史蒂芬·霍金：“女人对我来说，完全是一个谜”

Physicist who has grappled with cosmic inflation and a quantum theory of gravity says he is baffled by women

对于这位物理学界的伟人来说，宇宙膨胀说与量子引力论都不是什么难题；而他却坦言，让他最深感困惑的，是这种生物——女人。

【2011年，洛杉矶：女星简·芳达在一次电影试映会之后亲吻了史蒂芬·霍金】

His career has shed light on the secrets of the universe, from the nature of space-time to the workings of black holes, but there is one conundrum that still baffles the world's most famous scientist.

他揭示了宇宙的奥秘，解决了诸如时空本质、黑洞原理等一系列难题；但对于这位世界上最伟大的科学家来说，还有一个课题让他困扰不已。

In an interview to mark his 70th birthday this weekend, Stephen Hawking, the former Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, admitted he spent most of the day thinking about women. "They are," he said "a complete mystery."

本周末，斯蒂芬·霍金迎来了他的70岁生日。在一次采访中，这位剑桥大学的前卢卡斯数学教授坦承，自己多数时间都在琢磨女人，表示“她们完全是个谜”。

Professor Hawking, whose stardom has included spots on The Simpsons and Star Trek, spoke to New Scientist magazine ahead of an international conference held in his honour that begins on Thursday in Cambridge.

霍金教授曾为《辛普森一家（The Simpsons）》中的自己配音，也曾在《星际迷航（Star Trek）》中本色出演。在这次《新科学家（New Scientist）》周刊的采访之后，剑桥大学将于周三为他举行国际盛会。

The meeting will culminate in a public symposium on Sunday when some of the world's most prominent physicists give a series of talks on the state of the universe. Among them will be Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal, Saul Perlmutter, who won the Nobel prize in physics in 2011, and Kip Thorne at the California Institute of Technology.

本次盛会最精彩的环节，莫过于周日进行的公众研讨会，届时几位世界上最为著名的物理学家，如皇家天文学家里斯勋爵（Lord Rees）、2011年诺贝尔物理学奖获得者索尔·珀尔马特（Saul Perlmutter）、加州理工学院的基普·索恩（Kip Thorne）等，将就剑桥大学的现况发表一系列演讲。

Earlier this week, eminent researchers expressed admiration and respect for Professor Hawking, a scientist who inspired colleagues and students while forging ahead with fresh insights into some of the most intangible puzzles to hand.

本周初，几位知名科学家向霍金表达了自己的敬仰之情，称他对最为难以捉摸的难题有着独特的见解；而在不断开拓进取的同时，这位伟人还激励着自己的同事与学生。

Hawking has made a string of contributions to cosmology throughout a career that many doubted would last as long as it has after he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21. He worked on the inflation of the early universe, a quantum theory of gravity, and famously showed that black holes emit radiation and so slowly disappear.

霍金在21岁时不幸身患运动神经元疾病，许多人都怀疑他的职业生涯会就此终止，但在患病之后他还是在宇宙学领域做出了一系列不朽的贡献。他致力于早期宇宙膨胀说和重力量子论的研究，并且提出了著名的黑洞理论，指出黑洞会散发射线，因此蒸发得十分缓慢。

Asked about the most exciting development in physics during the course of his career, Hawking mentioned the findings of Nasa's Cobe (Cosmic Background Explorer) spacecraft and subsequent confirmation by a later mission called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Together, they made a map of the heavens that revealed the afterglow of the big bang "in excellent agreement with the predictions of inflation", he told the magazine.

当记者问到在他的科研生涯中，哪些物理学领域的成果最令他激动时，霍金提到了美国宇航局宇宙背景探测者（COBE）的发现，以及随后威尔金森微波各向异性探测器（WMAP）观察数据的证实。这两台探测器描绘出了宇宙天体图，表明宇宙大爆炸冷却后的“余晖”与“关于宇宙膨胀的预测完全吻合”。

As for his greatest mistake, Hawking said: "I used to think information was destroyed in black holes", a belief he later revised. "This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science." But his work in the field led to the theoretical breakthrough, so far unconfirmed by experiment, that black holes leak information back into the universe through quantum mechanical effects.

在谈及自己犯过的最严重的错误时，霍金说：“以前我认为黑洞会吞噬物质能量信息，这是我至少在科学领域犯过的最大的错误。”现在他已经推翻了这个理论，提出黑洞在吞噬物体之后，还会保留下该物体的些微痕迹，并会通过量子力学效应“吐回”到宇宙中。尽管新理论尚未经过试验证实，但霍金的研究也实现了该领域的理论突破。

The Large Hadron Collider at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, could do more than anything else to revolutionise scientists' understanding of the universe, Hawking said. The machine could find "supersymmetric" particles, which are partners of the more familiar subatomic particles. Such a finding would be "strong evidence" for M-theory, a version of string theory that describes gravity and the other forces of nature in an 11-dimensional universe.

霍金还认为，要彻底改变科学家们对宇宙的看法，欧洲粒子物理研究所（Cern，其实验室设在日内瓦附近）的大型强子对撞机要比任何设备都来得有效。它可以找到“超对称”粒子，这种粒子与常规的亚原子粒子十分相似。如果实验证明这种超对称粒子真的存在，那么M-理论便找到了可靠依据。M理论是弦理论的另一版本，后者对十一维宇宙中的重力及其它自然力做了详细描述。