万物简史 第208期:威力巨大的原子(22)

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　　令人惊叹的是，这个现象在1997年得到了证实，瑞士日内瓦大学的物理学家把两个光子朝相反方向发送到相隔11公里的位置，结果表明，只要干扰其中一个，另一个马上作出反应。

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　　Things reached such a pitch that at one conference Bohr remarked of a new theory that the question was not whether it was crazy, but whether it was crazy enough. To illustrate⁴ the nonintuitive nature of the quantum world, Schrodinger offered a famous thought experiment in which a hypothetical cat was placed in a box with one atom of a radioactive substance attached to a vial of hydrocyanic acid. If the particle degraded within an hour, it would trigger a mechanism⁵ that would break the vial and poison the cat. If not, the cat would live. But we could not know which was the case, so there was no choice, scientifically, but to regard the cat as 100 percent alive and 100 percent dead at the same time. This means, as Stephen Hawking⁶ has observed with a touch of understandable excitement, that one cannot “predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely⁷!”

　　事情达到了这样的一种程度：有一次会议上，玻尔在谈到一种新的理论时说，问题不是它是否荒唐，而是它是否足够荒唐。为了说明量子世界那无法直觉的性质，薛定谔提出了一个著名的思想实验：假设把猫儿放进一只箱子，同时放进一个放射性物质的原子，连着一小瓶氢氰酸。要是粒子在一个小时内发生衰变，它就会启动一种机制，把瓶子击破，使猫儿中毒。要不然，猫儿便会活着。但是，我们无法知道会是哪种情况，因此从科学的角度来看无法作出抉择，只能同时认为猫儿百分之百地活着、百分之百地死了。正如斯蒂芬·霍金有点儿激动地（这可以理解）说，这意味着，你无法“确切预知未来的事情，要是你连宇宙的现状都无法确切测定的话”。

　　Because of its oddities, many physicists disliked quantum theory, or at least certain aspects of it, and none more so than Einstein. This was more than a little ironic⁸ since it was he, in his annus mirabilis of 1905, who had so persuasively⁹ explained how photons of light could sometimes behave like particles and sometimes like waves—the notion at the very heart of the new physics.

　　由于存在这么多古怪的特点，许多物理学家不喜欢量子理论，至少不喜欢这个理论的某些方面，尤其是爱因斯坦。这是很有讽刺意味的，因为正是他在1905年这个奇迹年中很有说服力地解释说，光子有时候可以表现得像粒子，有时候表现得像波──这是新物理学的核心见解。

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