万物简史 第206期:威力巨大的原子(20)

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　　真正的意思是，你永远也无法预测电子在任何特定时刻的位置。你只能认为它有可能在那里。在某种意义上，正如丹尼斯·奥弗比所说，电子只有等到被观察到了，你才能说它确实存在。换句稍稍不同的话来说，在电子被观察到之前，你非得认为电子"哪里都有，而又哪里都没有"。

　　If this seems confusing, you may take some comfort in knowing that it was confusing to physicists¹, too. Overbye notes: “Bohr once commented that a person who wasn’t outraged² on first hearing about quantum theory didn’t understand what had been said.” Heisenberg, when asked how one could envision an atom, replied: “Don’t try.”

　　如果你觉得被这种说法弄得稀里糊涂，你要知道，它也把物理学家们弄得稀里糊涂，这是值得安慰的。奥弗比说："有一次，玻尔说，要是谁第一次听说量子理论时没有发火，这说明他没有理解意思。"当有人问海森伯是不是可以想像一下原子的模样，他回答说："别这么干。"

　　蓝色的原子辐射背景

　　So the atom turned out to be quite unlike the image that most people had created. The electron doesn’t fly around the nucleus³ like a planet around its sun, but instead takes on the more amorphous⁴ aspect of a cloud. The “shell” of an atom isn’t some hard shiny casing, as illustrations sometimes encourage us to suppose, but simply the outermost⁵ of these fuzzy electron clouds. The cloud itself is essentially⁶ just a zone of statistical⁷ probability marking the area beyond which the electron only very seldom strays. Thus an atom, if you could see it, would look more like a very fuzzy tennis ball than a hard-edged metallic⁸ sphere (but not much like either or, indeed, like anything you’ve ever seen; we are, after all, dealing⁹ here with a world very different from the one we see around us).

　　因此，结果证明，原子不完全是大多数人创造的那个模样。电子并不像行星绕着太阳转动那样在绕着原子核飞速转动，而更像是一朵没有固定形状的云。原子的"壳"并不是某种坚硬而光滑的外皮，就像许多插图有时候怂恿我们去想像的那样，而只是这种绒毛状的电子云的最外层。实质上，云团本身只是个统计概率的地带，表示电子只是在极少的情况下才越过这个范围。因此，要是你弄得明白的话，原子更像是个毛茸茸的网球，而不大像个外缘坚硬的金属球。（其实，二者都不大像，换句话说，不大像你见过的任何东西。毕竟，我们在这里讨论的世界，跟我们身边的世界是非常不同的。）

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