雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第2章:下一個星期(26)

'Einstein here throws doubt, ' Alan commented, 'on whether Euclid's axioms, when applied to rigid bodies, hold. … He therefore sets out to test … the Galilei-Newtonian laws or axioms.' He had identified the crucial point, that Einstein doubted the axioms. Not for Alan the 'obvious duties', for nothing was obvious to him. His brother John, who by now regarded Alan with a rather patronising, but not hostile amusement, held that

艾倫看到了愛因斯坦最本質的東西，那就是他一直在懷疑。對愛因斯坦來說，沒有什麼"明確的義務"，一切都不是明確的。艾倫的哥哥約翰說：

You could take a safe bet that if you ventured on some self-evident proposition, as for example that the earth was round, Alan would produce a great deal of incontrovertible evidence to prove that it was almost certainly flat, ovular, or much the same shape as a Siamese cat which had been boiled for fifteen minutes at a temperature of one thousand degrees Centigrade.

你可以跟艾倫打賭，挑戰一些明擺的道理。比如，你說地球是圓的，艾倫就偏要提出一堆證據，來證明它是平的，或者是胚珠形的，或者是在一千度的液體中煮了15分鐘的暹羅貓形的。

Cartesian doubt came as an incomprehensible intrusion into Alan's family and school environment, an intrusion that the English coped with more by laughter than by persecution. But doubt being a very difficult and rare state of mind, it had taken the whole intellectual world a very long time to ask whether the 'Galilei-Newtonian laws or axioms', apparently 'self-evident', were actually true. Only by the late nineteenth century was it recognised that they were inconsistent with the known laws of electricity and magnetism. The implications were frightening, and it had needed Einstein to take the step of saying that the assumed basis of mechanics was actually incorrect, thereby creating the Special Theory of Relativity in 1905. This then proved inconsistent with Newton's laws of gravity, and to remove these contradictions Einstein had gone even further, casting doubt even on Euclid's axioms of space to create the General Theory of Relativity in 1915. The point of what Einstein had done did not lie in this or that experiment. It lay, as Alan saw, in the ability to doubt, to take ideas seriously, and to follow them to a logical if upsetting conclusion. 'Now he has got his axioms, ' wrote Alan, 'and is able to proceed with his logic, discarding the old ideas of time, space, etc.'

這種笛卡爾式的懷疑，對於艾倫的家庭和學校來說，是很難理解的，英國人往往對此嗤之以鼻。懷疑是一種很高難很詭異的思維狀態，它長久地佔據着知識界，比如說，人們懷疑"伽利略-牛頓定律"，而到了19世紀後期，人們確實發現了它不符合電磁定律。這種心理暗示很強大，它使愛因斯坦敢於說出，之前假設的力學基礎是錯誤的，並在1905年提出了《狹義相對論》。緊接着，狹義相對論被證明與萬有引力定律相悖，爲了消除這個矛盾，愛因斯坦繼續深入努力，甚至開始懷疑歐幾里德空間，並在1915年提出《廣義相對論》。愛因斯坦所做的，並不是根據實驗，按艾倫的說法，他就是憑着懷疑，嚴肅地考查每一個問題，然後逼出一個符合邏輯的結論，哪怕這個結論讓人難以接受。艾論說："現在他有了自己的定理，這樣才能符合他的邏輯，摒棄時間、空間等等舊的概念。"