人們受夠了專家,但爲何仍然喜愛霍金

A few months ago, my teenage daughter and I went to see a lecture by Stephen Hawking at Oxford’s Mathematical Institute. The event had been postponed once because he was unwell; I worried that his body might finally give out, albeit five decades later than doctors had expected. Yet a new date was set and Hawking duly arrived, as if from another world, to deliver a spellbinding talk in his distinctive synthetic voice.

幾個月前，我和十幾歲的女兒去牛津大學數學研究所(Oxford’s Mathematical Institute)聽斯蒂芬?霍金(Stephen Hawking)的講座。講座曾經因霍金身體欠佳而推遲過一次；我當時擔心他的身體可能終於不行了，雖然他已經比醫生預計的多堅持了50年。然而，講座確定了一個新的日期，霍金準時抵達了會場，他就像來自另一個世界一樣，用自己獨特的合成聲音做了一個充滿魔力的演講。

I had given a lecture myself at the same venue earlier, striking a pessimistic tone: it was easy to pollute the stream of conversation about science and statistics, I said, and simply intoning the facts would not dispel misinformation. Hawking, who died this week, went some way to restoring my hope. He showed that it was possible to communicate difficult ideas, if you went about it in the right way.

我自己早些時候曾在同一地點發表過演講，我的演講論調比較悲觀：我說，關於科學和統計數據的談話很容易被污染，而且只是陳述事實沒法消除誤解。上週去世的霍金生前所做的不少努力能讓我這樣的悲觀者重燃希望。他向世界證明，如果方式正確，就有可能就艱深的思想與公衆溝通。

What was his secret? He acknowledged that his disability attracted the spotlight, but there was much more going on than the spectacle of a brilliant mind in a malfunctioning body.

他的祕訣是什麼？他承認自己的殘疾吸引了人們的關注，但吸引人的遠不止殘疾身體中的睿智頭腦。

First, he did not patronise his audience: presenting the most complicated ideas was a sign that he respected our intelligence. If we did not grasp everything, we would still be better off for having tried.

首先，他沒有對聽衆擺出高人一等的派頭：陳述最複雜的思想表明他尊重我們的智力。即便我們沒有完全理解，嘗試的過程還是對我們有好處。

“I know the book is difficult,” he commented after his A Brief History of Time had become a bestseller. “It does not matter too much if people can’t follow all the arguments. They can still get the flavour of the intellectual quest.”

他在他的《時間簡史》(A Brief History of Time)成爲暢銷書後評論道：“我知道這本書很難懂。如果理解不了全部內容，也沒有太大關係。他們仍然能體會到智力求索的感覺。”

That instinct was right. His talk demanded concentration. Most of it was beyond my daughter. Much of it was beyond me. Then Hawking would crack a joke about hairy black holes, and the audience would all be back on the same page, laughing, and ready for another attempt to scale the intellectual heights.

這種直覺是對的。聽他的演講需要全神貫注。其中大部分內容都超出了我女兒的理解範疇，有許多也超出了我的理解範疇。然後霍金會開個關於可怕的黑洞的玩笑，這是所有觀衆都能理解的，大家大笑一陣，準備好再次嘗試攀登智力的高峯。

Second, he was immensely curious. “My goal is simple, “ he said. “It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”

其次，他非常好奇。他說：“我的目??標很簡單，那就是完全理解宇宙，它爲什麼是現在這個樣子，又到底爲什麼存在。”

That sort of curiosity is contagious. It makes us want to join his hunt for answers, rather than passively receiving (or rejecting) information from an expert who claims to know them already.

這種好奇心具有感染力。它讓我們想要跟他一起去尋找答案，而不是從宣稱已經知道答案的專家那裏被動地接受（或拒絕）信息。

The third quality followed from the first two: unlike some public intellectuals, Hawking was not very interested in conflict for the sake of it. The economist Paul Krugman and the biologist Richard Dawkins are instructive contrasts to Hawking: both are brilliant communicators, but they often present their ideas as a battle between good and evil, wisdom and stupidity.

第三個品質源於前兩個特質：與一些公共知識分子不同，霍金不太喜歡單純爲了衝突而營造衝突。將經濟學家保羅?克魯格曼(Paul Krugman)和生物學家理查德?道金斯(Richard Dawkins)與霍金對比一下就能明白這一點：這兩人都是傑出的溝通者，但他們在介紹自己的思想時呈現出來的往往是善與惡、智慧與愚昧之間的戰鬥。

When you have a noble cause it can be tempting to pursue it in an antagonistic way: Economy, a charity that aims to improve economics literacy, has been fundraising with an endorsement from writer George Monbiot saying that economists are “a pox on the planet”.

當你有一個崇高的事業時，可能會忍不住以一種對抗性的方式去追求它：旨在提高人們的經濟學常識的慈善機構“經濟”(Economy)一直在籌款，並得到作家喬治?蒙比奧特(George Monbiot)的支持，他說，經濟學家是“這個星球上的天花”。

These insults seem to work, at first. If you call out your opponents as fools, knaves, or even transmissible diseases, you enthuse your own supporters. But you will win few new converts when every issue becomes a matter of tribal loyalty.

起初，這些侮辱似乎奏效了。如果你把你的對手稱作傻瓜、無賴，甚至是傳染病，你會讓你的支持者歡欣鼓舞。但是，當每個問題都變成是否忠於自己人的問題時，你將不會贏得新的支持者。

We humans are social creatures. Given a choice between being right on a partisan question (abortion, guns, Brexit, globalisation, climate change) and having mistaken views that our friends and neighbours support, we would rather be wrong and stay in the tribe. This becomes clear in surveys of views on climate change: college-educated Republicans and Democrats are further apart on the topic than those who are less educated.

我們人類是社會性生物。如果要在如下兩種情況中做出選擇——是在存在黨派分歧的問題上（墮胎、槍支、英國退歐、全球化和氣候變化）站在正確的一方，還是認同我們的朋友和鄰居所支持的錯誤觀點，我們寧願站在錯誤的一方、留在自己人當中。在對氣候變化看法的調查中，這一點變得很清楚：受過大學教育的共和黨人和民主黨人在這個問題上的分歧，比受教育程度較低的人還要大。

If our goal is to persuade, the curiosity-driven approach works better than the conflict-driven one: the evidence suggests that curious people are less subject to the temptations of partisanship. When the national conversation becomes polarised, we need to encourage curiosity about how things work rather than them-and-us tribalism.

如果我們的目標是說服，那麼用好奇心來實現目標比用衝突更好：有證據表明，好奇的人不太容易受到黨派傾向的影響。當全國的對話變得兩極化的時候，我們需要鼓勵深究事物運作的好奇心，而不是勢不兩立的部落主義。

Hawking, of course, did have robust political views. He criticised the UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt for cherry-picking evidence on the National Health Service and spoke out against Brexit. But after the referendum went the other way, he continued to argue in favour of mutual understanding and solving problems together, rather than dismissing voters as ignorant.

當然，霍金確實有鮮明的政治觀點。霍金批評英國衛生大臣傑里米?亨特(Jeremy Hunt)在英國國家醫療服務體系(National Health Service)的問題上有傾向性地挑選證據，霍金還公開反對英國退歐。但在全民公投結束後，他繼續主張相互理解並共同解決問題，而不是稱選民是愚昧的並輕視他們。

If experts want to persuade us to wrap our minds around a complex issue, they need to get us to abandon our cynicism towards unwelcome information. It does no harm to be the most recognisable scientist on the planet, but Hawking also understood that insults do not work. Instead, he treated us with respect and fired our enthusiasm.

如果專家們想要說服我們思考一個複雜的問題，他們需要說服我們拋棄對不合己意的信息的懷疑。地球上最知名科學家的身份當然有助於霍金說服別人，但同樣有幫助的是，霍金明白辱罵是沒用的。霍金尊重我們，並激發了我們的熱情。

Towards the end of his lecture, after a difficult discussion of quantum effects near the boundary of a black hole, Hawking offered a simpler idea: “If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There is a way out.”

講座接近尾聲時，在一段關於黑洞邊界附近量子效應的艱深討論結束後，霍金貢獻了一個更簡單的想法：“如果你覺得自己處於黑洞中，不要放棄。出路是有的。“

It was a message any teenager could hold on to. I sat next to my daughter and thought about how Hawking had lived such a rich life under the burden of an apparently unbeatable illness.

這是任何青少年都可以牢記的訊息。我坐在女兒旁邊，思考着霍金是如何面對明顯無法戰勝的病魔度過了如此豐富的一生。

We have been told that people have had enough of experts. That is true for some experts. It wasn’t true for Stephen Hawking.

我們被告知，人們受夠了專家。對一些專家來說的確如此，但對斯蒂芬?霍金來說卻並非這樣。