? Maybe right back to meet the person who invented fire, or who started the whole technological game off some time in the 20)Pleistocene.

But I think really what I’d like to do is go back and meet Charles Darwin, and tell him about 21)Mendelism, tell him about DNA, explain about 22)genetics, watch the light bulb go on over his head perhaps, and then ask him why he took 20 years to publish the theory of natural selection. Why he 23)delayed announcing that to the world for so long, ’cause it’s one of the great historical questions about science.

Simon Singh has a background in physics. He’s written popular science books including Fermat’s Last Theorem注3 and The Code Book.

I remember once I was giving a lecture on the Enigma注4 24)cipher machine, a Second World War 25)encryption 26)device. And after the lecture somebody came up, and they toke a photograph of it using a digital camera. And it just suddenly struck me that, Alan Turing, who helped break the Enigma Cipher, was a pioneer of computer――of trying to understand what you can do with data――and much of the lecture was, sort of, in praise of Alan Turing, and what a remarkable man he was. But if he’d been there, at that moment, to see this image being captured on a digital camera that you could encode images as data, and that data could be taken in an 27)instant and stored on this little device, I think he would have been truly shocked. So it would be fascinating to go back to Alan Turing and meet him, or maybe even go back to someone like Charles Babbage――the true pioneer of the early ideas of computing. Babbage was a Victorian living in...in a sort of mechanical age of the industrial revolution, and he tried to build it――he designed it but never got round to building it……he tried to build a mechanical computing device. And, and to sit down with him, and to show him the power of computing today would be extraordinary.

你仰慕历史上的哪些科学家？假如你有机会回到过去，你最想和谁见面？想向他们提什么问题呢？

让我们来看看英国最优秀的科学家眼中的巨人是谁吧。

苏珊・格林菲尔德，牛津大学药理学教授，英国皇家研究院院长：

如果让我选和哪一位逝去多年的科学家见面，我会想见一位女科学家，所以居里夫人是其中一个人选。我想问的是：作为女性，她要面对哪些困难？她当时面对的困难与今天是否有所不同？以及她当时要在科学界有所建树有多困难？

我还想见见伽利略，因为他当时需要很大勇气才能站出来挑战那个时代的一切偏见和教条――我想知道他背后的动力是什么。我认为这和居里夫人有点相似：重点不是谈论他们的科学成就，而是了解他们是如何获得勇气，是怎样的内在力量驱使他们抵抗当时教条的。

弗兰克・克洛斯，牛津大学物理学教授，其广受欢迎的作品包括《宇宙洋葱》：

虽然我并不知道我想见的人是谁，但我知道他们的贡献。若有机会回到过去，我愿亲历人类首次发现火、轮子或者轮子用途的时刻。我想知道那些是不是都由一个人发现的――那么那个人无异于当时的爱因斯坦；如果是的话，在他们可能仅有的25年的短暂生命中――当时的人活得并不长，他们还做过什么事情？又或者这些发现是各地很多不同人的共同成果？我不知道，但我很想知道。

如果我还可以再选一位众所周知的科学家来提问的话，我选艾萨克・牛顿。因为他除了如众所周知的作出过奠定科学基础的伟大发现外，他本身也是个很奇异的人物。但我只想在我已经了解以往三百年间的所有发现的基础上和他见面――和他在同一个水平上交谈可不是一件容易的事！

路易斯・沃派特，伦敦大学学院应用生物医学教授：

毫无疑问，我一定会选阿基米德。我认为阿基米德是以往所有科学家中最伟大的一位，让我说说为什么吧。首先，他根本没有前人的肩膀为他打基础，而他的贡献却是前无古人的――他发现了物体漂浮的原因；发现了杠杆原理；首创了重心的概念。我的意思是，这些都具有让人震惊的原创性。即使多年后，伽利略仍论及阿基米德的想法对他的重要影响。所以对我而言，阿基米德是目前所有科学家中最伟大的一位。至于我想对他提什么问题？我很想知道他是如何产生这些令人惊叹的想法的―纵使我们都知道他喊了那句“我找到了！”，但到底是什么引领他产生这些想法的呢？究竟在怎样的背景下，受过什么样的教育，令他能够判断王冠是由黄铜还是金所铸？如果能够了解他的思维方式，以及他受过谁的影响，那将会是一件很有趣的事情。这着实令人叹服。此外，我们应该永远记住很重要的一点，就是科学――我是指所有科学―都源自希腊。

马特・里德利，具有动物学背景的作家，著有《自然与培育》一书及弗朗西斯・柯里克的传记：

我希望回到过去见哪一位科学家？也许是去见见火的发现者，或者在更新世某个时候启动了整场科技游戏的人。

但我真正想做的是回去见查尔斯・达尔文，把关于孟德尔遗传学说和DNA的东西告诉他，向他解释基因学，或许还会看到他灵光一现的时刻。然后问他为什么花了20年时间发表自然选择学说，为什么他迟迟未宣布这一学说――因为这是科学上最重要的历史问题之一。

西蒙・辛格，具有物理学背景，其科普著作包括《费马大定理》及《密码故事》：

我记得我曾作过一个关于二战时期“恩尼格玛”密码机的讲座。讲座后有人上来用数码相机为密码机拍照，这时我突然想起协助破解“恩尼格玛”密码的阿伦・图灵其实就是计算机的先驱――他尝试去了解如何处理数据。整个讲座基本上都是对阿伦・图灵大加赞赏，讲他是一个多么伟大的人。但如果他当时在场的话，看见数码相机捕捉图像，图像可以编码为数据，而数据亦可立即记录在这个小小的装置上时，他会有多么惊讶。所以要是能回到过去与阿伦・图灵见面，那将会是很有趣的事。或者甚至去见见查尔斯・巴贝奇――巴贝奇是计算机早期构想的真正先驱。他是维多利亚时代的人……生活在工业革命的机械年代，他曾经尝试制造一种机械计算装置―他设计了这种装置，但最终没能制成。如果能与他坐下来，让他看看今天计算机的威力的话，那真是太棒了。

注1：eureka是“我发现了！”、“我找到了！”的幽默说法，源自希腊数学家和发明家阿基米德发现测量不规则固体体积的方法，并以此发现测定金子纯度的方法时的惊呼。

注2：弗朗西斯・柯里克（1916－2004），英国科学家。他与美国生物学家詹姆斯・沃森（James Watson）于1953年发现了遗传物质DNA的双螺旋结构。两人曾获1962年诺贝尔医学奖。

注3：“费马大定理”（Fermat’s last theorem）是法国数学家皮尔・德・费马（1601－1665）在1637年写下的一个著名猜想：当n大于2时，方程式Xn+Yn=Zn没有任何正整数解。此定理在1995年被英国数学家安德鲁・怀尔斯（Andrew Wiles）证明。

注4：Enigma（意为“谜”）是一种手提密码机，在二战期间被德军广泛使用。