演講MP3+雙語文稿:科學(xué)發(fā)現(xiàn)并不像你想的那樣

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【演講者及介紹】Phil Plait

菲爾·普萊特，天文學(xué)家，他畢生致力于傳播科學(xué)，傳播關(guān)于真實(shí)世界的信息

【演講主題】科學(xué)發(fā)現(xiàn)的秘密：犯錯(cuò)誤

【中英文字幕】

翻譯者 psjmz mz 校對者 Hanlin Wang

00:13

Now, people have a lot of misconceptionsabout science -- about how it works and what it is. A big one is that scienceis just a big old pile of facts. But that's not true -- that's not even thegoal of science. Science is a process. It's a way of thinking. Gathering factsis just a piece of it, but it's not the goal. The ultimate goal of science isto understand objective reality the best way we know how, and that's based onevidence.

人們對于科學(xué)有很多誤解——關(guān)于科學(xué)原理和科學(xué)的含義。一個(gè)最大的誤解是，科學(xué)只是一大堆陳舊的事實(shí)。但這并不正確——這甚至不是科學(xué)的目的?？茖W(xué)是一個(gè)過程。它是一種思考方式。收集事實(shí)只是其中一步，但并非目的。科學(xué)的最終目的是用我們所知道的最優(yōu)方法來理解客觀事實(shí)，即要以證據(jù)為基礎(chǔ)。

00:42

The problem here is that people are flawed.We can be fooled -- we're really good at fooling ourselves. And so baked intothis process is a way of minimizing our own bias. So sort of boiled down morethan is probably useful, here's how this works. If you want to do some science,what you want to do is you want to observe something ... say, "The sky isblue. Hey, I wonder why?" You question it. The next thing you do is youcome up with an idea that may explain it: a hypothesis. Well, you know what?Oceans are blue. Maybe the sky is reflecting the colors from the ocean. Great,but now you have to test it so you predict what that might mean. Yourprediction would be, "Well, if the sky is reflecting the ocean color, itwill be bluer on the coasts than it will be in the middle of the country."OK, that's fair enough, but you've got to test that prediction so you get on aplane, you leave Denver on a nice gray day, you fly to LA, you look up and thesky is gloriously blue. Hooray, your thesis is proven. But is it really? No.You've made one observation. You need to think about your hypothesis, thinkabout how to test it and do more than just one. Maybe you could go to adifferent part of the country or a different part of the year and see what theweather's like then. Another good idea is to talk to other people. They havedifferent ideas, different perspectives, and they can help you. This is what wecall peer review. And in fact that will probably also save you a lot of moneyand a lot of time, flying coast-to-coast just to check the weather.

問題在于，人類是有缺陷的。我們可能被愚弄——我們真的很擅長欺騙自己。所以，融入科學(xué)的探究過程，是一種將偏見最小化的方法?？偨Y(jié)起來說可能更好，科學(xué)的原理如下。如果你想要做點(diǎn)科學(xué)研究，觀察一些事物…舉例來說，“天空是藍(lán)的，我很好奇為什么是這樣？”你提出疑問。下一步你要做的是提出一個(gè)可能的解釋：一個(gè)假設(shè)。首先，海水是藍(lán)的。也許天空反射了海洋的藍(lán)色。很好，但現(xiàn)在你得檢驗(yàn)它，去推測這意味著什么。你的預(yù)測可能是，“哦，如果天空反射了海洋的顏色，那么海水在海邊的顏色要比在一個(gè)國家的內(nèi)陸部分更藍(lán)。”好的，這很合理，但你得驗(yàn)證那個(gè)預(yù)測，于是你坐上飛機(jī)，在一個(gè)灰蒙蒙的好日子里離開丹佛，飛到洛杉磯，望向天空，天空映襯著壯麗的蔚藍(lán)色。太好了，你的論點(diǎn)被證明了。但真是這樣嗎？不是。你做了一個(gè)觀察。你得對這個(gè)假設(shè)進(jìn)行斟酌，思考如何檢驗(yàn)它，還要重復(fù)多次。也許你可以去這個(gè)國家的其他地方，或者在一年的不同時(shí)間去，看看那時(shí)的天氣如何。另一個(gè)好主意是和其他人聊聊。他們有不同的想法，不同的視角，他們可以幫助到你。這就是我們所稱的同行評議。事實(shí)上，這也會幫你省下很大一筆錢和時(shí)間，不必只為了看看天氣兩頭飛。

02:16

Now, what happens if your hypothesis does adecent job but not a perfect job? Well, that's OK, because what you can do isyou can modify it a little bit and then go through this whole process again --make predictions, test them -- and as you do that over and over again, you willhone this idea. And if it gets good enough, it may be accepted by thescientific community, at least provisionally, as a good explanation of what'sgoing on, at least until a better idea or some contradictory evidence comesalong.

那么如果你的假設(shè)很好，但不是很完美怎么辦？這不是大問題，因?yàn)槟憧梢詫λM(jìn)行一點(diǎn)修正，然后再把整個(gè)流程走一遍——做預(yù)測，檢驗(yàn)它——隨著你一遍又一遍地重復(fù)，你的假設(shè)便會被優(yōu)化。如果它變得足夠好了，可能會被科學(xué)界采納，至少暫時(shí)性地，作為一種對此自然現(xiàn)象的合理解釋，直到有更好的觀點(diǎn)或者出現(xiàn)了一些與之相矛盾的證據(jù)。

02:48

Now, part of this process is admitting whenyou're wrong. And that can be really, really hard. Science has its strengthsand weaknesses and they depend on this. One of the strengths of science is thatit's done by people, and it's proven itself to do a really good job. Weunderstand the universe pretty well because of science. One of science'sweaknesses is that it's done by people, and we bring a lot of baggage alongwith us when we investigate things. We are egotistical, we are stubborn, we'resuperstitious, we're tribal, we're humans -- these are all human traits andscientists are humans. And so we have to be aware of that when we're studyingscience and when we're trying to develop our theses. But part of this wholething, part of this scientific process, part of the scientific method, isadmitting when you're wrong. I know, I've been there.

科學(xué)探究過程的一部分就是承認(rèn)你的錯(cuò)誤。這真的非常、非常難?？茖W(xué)有其優(yōu)勢和不足，而它依賴于錯(cuò)誤?？茖W(xué)的優(yōu)點(diǎn)之一是，它是由人來完成的，長久以來我們獲得的科學(xué)成就也毋庸置疑。因?yàn)榭茖W(xué)，我們對宇宙有非常不錯(cuò)的認(rèn)知。而科學(xué)的一個(gè)不足也恰恰是，它是由人來完成的，當(dāng)我們調(diào)查研究的時(shí)候，會帶著很多包袱。我們是任性主觀的，我們固執(zhí)且迷信，我們是群聚動(dòng)物，我們是人類——這些都是人的特點(diǎn)，而科學(xué)家也是人。所以在研究和做出假設(shè)時(shí)，我們要意識到這一點(diǎn)。但這整件事的一部分，整個(gè)科學(xué)過程的一部分，整個(gè)科學(xué)方法的一部分，在于要承認(rèn)自己在哪里犯了錯(cuò)。我曾經(jīng)有過這樣的經(jīng)歷。

03:45

Many years ago I was working on HubbleSpace Telescope, and a scientist I worked with came to me with some data, andhe said, "I think there may be a picture of a planet orbiting another starin this data." We had not had any pictures taken of planets orbiting otherstars yet, so if this were true, then this would be the first one and we wouldbe the ones who found it. That's a big deal. I was very excited, so I just dugright into this data. I spent a long time trying to figure out if this thingwere a planet or not. The problem is planets are faint and stars are bright, sotrying to get the signal out of this data was like trying to hear a whisper ina heavy metal concert -- it was really hard. I tried everything I could, butafter a month of working on this, I came to a realization ... couldn't do it. Ihad to give up. And I had to tell this other scientist, "The data's toomessy. We can't say whether this is a planet or not." And that was hard.Then later on we got follow-up observations with Hubble, and it showed that itwasn't a planet. It was a background star or galaxy, something like that.

許多年前，我在哈勃太空望遠(yuǎn)鏡項(xiàng)目工作，有個(gè)一起共事的科學(xué)家?guī)е鴶?shù)據(jù)來找我，他說：“我認(rèn)為這個(gè)數(shù)據(jù)表明可能有顆行星圍繞另一顆恒星轉(zhuǎn)?！比藗儺?dāng)時(shí)還沒有拍到行星繞其他恒星轉(zhuǎn)的照片，所以如果這個(gè)是真的，就會是世界上的首次發(fā)現(xiàn)，并且我們就是發(fā)現(xiàn)它的人。這可了不得。我非常激動(dòng)，所以我就深入研究了這些數(shù)據(jù)。我花了很長的時(shí)間去搞清楚這個(gè)東西是不是行星。問題是行星很暗，恒星很亮，所以試圖從這些數(shù)據(jù)中獲取信號就像在重金屬音樂會上聽到耳語一樣。真是非常難。我想盡了一切辦法，但忙了一個(gè)月后，我意識到…我做不到。我不得不放棄。我得告訴其他科學(xué)家，“數(shù)據(jù)太混亂了，我們無法確定這是不是行星。”承認(rèn)這件事真的非常難。后來我們用哈勃望遠(yuǎn)鏡做了后續(xù)觀測，結(jié)果發(fā)現(xiàn)它并不是一顆行星，只是個(gè)類似于背景恒星或星系的東西。

04:57

Well, not to get too technical, but thatsucked.

我不想說得太專業(yè)，但那真是太糟糕了。

04:59

(Laughter)

（笑聲）

05:00

I was really unhappy about this. But that'spart of it. You have to say, "Look, you know, we can't do this with thedata we have." And then I had to face up to the fact that even thefollow-up data showed we were wrong. Emotionally I was pretty unhappy. But if ascientist is doing their job correctly, being wrong is not so bad because thatmeans there's still more stuff out there -- more things to figure out.

我對此真的非常失落。但就這是科學(xué)的一部分。你不得不承認(rèn)，“看吧，我們無法用現(xiàn)有數(shù)據(jù)進(jìn)行分析?！彪S后我還得面對 后續(xù)的數(shù)據(jù)證明 我們是錯(cuò)的這個(gè)事實(shí)。情感上，我非常失落。但如果一個(gè)科學(xué)家正確地進(jìn)行了研究，犯了錯(cuò)誤并不是壞事，因?yàn)檫@意味著在此之外還有更多事物——更多的東西等待著我們?nèi)ヌ剿鳌?/p>

05:29

Scientists don't love being wrong but welove puzzles, and the universe is the biggest puzzle of them all. Now havingsaid that, if you have a piece and it doesn't fit no matter how you move it,jamming it in harder isn't going to help. There's going to be a time when youhave to let go of your idea if you want to understand the bigger picture. Theprice of doing science is admitting when you're wrong, but the payoff is thebest there is: knowledge and understanding. And I can give you a thousandexamples of this in science, but there's one I really like. It has to do withastronomy, and it was a question that had been plaguing astronomers literallyfor centuries.

科學(xué)家不喜歡犯錯(cuò)，但我們喜歡謎題，而宇宙就是最大的迷題。話雖如此，如果你有一小塊拼圖，但怎么擺弄都拼不上，硬插進(jìn)去并沒有用。如果你想要理解更大的概念，就得放棄目前所持有的觀點(diǎn)?？茖W(xué)研究的代價(jià)就是當(dāng)你犯錯(cuò)時(shí)要承認(rèn)，但這件事的回報(bào)是最好的：知識和理解。我可以給你上千個(gè)科學(xué)案例，但其中有一個(gè)我真的很喜歡。這當(dāng)然與天文學(xué)有關(guān)，這個(gè)問題一直困擾了天文學(xué)家好幾個(gè)世紀(jì)。

06:09

When you look at the Sun, it seems special.It is the brightest object in the sky, but having studied astronomy, physics,chemistry, thermodynamics for centuries, we learned something very importantabout it. It's not that special. It's a star just like millions of other stars.But that raises an interesting question. If the Sun is a star and the Sun hasplanets, do these other stars have planets? Well, like I said with my ownfailure in the "planet" I was looking for, finding them is superhard, but scientists tend to be pretty clever people and they used a lot ofdifferent techniques and started observing stars. And over the decades theystarted finding some things that were pretty interesting, right on the thin,hairy edge of what they were able to detect. But time and again, it was shownto be wrong.

太陽看起來很特別。它是天空中最亮的物體，但是經(jīng)過了幾個(gè)世紀(jì)的天文學(xué)，物理學(xué)，化學(xué)，熱力學(xué)研究后，我們了解到了一些關(guān)于太陽的重要信息。它不再那么特別了。它不過跟其他數(shù)百萬個(gè)恒星一樣。但這又引申出了一個(gè)有趣的問題。如果太陽是恒星，并且太陽有行星，其他恒星會有行星嗎？像我提到的在尋找“行星”上的失敗經(jīng)歷，找到它們真的非常難，但科學(xué)家往往非常聰明，他們會應(yīng)用很多不同的技術(shù)觀察恒星。幾十年后，他們開始發(fā)現(xiàn)一些真正有趣的東西，就在他們能夠探測到的薄而粗糙的邊緣。但事實(shí)一再證明，這是錯(cuò)的。

06:57

That all changed in 1991. A couple ofastronomers -- Alexander Lyne -- Andrew Lyne, pardon me -- and Matthew Bailes,had a huge announcement. They had found a planet orbiting another star. And notjust any star, but a pulsar, and this is the remnant of a star that haspreviously exploded. It's blasting out radiation. This is the last place in theuniverse you would expect to find a planet, but they had very methodicallylooked at this pulsar, and they detected the gravitational tug of this planetas it orbited the pulsar. It looked really good. The first planet orbitinganother star had been found ... except not so much.

事態(tài)在1991年才完全改變。幾位天文學(xué)家——亞歷山大·萊恩——安德魯·萊恩，對不起——和馬修·貝爾斯，發(fā)布了一項(xiàng)重大聲明。他們發(fā)現(xiàn)了一個(gè)繞著另一顆恒星旋轉(zhuǎn)的行星。不是隨便一顆恒星，而是脈沖星，這是之前爆炸過的恒星的殘骸。它在爆炸時(shí)釋放了大量輻射。這是宇宙中你最不可能找到行星的地方。但他們非常系統(tǒng)地觀察了這顆脈沖星，當(dāng)這顆行星繞脈沖星旋轉(zhuǎn)時(shí)，他們探測到了它的引力。這看起來真的很棒。第一顆繞另一顆恒星運(yùn)行的行星被發(fā)現(xiàn)了…只是沒有那么多。

07:38

(Laughter)

（笑聲）

07:39

After they made the announcement, a bunchof other astronomers commented on it, and so they went back and looked at theirdata and realized they had made a very embarrassing mistake. They had notaccounted for some very subtle characteristics of the Earth's motion around theSun, which affected how they measured this planet going around the pulsar. Andit turns out that when they did account for it correctly, poof -- their planetdisappeared. It wasn't real.

在他們發(fā)布公告后，其他一些天文學(xué)家對此發(fā)表了評論，于是他們仔細(xì)地回去查看數(shù)據(jù)，并意識到自己犯了一個(gè)非常尷尬的錯(cuò)誤。他們沒有考慮到地球繞太陽的運(yùn)動(dòng)中一些非常不明顯的特征，這些特征影響了他們測量這顆行星繞脈沖星運(yùn)行的方式。結(jié)果，當(dāng)他們做了正確的計(jì)算時(shí)，糟糕——他們的行星消失了。它其實(shí)并不存在的。

08:05

So Andrew Lyne had a very formidable task.He had to admit this. So in 1992 at the American Astronomical Society meeting,which is one of the largest gatherings of astronomers on the planet, he stoodup and announced that he had made a mistake and that the planet did not exist.And what happened next -- oh, I love this -- what happened next was wonderful.He got an ovation. The astronomers weren't angry at him; they didn't want tochastise him. They praised him for his honesty and his integrity. I love that!Scientists are people.

安德魯·萊恩有個(gè)非常艱巨的任務(wù)，他得承認(rèn)錯(cuò)誤。于是在1992年美國天文學(xué)會會議，這個(gè)全世界最大的天文學(xué)會議上，他站起來并宣布他犯了個(gè)錯(cuò)誤，那顆行星并不存在。接下來發(fā)生的是——太讓我激動(dòng)了——接下來的一幕很讓人難忘。他得到了熱烈的掌聲。天文學(xué)家們并沒有對他表示憤怒；他們不想譴責(zé)他，而是贊揚(yáng)了他的誠實(shí)和正直。我非常喜歡這一點(diǎn)！科學(xué)家也是人。

08:42

(Laughter)

（笑聲）

08:43

And it gets better!

事情在變得越來越好！

08:44

(Laughter)

（笑聲）

08:45

Lyne steps off the podium. The next guy tocome up is a man named Aleksander Wolszczan He takes the microphone and says,"Yeah, so Lyne's team didn't find a pulsar planet, but my team found notjust one but two planets orbiting a different pulsar. We knew about the problemthat Lyne had, we checked for it, and yeah, ours are real." And it turnsout he was right. And in fact, a few months later, they found a third planetorbiting this pulsar and it was the first exoplanet system ever found -- whatwe call alien worlds -- exoplanets. That to me is just wonderful.

萊恩從講臺上走下來后，下一位上臺的人是亞歷山大·沃爾茲森，他拿起麥克風(fēng)說道，“很遺憾，萊恩的團(tuán)隊(duì)沒有發(fā)現(xiàn)脈沖星，但我的團(tuán)隊(duì)發(fā)現(xiàn)了不止一個(gè)，而是兩顆行星圍繞不同的脈沖星運(yùn)行。我們知道萊恩存在的問題，我們仔細(xì)核實(shí)了自己的結(jié)果，我們的結(jié)果是真的?！苯Y(jié)果他是對的。事實(shí)上，幾個(gè)月后，他們發(fā)現(xiàn)了第三顆繞著這顆脈沖星的行星，這是迄今為止發(fā)現(xiàn)的第一個(gè)系外行星系統(tǒng)——我們稱之為外星世界——系外行星。這對我來說太棒了。

09:24

At that point the floodgates were opened.In 1995 a planet was found around a star more like the Sun, and then we foundanother and another. This is an image of an actual planet orbiting an actualstar. We kept getting better at it. We started finding them by the bucketload.We started finding thousands of them. We built observatories specificallydesigned to look for them. And now we know of thousands of them. We even knowof planetary systems.

從那時(shí)起，就好像泄洪閥門被打開了一樣。1995年，一個(gè)行星被發(fā)現(xiàn)繞著類似太陽的恒星運(yùn)行，隨后我們發(fā)現(xiàn)了一個(gè)又一個(gè)。這是一顆圍繞恒星運(yùn)行的行星圖像。我們做得越來越好。我們開始成批成批地找到它們，數(shù)量達(dá)到了幾千個(gè)。我們建造了專門用來尋找它們的天文臺。利用這些天文臺，我們發(fā)現(xiàn)了數(shù)千顆行星。我們甚至了解了行星系統(tǒng)。

09:53

That is actual data, animated, showing fourplanets orbiting another star. This is incredible. Think about that. For all ofhuman history, you could count all the known planets in the universe on twohands -- nine -- eight? Nine? Eight -- eight.

這是真實(shí)的數(shù)據(jù)，動(dòng)畫顯示了圍繞另一顆恒星運(yùn)行的四顆行星。真是難以置信，想想看吧?？v觀人類歷史，用兩只手就可以算出宇宙中所有的行星—— 9——8個(gè)？ 9個(gè)？8——8個(gè)。

10:10

(Laughter)

（笑聲）

10:13

Eh.

呃。

10:15

(Laughter)

（笑聲）

10:16

But now we know they're everywhere. Everystar -- for every star you see in the sky there could be three, five, tenplanets. The sky is filled with them. We think that planets may outnumber starsin the galaxy. This is a profound statement, and it was made because ofscience. And it wasn't made just because of science and the observatories andthe data; it was made because of the scientists who built the observatories,who took the data, who made the mistakes and admitted them and then let other scientistsbuild on their mistakes so that they could do what they do and figure out whereour place is in the universe. That is how you find the truth. Science is at itsbest when it dares to be human.

但現(xiàn)在我們知道它們到處都是。每個(gè)恒星——每個(gè)你在天空看到的星星，都可能擁有3，5，10個(gè)行星。它們布滿了天空。我們認(rèn)為行星的數(shù)量可能超過星系中的恒星。這是一個(gè)意義重大的結(jié)論，這全要?dú)w功于科學(xué)。得出這個(gè)結(jié)論不止要?dú)w功于科學(xué)研究和數(shù)據(jù)觀測；能得出這個(gè)結(jié)論要?dú)w功于建造了天文臺的科學(xué)家，他們得到了數(shù)據(jù)，他們犯了錯(cuò)誤并承認(rèn)了錯(cuò)誤，然后讓其他科學(xué)家在他們的錯(cuò)誤之上前進(jìn)，所以他們可以做到力所能及的事，并去弄清楚我們在宇宙中的位置。這就是你發(fā)現(xiàn)真相的方式。當(dāng)科學(xué)敢于為人時(shí)，它就處于最佳狀態(tài)。

11:02

Thank you.

謝謝。

11:03

(Applause and cheers)

（鼓掌和歡呼）