Beyond Matter And Space
物質與空間之外的宇宙
By George Johnson

Though he probably didn’t intend anything so jarring, Nicolaus Copernicus, in a 16th-century treatise, gave rise to the idea that human beings do not occupy a special place in the heavens. Nearly 500 years after replacing the Earth with the sun as the center of the cosmic swirl, we’ve come to see ourselves as just another species on a planet orbiting a star in the universe we call home. And this may be just one of many universes.
儘管可能無意吹皺一池春水，哥白尼卻在16世紀發表的論文中提出了人類並未在宇宙中占有特殊地位的概念。太陽取代地球成為宇宙中心將近500年後的今天，我們自認只是在我們稱為家的這個宇宙中，一個環繞恆星運行的行星上的物種。而且宇宙可能有許多個。

Despite the long string of demotions, we remain confident, that our band of primates has what it takes to figure out the cosmos. It is almost taken for granted that everything from physics to biology, including the mind, ultimately comes down to four fundamental concepts: matter and energy interacting in an arena of space and time.
雖然降級已久，身為靈長類的我們仍自認能了解宇宙，近乎理所當然的認為從物理學到生物學，包括心智，最終可歸納為四個基本概念：物質與能量在空間與時間的舞台上互動。

There are skeptics who suspect we may be missing a crucial piece of the puzzle. There is no reason why, in this particular century, Homo sapiens should have gathered all the pieces needed for a theory of everything. In displacing humanity from a privileged position, the Copernican principle applies not just to where we are in space but to when we are in time.
懷疑者認為我們可能遺漏了這謎團的一個關鍵。沒有理由認為在這特定世紀人類應已具備為一切提出理論的必要條件。哥白尼的理論剝奪人類的優越地位，適用於空間中的位置，也適用於在時間中所處階段。

Since it was published in 2012, “Mind and Cosmos,” by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, has caused much consternation. Dr. Nagel rejected the idea that there was nothing more to the universe than matter and physical forces. He also doubted that the laws of evolution could have produced something as remarkable as sentient life. Steven Pinker, a Harvard University psychologist, for one, denounced it as “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.”
美國哲學家納格爾「心智與宇宙」一書2012年出版以來，學術界深感驚愕。他駁斥宇宙只存在物質與各種物理力的概念，也懷疑演化律曾造就非凡的有知覺生命。哈佛大學心理學家品克斥該書為「曾經傑出的思想家的劣等推論」。

Dr. Nagel is an atheist, believes the answers may still be found through science, but only by expanding it. “Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning,” he wrote, “but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that the tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.”
無神論的納格爾認為，解答或許還是可以透過科學找到，唯必須予以擴張。他在書中說：「人類對終極清算的希望上了癮。然而理智的謙卑要求我們駁斥以下假設：原則上現有工具足以讓我們理解整個宇宙。」

Dr. Nagel finds it astonishing that the human brain has developed a science and a mathematics so in tune with the cosmos that it can predict and explain so many things. Neuroscientists assume that these mental powers somehow emerge from the electrical signaling of neurons – the circuitry of the brain. But no one has come close to explaining how that occurs.
人類的大腦已經發展出與宇宙契合的科學、數學概念，可據以預測並解釋許多事物。納格爾認為，這非常驚人。神經科學家認為，這些心智能力以某種方式來自神經元的電力信號，也就是大腦的電路系統。然而無人可以解釋原理。

That, Dr. Nagel proposes, might require another revolution: showing that mind, along with matter and energy, is “a fundamental principle of nature” – and that we live in a universe primed “to generate beings capable of comprehending it.” Rather than being a series of random mutations, evolution would have a direction, maybe even a purpose.
納格爾認為，這可能需要另一次革命：證明心智與物質、能量都是「自然的基本原則」，我們所處的宇宙經過設定，「創造可以理解它的生命」。演化不是連串的隨機突變，絕對有一個方向，甚至可能有一種目的。

“Above all,” he wrote, “I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable, in light of how little we really understand.”
他說：「最重要的是，由於我們真正理解的太少，我想擴大未被視為不可思議概念的範圍。」

Dr. Nagel is not alone in entertaining such ideas. The biologist Stuart Kauffman has suggested that Darwinian theory must be expanded to explain the emergence of intelligent creatures. And David J. Chalmers, a philosopher, has called on scientists to seriously consider “panpsychism” – the idea that some kind of consciousness.
納格爾不是唯一提出這些概念的學者。美國生物學家考夫曼認為，擴大達爾文的進化論才能解釋智慧生物的出現。澳洲哲學家查爾默斯呼籲科學界認真思索「泛心靈論」，亦即無論如何基本，宇宙充滿某種意識。

Some of this is a matter of scientific taste. It can be just as exhilarating, as Stephen Jay Gould proposed in “Wonderful Life,” to consider the conscious mind as a fluke, no more inevitable than the human appendix. But it doesn’t seem so crazy to consider alternate explanations.
這部分與科學品味有關。誠如美國演化生物學家古爾德在「奇妙生命」中所說，只消把有意識的心智視為一種僥倖，無可避免的程度不會大於盲腸，即足以令人振奮。然而斟酌其他解釋似乎也不瘋狂。

Now, a new book by the physicist Max Tegmark suggests that a different ingredient – mathematics – needs to be admitted into science as one of nature’s irreducible parts.
美國物理學家泰格馬克在新作中指出，必須為科學加上一種不同的成分：數學，它是自然界不可減的環節。

Dr. Tegmark, in his book, “Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality,” says the universe is a mathematical structure. He tries to show how matter, energy, space and time might emerge from numbers.
「我們的數學宇宙：我對現實終極本質的探究」一書指出，宇宙是一種數學結構。他試著解釋物質、能量、空間與時間可能出自數字。

But is mathematics, for all its power, really the root of reality? Or is it a product of the human mind? The mathematician Edward Frenkel noted, in reviewing the book, that only a small part of the vast ocean of mathematics appears to describe the real world. The rest seems to be about nothing other than itself.
然而力量可觀的數學果真是現實的根源嗎？或者它是人類心智的產物？美國數學家法朗凱爾評論該著作之後指出，浩瀚的數學領域只有一小部分似可形容真實世界，其餘似乎只與它本身有關。

Ultimately, it could be that, millenniums from now, science on Earth, circa 2014, will look like nothing more than a good start.
最後，可能數千年後，2014年左右地球上的科學看起來頂多只是個好的開始。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/22/science/beyond-energy-matter-time-and-space.html

2014-07-29聯合報/G5版/UNITEDDAILYNEWS 陳世欽譯 原文參見紐時週報十版左