《那些古怪又讓人憂心的問題》第101期:樂高大橋(1)
LEGO BRIDGE
Q. How many Lego bricks would it take to build a bridge capable of carrying traffic from London to New York? Have that many Lego bricks been manufactured?
Q．要想用樂高積木搭一座連接紐約和倫敦的大橋需要多少積木？已經生產出來的樂高積木數量夠建造這麼一座大橋嗎？——Jerry Petersen
——傑瑞•彼得森
A. LET'S START WITH A less ambitious goal.
A．野心先不要這麼大。Making the connection
連接兩座城市There have certainly been enough Lego1 bricks to connect New York and LEGO2 units, New York and London are 700 million studs apart. That means that if you arranged bricks like this . . .
全世界當然有足夠連接紐約和倫敦的Lego1積木。如果用LEGO2“單體”來作爲衡量標準的話，紐約和倫敦相距7億塊單體。這意味着如果你像這樣搭積木……. . . it would take 350 million of them to connect the two cities. The bridge wouldn't be able to hold itself together or carry anything bigger than a LEGO®3 minifig, but it's a start.
……則會需要3.5億塊積木。不過造出來的橋連自身的完整性都不能保證，而且任何比LEGO®3小人大的東西都放不上去。但這是一個很不錯的開頭。There have been over 400 billion Lego4 pieces produced over the years. But how many of those are bricks that would help with a bridge, and how many are little helmet visors that get lost in the carpet?
全世界已經生產出來的Lego4積木超過4000億塊，但其中又有多少是可以拿來建造這座樂高大橋的磚塊，又有多少是丟失在地毯當中的樂高小人護目鏡呢？Let's assume we're building our bridge out of the most common LeGo5 piece-the 2x4 brick.
假設我們用的是最普通的2×4 LeGo5積木。Using data provided by Dan Boger, Lego6 kit archivist and operator of the Lego data site, I've come up with the following rough estimate: 1 out of every 50 to 100 pieces is a 2x4 rectangular brick. This suggests there are about 5–10 billion 2x4 bricks in existence, which is more than enough for our one-block-wide bridge.
丹•博格是一位Lego6套裝檔案保管員，同時也是樂高數據網站的運營專員，用他整理出來的數據我粗略估計了一下：每50～100塊樂高積木中就有一塊2×4的長方形積木。這意味着全世界一共有50億～100億塊2×4樂高積木，這些積木足夠建造我們那個一塊積木寬的樂高大橋了。Supporting cars
承載汽車Of course, if we want to support actual traffic, we'll need to make the bridge a little wider.
當然了，如果我們想讓正常的汽車能夠開上樂高大橋，那麼大橋需要變得更寬一些。We probably want to make the bridge float. The Atlantic Ocean is deep,[citation needed] and we want to avoid building 3-mile-high pylons out of Lego bricks if we can.
我們可能還想讓樂高大橋浮起來。大西洋很深，所以我們希望儘可能別建造一個5千米高的樂高橋塔。Lego bricks don't make a watertight seal when you connect them together,7 and the plastic used to make them is denser than water. That's easy enough to solve; if we put a layer of sealant over the outer surface, the resulting block is substantially less dense than water.
一塊塊拼起來的樂高積木並不具有防水性7，而且製作樂高積木的塑料密度大於水。這個問題很好解決：我們在外表面塗一層密封材料，這樣整個積木塊的密度就比水小了。For every cubic meter of water it displaces, the bridge can carry 400 kg. A typical passenger car weighs a little under 2000 kg, so our bridge will need a minimum of 10 cubic meters of Lego supporting each passenger car.
每排開1立方米的水，我們的樂高大橋能夠浮起400千克的物體。一輛普通的私家車質量接近2000千克，所以每開上去一輛車，樂高大橋的體積就至少要增加10立方米。If we make the bridge a meter thick and 5 meters wide, then it should be able to stay afloat without any trouble-although it might ride low in the water-and be sturdy enough to drive on.
如果我們造出1米厚5米寬的大橋，它自身浮在水面上應該沒什麼問題——雖然突出海平面只有一點點距離——汽車開在上面也會很穩當。Legos8 are quite strong; according to a BBC investigation, you could stack a quarter of a million 2x2 bricks on top of each other before the bottom one collapsed.9
Legos8積木強度非常高。根據英國廣播公司（BBC）的研究結果，如果你把2×2的樂高積木一塊一塊往上疊，需要疊25萬塊積木才能讓最下面那塊積木崩潰。9The first problem with this idea is that there aren't nearly enough Lego blocks in the world to build this kind of bridge. Our second problem is the ocean.
這種想法遇到的第一個問題是世界上沒有足夠的樂高積木來建造出這種樣式的樂高大橋。第二個問題和海洋有關。
