中英文对照万物简史.doc

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A
Short History of
Nearly Everything
万物简史

作者：　[美国]比尔·布莱森
BILL BRYSON

翻译： 严维明 陈邕
2005年2月第一版

流水有意 修正个别字句（橙色部分）

接力出版社出版　

目录
引言 7
第一部 寥廓的空宇 14
第一章　如何营造一个宇宙 15
第二章　欢迎光临太阳系 26
第三章　埃文斯牧师的宇宙 37
第二部 地球的大小 49
第四章　事物的测定 50
第五章　敲石头的人们 72
第六章　势不两立的科学 90
第七章　基本物质 110
第三部 一个新时代的黎明 127
第八章　爱因斯坦的宇宙 128
第九章　威力巨大的原子 149
第十章　把铅撵出去 167
第十一章　马斯特·马克的夸克 180
第十二章　大地在移动 193
第四部 处境危险地行星 207
第十三章 砰！ 208
第十四章 地下的烈火 228
第十五章 美丽而危险 246
第五部 生命本身 260
第十六章 孤独的行星 261
第十七章 进入对流层 278
第十八章 浩瀚的海洋 294
第十九章 生命的起源 313
第二十章 小生物的世界 330
第二十一章 生命在继续 351
第二十二章 多灾多难的生命进程 368
第二十三章 丰富多彩的生命 385
第二十四章 令人惊叹的细胞 409
第二十五章 达尔文的非凡见解 421
第二十六章 生命的物质 439
第六部 通向我们的路 460
第二十七章 冰河时代 461
第二十八章 神秘的两足动物 478
第二十九章 永不安分的类人猿 502
第三十章 再见 520

　　关于作者：

　　比尔·布莱森，享誉世界的旅游文学作家。1951年出生于美国艾奥瓦州，毕业于美国德雷克大学。从1973年起，曾在英国居住20年之久，任职于《泰晤士报》与《独立报》，同时也为《纽约时报》、《国家地理杂志》等刊物撰文。后搬回美国，现与妻子和四个小孩居住于新罕布什尔州的汉诺威市。

　　布莱森擅长用不同的眼光来看待他所游历的世界，在他的书里，英国式的睿智幽默与美国式的搞笑绝妙地融合在了一起。他的尖刻加上他的博学，让他的文字充满了幽默、机敏和智慧，使他自己成为“目前活在世上的最有趣的旅游文学作家”(《泰晤士报》)。

　　代表作有《哈！小不列颠》、《欧洲在发酵》、《一脚踩进小美国》、《别跟山过不去》、《请问这里是美国吗？》等多种，每本均高居美、英、加畅销书排行榜前列。其中《哈！小不列颠》更被英国读者推选为“最能深刻传达出英国灵魂的作品”。

　　作者不但才华横溢，兴趣亦十分广泛，在语言学方面著有《麻烦词汇词典》、《母语》、《美式英语》等书，皆为拥有广大拥趸的幽默之作。

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
致谢
As I sit here, in early 2003, I have before me several pages of manuscript bearing majestically encouraging and tactful notes from Ian Tattersal of the American Museum of Natural History pointing out, inter alia, that Perigueux is not a wineproducing region, that it is inventive but a touch unorthodox of me to italicize taxonomic divisions above the level of genus and species, that I have persistently misspelled Olorgesaille, a place that I recently visited, and so on in similar vein through two chapters of text covering his area of expertise, early humans.
Goodness knows how many other inky embarrassments may lurk in these pages yet, but it is thanks to Dr. Tattersall and all of those whom I am about to mention that there aren't many hundreds more. I cannot begin to thank adequately those who helped me in the preparation of this book. I am especially indebted to the following, who were uniformly generous and kindly and showed the most heroic reserves of patience in answering one simple, endlessly repeated question: "I'm sorry, but can you explain that again?"
In the United States: Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York; John Thorstensen, Mary K. Hudson, and David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire; Dr. William Abdu and Dr. Bryan Marsh of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire; Ray Anderson and Brian Witzke of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, Iowa city; Mike Voorhies of the University of Nebraska and Ashfall Fossil Beds State Park near Orchard, Nebraska; Chuck Offenburger of Buena Vista University, Storm Lake, Iowa; Ken Rancourt, director of research, Mount Washington Observatory, Gorham, New Hampshire; Paul Doss, geologist of Yellowstone National Park, and his wife, Heidi, also of the National Park; Frank Asara of the University of California at Berkeley; Oliver Payne and Lynn Addison of the National Geographic Society; James O. Farlow, IndianaPurdue University; Roger L. Larson, professor of marine geophysics, University of Rhode Island; Jeff Guinn of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram news paper; Jerry Kasten of Dallas, Texas; and the staff of the Iowa Historical Society in Des Moines.
In England: David Caplin of Imperial College, London; Richard Fortey, Les Ellis, and Kathy Way of the Natural History Museum; Martin Raff of University College, London; Rosalind Harding of the Institute of Biological Anthropology in Oxford; Dr. Laurence Smaje, formerly of the Wellcome Institute; and Keith Blackmore of The Times.
In Australia: the Reverend Robert Evans of Hazelbrook, New South Wales; Alan Thorne and Victoria Bennett of the Australian National University in Canberra; Louise Burke and John Hawley of Canberra; Anne Milne of the Sydney Morning Herald; Ian Nowak, formerly of the Geological Society of Western Australia; Thomas H. Rich of Museum Victoria; Tim Flannery, director of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide; and the very helpful staff of the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney.
And elsewhere: Sue Superville, information center manager at the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington, and Dr. Emma Mbua, Dr. Koen Maes, and Jillani Ngalla of the Kenya National Museum in Nairobi.
I am also deeply and variously indebted to Patrick Janson-Smith, Gerald Howard, Marianne Velmans, Alison Tulett, Larry Finlay, Steve Rubin, Jed Mattes, Carol Heaton, Charles Elliott, David Bryson, Felicity Bryson, Dan McLean, Nick Southern, Patrick Gallagher, Larry Ashmead, and the staff of the peerless and ever-cheery Howe Library in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Above all, and as always, my profoundest thanks to my dear wife, Cynthia.
The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: "I don't intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God."
"Don't you think God knows the facts?" Bethe asked.
"Yes," said Szilard.
"He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts."
-Hans Christian von Baeyer,
Taming the Atom

　　物理学家利奥·西拉德有一次对他的朋友汉斯·贝特说，他准备写日记："我不打算发表。我只是想记下事实，供上帝参考。"
　　"难道上帝不知道那些事实吗？"贝特问。
"知道，"西拉德说，"他知道那些事实，可他不知道这样描述的事实。"

--汉斯·克里斯琴·冯·拜耳《征服原子》　
INTRODUCTION
引言

Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.
欢迎。恭喜。我很高兴，你居然成功了。我知道，来到这个世界很不容易。事实上，我认为比你知道的还要难一些。
To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence.
首先，你现在来到这个世界，几万亿个游离的原子不得不以某种方式聚集在一起，以复杂而又奇特的方式创造了你。这种安排非常专门，非常特别，过去从未有过，存在仅此一回。在此后的许多年里，（我希望）这些小粒子将任劳任怨地进行几十亿次的巧妙合作，把你保持完好，让你经历一次极其惬意而又赏心悦目的旅程，那就是生存。
Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you-indeed, don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single overarching impulse: to keep you you.
为什么原子这样自找麻烦，这还搞不大清楚。形成你，对原子来说并不是一件心旷神怡的事情。尽管它们如此全神贯注，组成你的原子其实对你并不在乎--实际上甚至不知道你在哪里。它们实际上也不知道自己在哪里。它们毕竟是没有头脑的粒子，连自己也没有生命。（要是你拿起一把镊子，把原子一个一个从你的身上夹下来，你就会变成一大堆细微的原子尘土，其中哪个原子也从未有过生命，而它们又都曾是你的组成部分，这是个挺有意思的想法。）然而，在你的生存期间，它们都担负着同一个任务：使你成为你。
The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting-fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And that's it for you.
原子很脆弱，它们的献身时刻倏忽而过--简直是倏忽而过，这是个坏消息。连寿命很长的人也总共只活大约65万个小时。而当那个不太遥远的终结点或沿途某个别的终点飞快地出现在你眼前的时候，由于未知的原因，你的原子们将宣告你生命的结束，然后散伙，悄然离去成为别的东西。你也就到此为止。
Still, you may rejoice that it happens at all. Generally speaking in the universe it doesn't, so far as we can tell. This is decidedly odd because the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere. Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements-nothing you wouldn't find in any ordinary drugstore-and that's all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is of course the miracle of life.
不过，你可以感到高兴,这事儿还是发生了。总的来说，据我们所知，这类事情在宇宙别的地方是没有的。这的确很怪，原子们如此大方、如此协调地聚集在一起，构成地球上的生物，而同一批原子在别处是不肯这么做的。不说别的，从化学的角度来说，生命只有这个世界上才有，真是不可思议：碳、氢、氧、氮、一点儿钙、一点儿硫，再加上一点儿很普通的别的元素--在任何普通药房里都找得着的东西--这些就是你的全部需要。原子们惟一特别的地方就是：它们形成了你。当然，这正是生命的奇迹。
Whether or not atoms make life in other corners of the universe, they make plenty else; indeed, they make everything else. Without them there would be no water or air or rocks, no stars and planets, no distant gassy clouds or swirling nebulae or any of the other things that make the universe so usefully material. Atoms are so numerous and necessary that we easily overlook that they needn't actually exist at all. There is no law that requires the universe to fill itself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other physical properties on which our existence hinges. There needn't actually be a universe at all. For the longest time there wasn't. There were no atoms and no universe for them to float about in. There was nothing-nothing at all anywhere.
　　不管原子在宇宙的别的角落是不是形成生命，它们形成许多其他东西；实际上，除了生命以外，它们还形成别的任何东西。没有原子，就没有水，就没有空气，就没有岩石，就没有恒星和行星，就没有远方的云团，就没有旋转的星云，就没有使宇宙如此动人、如此具体的任何别的东西。原子如此之多，如此必不可少，我们很容易忽视它们实际存在的必要性。
没有法则要求宇宙间充满物质微粒，产生我们所赖以生存的光、引力和其他物理性质。实际上也根本不需要宇宙。在很长时间里就没有宇宙。那时候没有原子，没有供原子到处飘浮的宇宙。什么也没有--任何地方什么也没有。
So thank goodness for atoms. But the fact that you have atoms and that they assemble in such a willing manner is only part of what got you here. To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most-99.99 percent-are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
所以，谢天谢地，有了原子。不过，有了原子，它们心甘情愿地聚集在一起，这只是你来到这个世界的部分条件。你现在在这个地方，生活在21世纪，聪明地知道有这回事，你还必须是生物方面一连串极不寻常的好运气的受益者。在地球上幸存下来，这是一件非常微妙的事。自开天辟地以来，存在过上百上千亿物种，其中大多数--据认为是99.9％--已经不复存在。你看，地球上的生命不仅是短暂的，而且是令人沮丧的脆弱的。我们产生于一颗行星，这颗行星善于创造生命，但又更善于毁灭生命，这是我们的存在的一个很有意思的特点。
The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change everything about yourself-shape, size, color, species affiliation, everything-and to do so repeatedly. That's much easier said than done, because the process of change is random. To get from "protoplasmal primordial atomic globule" (as the Gilbert and Sullivan song put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary shifts, and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.
地球上的普通物种只能延续大约400万年，因此，若要在这里待上几十亿年，你不得不像制造你的原子那样变个不停。你要准备自己身上的一切都发生变化--形状、大小、颜色、物种属性等等--反复地发生变化。这说起来容易做起来难，因为变化的过程是无定规的。从"细胞质的原始原子颗粒"（用吉尔伯特和沙利文的话来说），到有知觉、能直立的现代人，要求你在特别长的时间里，以特别精确的方式，不断产生新的特点。因此，在过去38亿年的不同时期里，你先是讨厌氧气，后又酷爱氧气，长过鳍、肢和漂亮的翅膀，生过蛋，用叉子般的舌头舔过空气，曾经长得油光光、毛茸茸，住过地下，住过树上，曾经大得像麋鹿，小得像老鼠，以及超过100万种别的东西。这些都是必不可少的演变步骤，只要发生哪怕最细微的一点偏差，你现在也许就会在舔食长在洞壁上的藻类，或者像海象那样懒洋洋地躺在哪个卵石海滩上，或者用你头顶的鼻孔吐出空气，然后钻到18米的深处去吃一口美味的蚯蚓。
　　Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely-make that miraculously-fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result-eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly-in you.
你不光自古以来一直非常走运，属于一个受到优待的进化过程，而且在自己的祖宗方面，你还极其--可以说是奇迹般地--好运气。想一想啊，在38亿年的时间里，在这段比地球上的山脉、河流和海洋还要久远的时间里，你父母双方的哪个祖先都很有魅力，都能找到配偶，都健康得能生儿育女，都运气好得能活到生儿育女的年龄。这些跟你有关的祖先，一个都没有被压死，被吃掉，被淹死，被饿死，被卡住，早年就受了伤，或者无法在其生命过程中在恰当的时刻把一小泡遗传物质释放给恰当的伴侣，以使这惟一可能的遗传组合过程持续下去，最终在极其短暂的时间里令人吃惊地--产生了你。

This is a book about how it happened-in particular how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also some of what happened in between and since. That's a great deal to cover, of course, which is why the book is called A Short History of Nearly Everything, even though it isn't really. It couldn't be. But with luck by the time we finish it will feel as if it is.
本书要说一说这事儿是怎样发生的--尤其是我们怎样从根本不存在变成某种存在，然后那种存在的一小点儿又怎样变成了我们。我还要说一说在此期间和在此以前的事。这当然要涉及好多事情，所以这本书就叫做《万物简史》，虽然实际上并非如此，也不可能如此。但是，要是运气好的话，等你读完本书的时候，你也许会在一定程度上有那种感觉。
My own starting point, for what it's worth, was an illustrated science book that I had as a classroom text when I was in fourth or fifth grade. The book was a standard-issue 1950s schoolbookbattered, unloved, grimly hefty-but near the front it had an illustration that just captivated me: a cutaway diagram showing the Earth's interior as it would look if you cut into the planet with a large knife and carefully withdrew a wedge representing about a quarter of its bulk.
我写本书的最初灵感，不管其价值如何，来自我在念小学四、五年级时有过的一本科普读物。那是20世纪50年代学校发的一本教科书--乍一看去，皱皱巴巴，招人生厌，又笨又重--但书的前几页有一幅插图，一下子把我迷住了：一幅剖面图，显示地球的内部，样子就像你拿起一把大刀，切到行星里面，然后小心翼翼地取出一块楔形物，代表这庞然大物的大约四分之一。
It's hard to believe that there was ever a time when I had not seen such an illustration before