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TED Talks, Richard Dawkins on our "queer" universe

Richard Dawkins on our "queer" universe

My title: "Queerer than we can suppose: The strangeness of science.

"Queerer than we can suppose" comes from J.B.S. Haldane, the famous biologist, who said, "Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy." Richard Feynman compared the accuracy of quantum theories -- experimental predictions -- to specifying the width of North America to within one hair's breadth of accuracy. This means that quantum theory has got to be in some sense true. Yet the assumptions that quantum theory needs to make in order to deliver those predictions are so mysterious that even Feynman himself was moved to remark, "If you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory. It's so queer that physicists resort to one or another paradoxical interpretation of it.

David Deutsch, who's talking here, in The Fabric of Reality, embraces the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum theory, because the worst that you can say about it is that it's preposterously wasteful. It postulates a vast and rapidly growing number of universes existing in parallel -- mutually undetectable except through the narrow porthole of quantum mechanical experiments. And that's Richard Feynman. The biologist Lewis Wolpert believes that the queerness of modern physics is just an extreme example.

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense. Every time you drink a glass of water, he points out, the odds are that you will imbibe at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell. (Laughter) It's just elementary probability theory. The number of molecules per glassful is hugely greater than the number of glassfuls, or bladdersful, in the world -- and, of course, there's nothing special about Cromwell or bladders. You have just breathed in a nitrogen atom that passed through the right lung of the third iguanodon to the left of the tall cycad tree. "Queerer than we can suppose.

What is it that makes us capable of supposing anything, and does this tell us anything about what we can suppose? Are there things about the universe that will be forever beyond our grasp, but not beyond the grasp of some superior intelligence? Are there things about the universe that are, in principle, ungraspable by any mind, however superior? The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe. We're now so used to the idea that the Earth spins -- rather than the Sun moves across the sky -- it's hard for us to realize what a shattering mental revolution that must have been. After all, it seems obvious that the Earth is large and motionless, the Sun small and mobile. But it's worth recalling Wittgenstein's remark on the subject. "Tell me," he asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?" (Laughter) Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things, like crystals and rocks, are really almost entirely composed of empty space.

And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium and the next atom is in the next sports stadium. So it would seem the hardest, solidest, densest rock is really almost entirely empty space, broken only by tiny particles so widely spaced they shouldn't count. Why, then, do rocks look and feel solid and hard and impenetrable? As an evolutionary biologist I'd say this: our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms. If we had, our brains probably would perceive rocks as full of empty space. Rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands precisely because objects like rocks and hands cannot penetrate each other. It's therefore useful for our brains to construct notions like "solidity" and "impenetrability," because such notions help us to navigate our bodies through the middle-sized world in which we have to navigate. Moving to the other end of the scale, our ancestors never had to navigate through the cosmos at speeds close to the speed of light.

If they had, our brains would be much better at understanding Einstein. I want to give the name "Middle World" to the medium-scaled environment in which we've evolved the ability to take act -- nothing to do with Middle Earth. Middle World. (Laughter) We are evolved denizens of Middle World, and that limits what we are capable of imagining. You find it intuitively easy to grasp ideas like, when a rabbit moves at the -- sort of medium velocity at which rabbits and other Middle World objects move, and hits another Middle World object, like a rock, it knocks itself out. May I introduce Major General Albert Stubblebine III, commander of military intelligence in 1983.

He stared at his wall in Arlington, Virginia, and decided to do it. As frightening as the prospect was, he was going into the next office. He stood up, and moved out from behind his desk. What is the atom mostly made of? he thought. Space. He started walking. What am I mostly made of? Atoms. He quickened his pace, almost to a jog now. What is the wall mostly made of? Atoms. All I have to do is merge the spaces. Then, General Stubblebine banged his nose hard on the wall of his office. Stubblebine, who commanded 16,000 soldiers, was confounded by his continual failure to walk through the wall. He has no doubt that this ability will, one day, be a common tool in the military arsenal. Who would screw around with an army that could do that? That's from an article in Playboy, which I was reading the other day. (Laughter) I have every reason to think it's true; I was reading Playboy because I, myself, had an article in it.

(Laughter) Unaided human intuition schooled in Middle World finds it hard to believe Galileo when he tells us a heavy object and a light object, air friction aside, would hit the ground at the same instant. And that's because in Middle World, air friction is always there. If we'd evolved in a vacuum we would expect them to hit the ground simultaneously. If we were bacteria, constantly buffeted by thermal movements of molecules, it would be different, but we Middle Worlders are too big to notice Brownian motion. In the same way, our lives are dominated by gravity but are almost oblivious to the force of surface tension. A small insect would reverse these priorities. Steve Grand -- he's the one on the left, Douglas Adams is on the right -- Steve Grand, in his book, Creation: Life and How to Make It, is positively scathing about our preoccupation with matter itself.

We have this tendency to think that only solid, material things are really things at all. Waves of electromagnetic fluctuation in a vacuum seem unreal. Victorians thought the waves had to be waves in some material medium -- the ether. But we find real matter comforting only because we've evolved to survive in Middle World, where matter is a useful fiction. A whirlpool, for Steve Grand, is a thing with just as much reality as a rock. In a desert plain in Tanzania, in the shadow of the volcano Ol Donyo Lengai, there's a dune made of volcanic ash.

The beautiful thing is that it moves bodily. It's what's technically known as a barchan, and the entire dune walks across the desert in a westerly direction at a speed of about 17 meters per year. It retains its crescent shape and moves in the direction of the horns. What happens is that the wind blows the sand up the shallow slope on the other side, and then, as each sand grain hits the top of the ridge, it cascades down on the inside of the crescent, and so the whole horn-shaped dune moves. Steve Grand points out that you and I are, ourselves, more like a wave than a permanent thing. He invites us, the reader, to "think of an experience from your childhood -- something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: You weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important. So "really" isn't a word that we should use with simple confidence.

If a neutrino had a brain, which it evolved in neutrino-sized ancestors, it would say that rocks really do consist of empty space. We have brains that evolved in medium-sized ancestors which couldn't walk through rocks. "Really," for an animal, is whatever its brain needs it to be in order to assist its survival, and because different species live in different worlds, there will be a discomforting variety of reallys. What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished world but a model of the world, regulated and adjusted by sense data, but constructed so it's useful for dealing with the real world. The nature of the model depends on the kind of animal we are.

A flying animal needs a different kind of model from a walking, climbing or swimming animal. A monkey's brain must have software capable of simulating a three-dimensional world of branches and trunks. A mole's software for constructing models of its world will be customized for underground use. A water strider's brain doesn't need 3D software at all, since it lives on the surface of the pond in an Edwin Abbott flatland. I've speculated that bats may see color with their ears.

The world model that a bat needs in order to navigate through three dimensions catching insects must be pretty similar to the world model that any flying bird, a day-flying bird like a swallow, needs to perform the same kind of tasks. The fact that the bat uses echoes in pitch darkness to input the current variables to its model, while the swallow uses light, is incidental. Bats, I even suggested, use perceived hues, such as red and blue, as labels, internal labels, for some useful aspect of echoes -- perhaps the acoustic texture of surfaces, furry or smooth and so on, in the same way as swallows or, indeed, we, use those perceived hues -- redness and blueness etcetera -- to label long and short wavelengths of light. There's nothing inherent about red that makes it long wavelength. And the point is that the nature of the model is governed by how it is to be used, rather than by the sensory modality involved.

J. B .S. Haldane himself had something to say about animals whose world is dominated by smell. Dogs can distinguish two very similar fatty acids, extremely diluted: caprylic acid and caproic acid. The only difference, you see, is that one has an extra pair of carbon atoms in the chain. Haldane guesses that a dog would probably be able to place the acids in the order of their molecular weights by their smells, just as a man could place a number of piano wires in the order of their lengths by means of their notes. Now, there's another fatty acid, capric acid, which is just like the other two, except that it has two more carbon atoms. A dog that had never met capric acid would, perhaps, have no more trouble imagining its smell than we would have trouble imagining a trumpet, say, playing one note higher than we've heard a trumpet play before. Perhaps dogs and rhinos and other smell-oriented animals smell in color. And the argument would be exactly the same as for the bats. Middle World -- the range of sizes and speeds which we have evolved to feel intuitively comfortable with -- is a bit like the narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see as light of various colors.

We're blind to all frequencies outside that, unless we use instruments to help us. Middle World is the narrow range of reality which we judge to be normal, as opposed to the queerness of the very small, the very large and the very fast. We could make a similar scale of improbabilities; nothing is totally impossible. Miracles are just events that are extremely improbable. A marble statue could wave its hand at us; the atoms that make up its crystalline structure are all vibrating back and forth anyway. Because there are so many of them, and because there's no agreement among them in their preferred direction of movement, the marble, as we see it in Middle World, stays rock steady. But the atoms in the hand could all just happen to move the same way at the same time, and again and again. In this case, the hand would move and we'd see it waving at us in Middle World. The odds against it, of course, are so great that if you set out writing zeros at the time of the origin of the universe, you still would not have written enough zeros to this day. Evolution in Middle World has not equipped us to handle very improbable events; we don't live long enough.

In the vastness of astronomical space and geological time, that which seems impossible in Middle World might turn out to be inevitable. One way to think about that is by counting planets. We don't know how many planets there are in the universe, but a good estimate is about ten to the 20, or 100 billion billion. And that gives us a nice way to express our estimate of life's improbability. Could make some sort of landmark points along a spectrum of improbability, which might look like the electromagnetic spectrum we just looked at. If life has arisen only once on any -- if -- if life could -- I mean, life could originate once per planet, could be extremely common, or it could originate once per star, or once per galaxy or maybe only once in the entire universe, in which case it would have to be here.

And somewhere up there would be the chance that a frog would turn into a prince and similar magical things like that. If life has arisen on only one planet in the entire universe, that planet has to be our planet, because here we are talking about it. And that means that if we want to avail ourselves of it, we're allowed to postulate chemical events in the origin of life which have a probability as low as one in 100 billion billion. I don't think we shall have to avail ourselves of that, because I suspect that life is quite common in the universe. And when I say quite common, it could still be so rare that no one island of life ever encounters another, which is a sad thought. How shall we interpret "queerer than we can suppose?

Queerer than in principle can be supposed, or just queerer than we can suppose, given the limitations of our brain's evolutionary apprenticeship in Middle World? Could we, by training and practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World and achieve some sort of intuitive, as well as mathematical, understanding of the very small and the very large? I genuinely don't know the answer. I wonder whether we might help ourselves to understand, say, quantum theory, if we brought up children to play computer games, beginning in early childhood, which had a sort of make believe world of balls going through two slits on a screen, a world in which the strange goings on of quantum mechanics were enlarged by the computer's make believe, so that they became familiar on the Middle-World scale of the stream. And, similarly, a relativistic computer game in which objects on the screen manifest the Lorenz Contraction, and so on, to try to get ourselves into the way of thinking -- get children into the way of thinking about it. I want to end by applying the idea of Middle World to our perceptions of each other.

Most scientists today subscribe to a mechanistic view of the mind: we're the way we are because our brains are wired up as they are; our hormones are the way they are. We'd be different, our characters would be different, if our neuro-anatomy and our physiological chemistry were different. But we scientists are inconsistent. If we were consistent, our response to a misbehaving person, like a child murderer, should be something like, this unit has a faulty component; it needs repairing. That's not what we say. What we say -- and I include the most austerely mechanistic among us, which is probably me -- what we say is, "Vile monster, prison is too good for you." Or worse, we seek revenge, in all probability thereby triggering the next phase in an escalating cycle of counter-revenge, which we see, of course, all over the world today. In short, when we're thinking like academics, we regard people as elaborate and complicated machines, like computers or cars, but when we revert to being human we behave more like Basil Fawlty, who, we remember, thrashed his car to teach it a lesson when it wouldn't start on gourmet night. (Laughter) The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world.

We swim through a sea of people -- a social version of Middle World. We are evolved to second-guess the behavior of others by becoming brilliant, intuitive psychologists. Treating people as machines may be scientifically and philosophically accurate, but it's a cumbersome waste of time if you want to guess what this person is going to do next. The economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful, goal-seeking agent with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt, blame-worthiness. Personification and the imputing of intentional purpose is such a brilliantly successful way to model humans, it's hardly surprising the same modeling software often seizes control when we're trying to think about entities for which it's not appropriate, like Basil Fawlty with his car or like millions of deluded people with the universe as a whole. (Laughter) If the universe is queerer than we can suppose, is it just because we've been naturally selected to suppose only what we needed to suppose in order to survive in the Pleistocene of Africa?

Or are our brains so versatile and expandable that we can train ourselves to break out of the box of our evolution? Or, finally, are there some things in the universe so queer that no philosophy of beings, however godlike, could dream them? Thank you very much.

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Richard Dawkins on our "queer" universe Richard Dawkins über unser "seltsames" Universum Ο Richard Dawkins για το "queer" σύμπαν μας Richard Dawkins sobre nuestro universo "raro リチャード・ドーキンス、"クィア "な宇宙を語る Richardas Dawkinsas apie mūsų "keistą" visatą Richard Dawkins sobre o nosso universo "maricas Richard Dawkins, "garip" evrenimiz hakkında 理查德-道金斯谈我们的 "同性恋 "宇宙

My title: "Queerer than we can suppose: The strangeness of science. ||Queerer|||||||| Meu título: "Mais esquisito do que podemos supor: a estranheza da ciência. Benim başlığım: "Tahmin edebileceğimizden daha garip: Bilimin tuhaflığı.

"Queerer than we can suppose" comes from J.B.S. "Tahmin edebileceğimizden daha garip" ifadesi J.B.S.'den geliyor. Haldane, the famous biologist, who said, "Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. Haldane|||||||||||||||||||||||||| Haldane, o famoso biólogo, que disse: "Agora, minha própria suspeita é que o universo não é apenas mais estranho do que imaginamos, mas mais estranho do que imaginamos. Ünlü biyolog Haldane, "Şimdi, kendi şüphem evrenin düşündüğümüzden daha tuhaf olduğu, fakat düşündüğümüzden daha tuhaf olduğudur" dedi. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy." |şüpheleniyorum|||||||gökyüzünde|||||||||||||| Göklerde ve yerlerde, herhangi bir felsefede hayal edilenlerden ya da hayal edilebileceklerden daha fazla şey olduğunu şüpheleniyorum. Richard Feynman compared the accuracy of quantum theories -- experimental predictions -- to specifying the width of North America to within one hair’s breadth of accuracy. |Feynman|||||||||||||||||||||| Richard Feynman, kuantum teorilerinin - deneysel tahminlerin - doğruluğunu, Kuzey Amerika'nın genişliğini bir kılınca kadar kesinlikle belirtmekle karşılaştırdı. This means that quantum theory has got to be in some sense true. Bu, kuantum teorisinin bir anlamda doğru olması gerektiği anlamına geliyor. Yet the assumptions that quantum theory needs to make in order to deliver those predictions are so mysterious that even Feynman himself was moved to remark, "If you think you understand quantum theory, you don’t understand quantum theory. ||varsayımlar|||||yapmak|||||vermek|o (1)|tahminler|||gizemli|||||bir||||||||||||||| Yine de, kuantum teorisinin bu tahminleri sunabilmesi için yapması gereken varsayımlar o kadar karmaşık ki, Feynman bile, "Eğer kuantum teorisini anladığınızı düşünüyorsanız, kuantum teorisini anlamıyorsunuz" demek zorunda kaldı. It’s so queer that physicists resort to one or another paradoxical interpretation of it. ||||fizikçilerin|başvurmak|||||çelişkili|yorumlama|| É tão estranho que os físicos recorrem a uma ou outra interpretação paradoxal disso. O kadar garip ki, fizikçiler buna bir ya da başka bir paradoksal yorumda bulunmak zorunda kalıyorlar.

David Deutsch, who’s talking here, in The Fabric of Reality, embraces the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum theory, because the worst that you can say about it is that it’s preposterously wasteful. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||préposterieusement|gaspilleuse |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||israfçı Burada konuşan David Deutsch, Gerçekliğin Kumaşı adlı eserinde, kuantum teorisinin "çoklu evrenler" yorumunu benimsemektedir, çünkü onun hakkında söylenebilecek en kötü şey, son derece israf olmasıdır. It postulates a vast and rapidly growing number of universes existing in parallel -- mutually undetectable except through the narrow porthole of quantum mechanical experiments. |öngörüyor|||||||||||||algılanamaz|||||portaldan|||| Bu, paralel olarak var olan devasa ve hızla büyüyen bir evrenler sayısını varsayar - karşılıklı olarak tespit edilemezler, yalnızca kuantum mekanik deneylerin dar penceresi aracılığıyla algılanabilirler. And that’s Richard Feynman. Ve işte Richard Feynman. The biologist Lewis Wolpert believes that the queerness of modern physics is just an extreme example. |||Wolpert|||||||fizik||||| Biyolog Lewis Wolpert, modern fiziğin tuhaflığının sadece uç bir örnek olduğuna inanıyor.

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense. ||||||||sağduyu| Bilim, teknolojinin aksine, sağduyuya zarar verir. Every time you drink a glass of water, he points out, the odds are that you will imbibe at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell. her||||||||||||olasılık|||||içmek|||||||||||| Her su içtiğinizde, en az bir molekülün Oliver Cromwell'in mesanesinden geçtiği ihtimali olduğunu belirtiyor. (Laughter) It’s just elementary probability theory. (Gülüş) Bu sadece temel olasılık teorisi. The number of molecules per glassful is hugely greater than the number of glassfuls, or bladdersful, in the world -- and, of course, there’s nothing special about Cromwell or bladders. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||mesaneler Bir bardaktaki molekül sayısı, dünyadaki bardak sayısından veya mesaneden çok daha fazladır - ve elbette, Cromwell veya mesaneler hakkında özel bir şey yoktur. You have just breathed in a nitrogen atom that passed through the right lung of the third iguanodon to the left of the tall cycad tree. |||nefes aldın|||||||||||||||||||||sikas ağacı| Vous venez de respirer un atome d'azote qui a traversé le poumon droit du troisième iguanodon à gauche du grand cycad. Yüksek sikad ağacının solundaki üçüncü iguanodonun sağ akciğerinden geçen bir azot atomunu yeni soludunuz. "Queerer than we can suppose. "Hayal edebileceğimizden daha tuhaf.

What is it that makes us capable of supposing anything, and does this tell us anything about what we can suppose? Bizi herhangi bir şeyi hayal edebilmemizi sağlayan nedir ve bu, hayal edebileceğimiz şeyler hakkında bize bir şeyler söyler mi? Are there things about the universe that will be forever beyond our grasp, but not beyond the grasp of some superior intelligence? Evren hakkında sonsuza dek kavrayamayacağımız şeyler var mı, ama bunlar bazı üstün zekaların kavrayışının ötesinde değil? Are there things about the universe that are, in principle, ungraspable by any mind, however superior? ||||||||||anlaşılamaz||||| Evrenle ilgili, prensipte, herhangi bir zihin tarafından kavranamayacak şeyler var mı, ne kadar üstün olursa olsun? The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe. |||||||||||remous d'idées||||||||||||||| ||||||||dizi|||fırtınaları||||||||||||||| Bilimin tarihi, ardışık nesillerin evrendeki artan tuhaflık seviyeleriyle barışa varmasıyla, uzun bir dizi şiddetli beyin fırtınasından oluşmuştur. We’re now so used to the idea that the Earth spins -- rather than the Sun moves across the sky -- it’s hard for us to realize what a shattering mental revolution that must have been. ||||||||||dönüyor||||||||||||||||||||||| Artık Dünya'nın döndüğü fikrine -- Güneş'in gökyüzünde hareket ettiğinden ziyade -- o kadar alıştık ki, bunun ne kadar sarsıcı bir zihinsel devrim olduğunu fark etmekte zorlanıyoruz. After all, it seems obvious that the Earth is large and motionless, the Sun small and mobile. Sonuçta, Dünya'nın büyük ve hareketsiz, Güneş'in küçük ve hareketli olduğu açık görünüyor. But it’s worth recalling Wittgenstein’s remark on the subject. ||||Wittgenstein'ın|||| Ancak konuyla ilgili Wittgenstein'ın yorumunu anımsamakta fayda var. "Tell me," he asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" |||||||||||||||||||||dönüyordu|||||||||| "Bana söyle," diye sordu bir arkadaşına, "insanların neden her zaman, Güneş'in Dünya'nın etrafında döndüğünü varsaymanın doğal olduğunu, Dünya'nın döndüğünü varsaymak yerine, söylediklerini?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Arkadaşı cevap verdi, "Elbette, çünkü sadece Güneş'in Dünya'nın etrafında döndüğü gibi görünüyor." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?" Wittgenstein|||||||||||||||||| Wittgenstein cevap verdi, "Peki, eğer Dünya'nın döndüğü gibi görünseydi, nasıl görünürdü?" (Laughter) (Kahkaha) Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things, like crystals and rocks, are really almost entirely composed of empty space. ||||karşı|||||||||||||||||| Bilim, tüm sezgilerin tersine, görünüşte katı olan şeylerin, kristaller ve taşlar gibi, aslında neredeyse tamamen boşluktan oluştuğunu öğretmiştir.

And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium and the next atom is in the next sports stadium. Ve tanıdık bir örnek: bir atomun çekirdeği, bir spor stadyumunun ortasında bir sinek ve bir sonraki atom, bir sonraki spor stadyumundadır. So it would seem the hardest, solidest, densest rock is really almost entirely empty space, broken only by tiny particles so widely spaced they shouldn’t count. |||||||en yoğun|||||||||||||||||| Dolayısıyla, en sert, en katı, en yoğun taşın aslında neredeyse tamamen boş alan olduğu, sadece o kadar geniş aralıklı olan küçük parçacıklarla kırılmış olduğu görünmektedir. Why, then, do rocks look and feel solid and hard and impenetrable? O zaman, taşlar neden katı, sert ve geçilemez görünüyor ve hissediliyor? As an evolutionary biologist I’d say this: our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at. |||||||||||||||||sıralar||||||||||| Bir evrimsel biyolog olarak şunu söyleyebilirim: beyinlerimiz, bedenlerimizin çalıştığı büyüklük ve hız sıralarında hayatta kalmamıza yardımcı olacak şekilde evrimleşti. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms. Atomlar dünyasında gezinmek için asla evrim geçirmedik. If we had, our brains probably would perceive rocks as full of empty space. |||||||algılardı|||||| Eğer olsaydı, muhtemelen beynimiz taşları boşluk dolu olarak algılardı. Rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands precisely because objects like rocks and hands cannot penetrate each other. Taşlar, taşlar ve eller gibi nesnelerin birbirini geçememesi nedeniyle, ellerimiz için sert ve geçilemez hissediliyor. It’s therefore useful for our brains to construct notions like "solidity" and "impenetrability," because such notions help us to navigate our bodies through the middle-sized world in which we have to navigate. ||||||||||||geçilemezlik|||||||||||||||||||| Bu nedenle, beynimizin "katılık" ve "geçilemezlik" gibi kavramlar oluşturması faydalıdır, çünkü bu tür kavramlar bedenlerimizi navigasyon yapmak zorunda olduğumuz orta boyutlu dünyada yönlendirmemize yardımcı olur. Moving to the other end of the scale, our ancestors never had to navigate through the cosmos at speeds close to the speed of light. Ölçeğin diğer ucuna geçersek, atalarımız asla ışık hızına yakın hızlarla kozmosda navigasyon yapmak zorunda kalmadılar.

If they had, our brains would be much better at understanding Einstein. S'ils l'avaient fait, nos cerveaux seraient beaucoup mieux à comprendre Einstein. Eğer öyle olsaydı, beyinlerimiz Einstein'ı anlamakta çok daha iyi olurdu. I want to give the name "Middle World" to the medium-scaled environment in which we’ve evolved the ability to take act -- nothing to do with Middle Earth. Je veux donner le nom "Monde Moyen" à l'environnement de taille moyenne dans lequel nous avons évolué pour avoir la capacité d'agir - rien à voir avec la Terre du Milieu. Evrimleştiğimiz, harekete geçme yeteneğini kazandığımız orta ölçekli ortama "Orta Dünya" ismini vermek istiyorum - Orta Dünya ile hiçbir ilgisi yok. Middle World. Monde Moyen. Orta Dünya. (Laughter) We are evolved denizens of Middle World, and that limits what we are capable of imagining. ||||habitants|||||||||||| ||||sakinleri||||||||||yetenekli|| (Rires) Nous sommes des habitants évolués du Monde Intermédiaire, et cela limite ce que nous sommes capables d'imaginer. (Gülüş) Biz, Orta Dünya'nın evrimleşmiş sakinleriyiz ve bu durum, hayal edebildiklerimizin sınırlarını belirliyor. You find it intuitively easy to grasp ideas like, when a rabbit moves at the -- sort of medium velocity at which rabbits and other Middle World objects move, and hits another Middle World object, like a rock, it knocks itself out. |||sezgisel olarak|||||||||hareket eder||||||hız|||||||||||||||||||onu||| Vous trouvez intuitivement facile de saisir des idées comme, quand un lapin se déplace à la -- sorte de vitesse moyenne à laquelle les lapins et d'autres objets du Monde Intermédiaire se déplacent, et frappe un autre objet du Monde Intermédiaire, comme une pierre, il se sonne lui-même. Bir tavşanın, tavşanların ve diğer Orta Dünya nesnelerinin hareket ettiği orta hızda hareket ederken bir Orta Dünya nesnesine, örneğin bir kayaya çarptığında, kendini bayıltacağını anlamak sezgisel olarak kolaydır. May I introduce Major General Albert Stubblebine III, commander of military intelligence in 1983. ||||||Stubblebine|||||| ||||||Stubblebine|||||| Puis-je vous présenter le Major Général Albert Stubblebine III, commandant du renseignement militaire en 1983. 1983 yılında askeri istihbaratın komutanı Korgeneral Albert Stubblebine III'ü tanıtmak isterim.

He stared at his wall in Arlington, Virginia, and decided to do it. ||||||Arlington|||||| Il regardait son mur à Arlington, en Virginie, et décida de le faire. Virginia, Arlington'daki duvarına baktı ve bunu yapmaya karar verdi. As frightening as the prospect was, he was going into the next office. ||||olasılık||||||||ofis Aussi effrayante que la perspective était, il allait dans le bureau voisin. Ne kadar korkutucu bir ihtimal olsa da, bir sonraki odaya girmeyi düşündü. He stood up, and moved out from behind his desk. Il se leva et sortit de derrière son bureau. Ayağa kalktı ve masasının arkasından dışarı çıktı. What is the atom mostly made of? De quoi est principalement constitué l'atome ? Atom çoğunlukla ne ile yapılmıştır? he thought. pensa-t-il. diye düşündü. Space. Espace. Uzay. He started walking. Yürümeye başladı. What am I mostly made of? En çok neyle yapılmışımdır? Atoms. He quickened his pace, almost to a jog now. |hızlandırdı||||||| Il a accéléré le pas, presque pour courir maintenant. Adımlarını hızlandırdı, neredeyse bir koşuya geçti. What is the wall mostly made of? De quoi est principalement faite le mur ? Duvar çoğunlukla neyle yapılmış? Atoms. Des atomes. Atomlar. All I have to do is merge the spaces. tek yapmam gereken||||||birleştirmek|| Yapmam gereken tek şey boşlukları birleştirmek. Then, General Stubblebine banged his nose hard on the wall of his office. Sonra General Stubblebine burnunu sert bir şekilde ofisinin duvarına vurdu. Stubblebine, who commanded 16,000 soldiers, was confounded by his continual failure to walk through the wall. |||||şaşırmış|||sürekli|||||| Stubblebine, qui commandait 16 000 soldats, était confus par son échec continuel à traverser le mur. Stubblebine, que comandava 16.000 soldados, ficou confuso com seu contínuo fracasso em atravessar o muro. 16.000 askere komuta eden Stubblebine, duvardan geçişte sürekli başarısızlığından şaşkındı. He has no doubt that this ability will, one day, be a common tool in the military arsenal. Il n'a aucun doute que cette capacité sera, un jour, un outil courant dans l'arsenal militaire. Bu yeteneğin bir gün askeri cephanelikte yaygın bir araç olacağından hiç şüphesi yok. Who would screw around with an army that could do that? Qui s'amuserait avec une armée qui pourrait faire ça? Quem iria se meter com um exército que poderia fazer isso? Bunu yapabilen bir orduyla kim oynar ki? That’s from an article in Playboy, which I was reading the other day. |||||Playboy||||||| |||||Playboy||||||| Bu, geçen gün okuduğum Playboy dergisinden bir makaleden alıntı. (Laughter) I have every reason to think it’s true; I was reading Playboy because I, myself, had an article in it. Doğru olduğuna inanmak için her sebebe sahibim; çünkü ben de içinde bir makalem olduğu için Playboy okudum.

(Laughter) Unaided human intuition schooled in Middle World finds it hard to believe Galileo when he tells us a heavy object and a light object, air friction aside, would hit the ground at the same instant. ||||eğitilmiş|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||anında (Rires) L'intuition humaine non assistée, éduquée dans le Monde Moyen, a du mal à croire Galilée lorsqu'il nous dit qu'un objet lourd et un objet léger, friction de l'air mise à part, toucheraient le sol en même instant. (Risos) A intuição humana sem ajuda, educada no Mundo Médio, acha difícil acreditar que Galileu quando ele nos diz que um objeto pesado e um objeto leve, com o atrito do ar à parte, atingiriam o chão no mesmo instante. (Kahkahalar) Orta Dünya'daki insanoğlunun yardımsız sezgisi, Galileo'nun ağır bir nesne ve hafif bir nesnenin, hava direnci bir tarafa bırakıldığında, aynı anda yere düşeceğini söylerken buna inanmakta zorlanıyor. And that’s because in Middle World, air friction is always there. Et c'est parce que dans le Monde Moyen, la friction de l'air est toujours présente. Ve bunun sebebi, Orta Dünya'da hava direncinin her zaman bulunmasıdır. If we’d evolved in a vacuum we would expect them to hit the ground simultaneously. Si nous avions évolué dans un vide, nous nous attendrions à ce qu'ils touchent le sol simultanément. If we were bacteria, constantly buffeted by thermal movements of molecules, it would be different, but we Middle Worlders are too big to notice Brownian motion. ||||||||||||||||||mondialistes||||||| ||||||||||||||||||Orta Dünya sakinleri||||||| Se fôssemos bactérias, constantemente afetadas pelos movimentos térmicos das moléculas, seria diferente, mas nós, os mundos do meio, somos grandes demais para perceber o movimento browniano. Eğer bakteriler olsaydık, moleküllerin termal hareketleriyle sürekli sarsılıyorsak, durum farklı olurdu ama biz Orta Dünya'dakiler Brown hareketini fark edecek kadar büyük değiliz. In the same way, our lives are dominated by gravity but are almost oblivious to the force of surface tension. |||||||||||||farkında değil|||||| Do mesmo modo, nossas vidas são dominadas pela gravidade, mas são quase inconscientes da força da tensão superficial. Aynı şekilde, hayatlarımız yerçekimi tarafından domine edilir ama yüzey geriliminin kuvvetine neredeyse kayıtsızız. A small insect would reverse these priorities. Küçük bir böcek bu öncelikleri tersine çevirirdi. Steve Grand -- he’s the one on the left, Douglas Adams is on the right -- Steve Grand, in his book, Creation: Life and How to Make It, is positively scathing about our preoccupation with matter itself. |||||||||||||||||||||ve||||||||||maddeye olan takıntımız||| Steve Grand -- c'est celui de gauche, Douglas Adams est à droite -- Steve Grand, dans son livre, Creation: Life and How to Make It, est absolument acerbe à propos de notre préoccupation pour la matière elle-même. Steve Grand -- solda olan o, sağda Douglas Adams -- Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How to Make It adlı kitabında, maddenin kendisiyle olan takıntımız hakkında oldukça sert eleştirilerde bulunuyor.

We have this tendency to think that only solid, material things are really things at all. Nous avons cette tendance à penser que seules les choses solides et matérielles sont vraiment des choses. Sadece katı, maddi şeylerin gerçekten şeyler olduğunu düşünme eğilimimiz var. Waves of electromagnetic fluctuation in a vacuum seem unreal. |||fluctuation||||| |||dalgalanma||||| Des ondes de fluctuation électromagnétique dans un vide semblent irréelles. Boşlukta elektromanyetik dalgalanma dalgaları gerçek dışı görünüyor. Victorians thought the waves had to be waves in some material medium -- the ether. |||||||||||||aether Victorianlar, dalgaların bazı maddi bir ortamda, -aetherde- dalgalar olması gerektiğini düşündüler. But we find real matter comforting only because we’ve evolved to survive in Middle World, where matter is a useful fiction. Ama gerçek maddeyi sadece Orta Dünya'da hayatta kalmak için evrim geçirdiğimiz için rahatlatıcı buluyoruz, burada madde yararlı bir kurgu. A whirlpool, for Steve Grand, is a thing with just as much reality as a rock. |dönme dolabı|||||||||||||| Un tourbillon, pour Steve Grand, est une chose avec autant de réalité qu'un rocher. Steve Grand'a göre bir girdap, bir taş kadar gerçektir. In a desert plain in Tanzania, in the shadow of the volcano Ol Donyo Lengai, there’s a dune made of volcanic ash. |||||||||||||Donyo|||||||| |||||||||||||Donyo|||||||| Tanzanya'daki bir çöl ovasında, Ol Donyo Lengai volkanının gölgesinde, volkanik külden oluşmuş bir kumul var.

The beautiful thing is that it moves bodily. |||||||bedensel Güzel olan şey, bu kumulun bedensel olarak hareket etmesidir. It’s what’s technically known as a barchan, and the entire dune walks across the desert in a westerly direction at a speed of about 17 meters per year. ||||||barkan|||||||||||||||||||| Teknik olarak barchan olarak bilinen bu şey, tüm kumulun çölde batı yönünde saatte yaklaşık 17 metre hızla hareket etmesidir. It retains its crescent shape and moves in the direction of the horns. |korur||hilal||||||||| Il conserve sa forme de croissant et se déplace dans la direction des cornes. Hilal şeklini korur ve boynuzların yönünde hareket eder. What happens is that the wind blows the sand up the shallow slope on the other side, and then, as each sand grain hits the top of the ridge, it cascades down on the inside of the crescent, and so the whole horn-shaped dune moves. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||düşer||||||||||||||| Ce qui se passe, c'est que le vent pousse le sable sur la pente douce de l'autre côté, et ensuite, lorsque chaque grain de sable frappe le sommet de la crête, il dévale à l'intérieur du croissant, et ainsi toute la dune en forme de corne se déplace. O que acontece é que o vento sopra a areia pela encosta rasa do outro lado e, quando cada grão de areia atinge o topo da cordilheira, cai em cascata no interior do crescente, e assim toda a duna em forma de chifre movimentos. Olan şu ki, rüzgar kumları diğer taraftaki sığ yamaç boyunca üfler ve her kum tanesi sırtın tepe noktasına çarptığında, hilalin iç kısmına doğru dökülerek aşağı doğru süzülür ve böylece tamamen boynuz şeklindeki kumul hareket eder. Steve Grand points out that you and I are, ourselves, more like a wave than a permanent thing. Steve Grand souligne que vous et moi sommes, nous-mêmes, plus semblables à une vague qu'à quelque chose de permanent. Steve Grand, senin ve benim aslında, kalıcı bir şeyden çok bir dalga gibi olduğumuzu belirtir. He invites us, the reader, to "think of an experience from your childhood -- something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. Il nous invite, nous les lecteurs, à "penser à une expérience de votre enfance - quelque chose dont vous vous souvenez clairement, quelque chose que vous pouvez voir, ressentir, peut-être même sentir, comme si vous y étiez vraiment." After all, you really were there at the time, weren’t you? Après tout, vous y étiez vraiment à ce moment-là, n'est-ce pas ? How else would you remember it? Sinon, comment vous en souviendriez-vous ? But here is the bombshell: You weren’t there. Mais voici la bombe : tu n'étais pas là. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Pas un seul atome qui est dans votre corps aujourd'hui n'était présent lorsque cet événement a eu lieu. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. La matière circule d'un endroit à l'autre et se réunit momentanément pour être vous. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. Quel que soit ce que vous êtes, vous n'êtes donc pas la substance dont vous êtes fait. If that doesn’t make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important. Si cela ne fait pas dresser les cheveux sur la nuque, relisez-le jusqu'à ce que ça le fasse, car c'est important. So "really" isn’t a word that we should use with simple confidence. Donc, "vraiment" n'est pas un mot que nous devrions utiliser avec une confiance simple.

If a neutrino had a brain, which it evolved in neutrino-sized ancestors, it would say that rocks really do consist of empty space. ||neutrino||||||||||||||||||||| Si un neutrino avait un cerveau, qu'il avait évolué chez des ancêtres de la taille d'un neutrino, il dirait que les rochers consistent vraiment en de l'espace vide. Se um neutrino tivesse um cérebro, que evoluiu em ancestrais do tamanho de um neutrino, diria que as rochas realmente consistem em espaço vazio. We have brains that evolved in medium-sized ancestors which couldn’t walk through rocks. Temos cérebros que evoluíram em ancestrais de tamanho médio que não conseguiam atravessar rochas. "Really," for an animal, is whatever its brain needs it to be in order to assist its survival, and because different species live in different worlds, there will be a discomforting variety of reallys. |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||réalités «Vraiment», pour un animal, c'est tout ce dont son cerveau a besoin pour aider à sa survie, et parce que différentes espèces vivent dans des mondes différents, il y aura une variété inconfortable de vrais. "Realmente", para um animal, é o que seu cérebro precisa para ajudar na sobrevivência e, como espécies diferentes vivem em mundos diferentes, haverá uma variedade desconfortável de coisas. What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished world but a model of the world, regulated and adjusted by sense data, but constructed so it’s useful for dealing with the real world. The nature of the model depends on the kind of animal we are.

A flying animal needs a different kind of model from a walking, climbing or swimming animal. A monkey’s brain must have software capable of simulating a three-dimensional world of branches and trunks. A mole’s software for constructing models of its world will be customized for underground use. |de la taupe||||||||||||| Le logiciel d'une taupe pour construire des modèles de son monde sera personnalisé pour une utilisation souterraine. O software de uma toupeira para a construção de modelos de seu mundo será personalizado para uso subterrâneo. A water strider’s brain doesn’t need 3D software at all, since it lives on the surface of the pond in an Edwin Abbott flatland. |||||||||||||||||||||||plat pays Le cerveau d'un gerris n'a pas besoin de logiciel 3D du tout, puisqu'il vit à la surface de l'étang dans un terrain plat d'Edwin Abbott. O cérebro de um strider da água não precisa de software 3D, pois vive na superfície da lagoa em uma planície de Edwin Abbott. I’ve speculated that bats may see color with their ears. J'ai émis l'hypothèse que les chauves-souris peuvent voir la couleur avec leurs oreilles.

The world model that a bat needs in order to navigate through three dimensions catching insects must be pretty similar to the world model that any flying bird, a day-flying bird like a swallow, needs to perform the same kind of tasks. Le modèle du monde dont une chauve-souris a besoin pour naviguer dans les trois dimensions et attraper des insectes doit être assez similaire au modèle du monde dont tout oiseau volant, un oiseau volant de jour comme une hirondelle, a besoin pour effectuer le même type de tâches. The fact that the bat uses echoes in pitch darkness to input the current variables to its model, while the swallow uses light, is incidental. Le fait que la chauve-souris utilise des échos dans l'obscurité totale pour entrer les variables actuelles dans son modèle, tandis que l'hirondelle utilise la lumière, est accessoire. O fato de o morcego usar ecos na escuridão total para inserir as variáveis atuais em seu modelo, enquanto a andorinha usa luz, é incidental. Bats, I even suggested, use perceived hues, such as red and blue, as labels, internal labels, for some useful aspect of echoes -- perhaps the acoustic texture of surfaces, furry or smooth and so on, in the same way as swallows or, indeed, we, use those perceived hues -- redness and blueness etcetera -- to label long and short wavelengths of light. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||etc.|||||||| Les chauves-souris, ai-je même suggéré, utilisent des teintes perçues, telles que le rouge et le bleu, comme étiquettes, des étiquettes internes, pour un aspect utile des échos - peut-être la texture acoustique des surfaces, duveteuses ou lisses, et ainsi de suite, de la même manière que les hirondelles ou, en effet, nous, utilisons ces teintes perçues - rougeur et bleueté, etc. - pour étiqueter les longueurs d'onde de lumière longues et courtes. Os morcegos, eu até sugeri, usam tons percebidos, como vermelho e azul, como rótulos, rótulos internos, para algum aspecto útil dos ecos - talvez a textura acústica das superfícies, peluda ou lisa e assim por diante, da mesma maneira que as andorinhas ou, de fato, nós usamos esses tons percebidos - vermelhidão e azul, etc. - para rotular comprimentos de onda longos e curtos da luz. There’s nothing inherent about red that makes it long wavelength. And the point is that the nature of the model is governed by how it is to be used, rather than by the sensory modality involved. Et le fait est que la nature du modèle est régie par la manière dont il doit être utilisé, plutôt que par la modalité sensorielle impliquée.

J. B .S. J. B .S. Haldane himself had something to say about animals whose world is dominated by smell. Haldane lui-même avait quelque chose à dire sur les animaux dont le monde est dominé par l'odorat. Dogs can distinguish two very similar fatty acids, extremely diluted: caprylic acid and caproic acid. |||||||||||||caproïque| Les chiens peuvent distinguer deux acides gras très similaires, extrêmement dilués : l'acide caprique et l'acide caproïque. Os cães podem distinguir dois ácidos graxos muito semelhantes, extremamente diluídos: ácido caprílico e ácido capróico. The only difference, you see, is that one has an extra pair of carbon atoms in the chain. La seule différence, vous voyez, est que l'un a une paire supplémentaire d'atomes de carbone dans la chaîne. Haldane guesses that a dog would probably be able to place the acids in the order of their molecular weights by their smells, just as a man could place a number of piano wires in the order of their lengths by means of their notes. Haldane suppose qu'un chien serait probablement capable de classer les acides selon leur poids moléculaire par leurs odeurs, tout comme un homme pourrait classer un certain nombre de cordes de piano selon leur longueur par le biais de leurs notes. Haldane acha que um cão provavelmente seria capaz de colocar os ácidos na ordem de seus pesos moleculares pelos cheiros, assim como um homem poderia colocar vários fios de piano na ordem de seus comprimentos por meio de suas notas. Now, there’s another fatty acid, capric acid, which is just like the other two, except that it has two more carbon atoms. |||||caprique|||||||||||||||| Maintenant, il y a un autre acide gras, l'acide caprique, qui est exactement comme les deux autres, sauf qu'il a deux atomes de carbone de plus. Agora, há outro ácido graxo, o ácido caprico, que é igual aos outros dois, exceto que ele tem mais dois átomos de carbono. A dog that had never met capric acid would, perhaps, have no more trouble imagining its smell than we would have trouble imagining a trumpet, say, playing one note higher than we’ve heard a trumpet play before. ||||||acide caprique|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Un chien qui n'aurait jamais rencontré l'acide caprique aurait, peut-être, autant de mal à imaginer son odeur que nous aurions de mal à imaginer une trompette, par exemple, jouant une note plus haute que ce que nous avons entendu d'une trompette auparavant. Perhaps dogs and rhinos and other smell-oriented animals smell in color. |||rhinocéros|||||||| Peut-être que les chiens, les rhinocéros et d'autres animaux orientés vers l'odorat sentent en couleur. Talvez cães, rinocerontes e outros animais cheiros cheiram a cores. And the argument would be exactly the same as for the bats. Et l'argument serait exactement le même que pour les chauves-souris. Middle World -- the range of sizes and speeds which we have evolved to feel intuitively comfortable with -- is a bit like the narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see as light of various colors. Monde Moyen -- la gamme de tailles et de vitesses avec lesquelles nous avons évolué pour nous sentir intuitivement à l'aise -- est un peu comme la gamme restreinte du spectre électromagnétique que nous percevons comme la lumière de diverses couleurs. O Mundo do Meio - a variedade de tamanhos e velocidades com as quais evoluímos para nos sentir intuitivamente confortáveis - é um pouco como a faixa estreita do espectro eletromagnético que vemos como luz de várias cores.

We’re blind to all frequencies outside that, unless we use instruments to help us. Nous sommes aveugles à toutes les fréquences en dehors de cela, à moins que nous n'utilisions des instruments pour nous aider. Middle World is the narrow range of reality which we judge to be normal, as opposed to the queerness of the very small, the very large and the very fast. Le Monde Moyen est la gamme étroite de la réalité que nous jugeons normale, par opposition à la bizarrerie du très petit, du très grand et du très rapide. O Mundo Médio é o estreito leque de realidade que julgamos normal, em oposição à estranheza dos muito pequenos, muito grandes e muito rápidos. We could make a similar scale of improbabilities; nothing is totally impossible. |||||||improbabilités|||| Nous pourrions créer une échelle similaire d'improbabilités ; rien n'est totalement impossible. Miracles are just events that are extremely improbable. Les miracles ne sont que des événements extrêmement improbables. A marble statue could wave its hand at us; the atoms that make up its crystalline structure are all vibrating back and forth anyway. Une statue en marbre pourrait nous faire signe ; les atomes qui composent sa structure cristalline vibrent tous d'avant en arrière de toute façon. Because there are so many of them, and because there’s no agreement among them in their preferred direction of movement, the marble, as we see it in Middle World, stays rock steady. Parce qu'ils sont si nombreux, et qu'il n'y a pas d'accord entre eux sur la direction de mouvement préférée, la boule de marbre, telle que nous la voyons dans le Monde du Milieu, reste parfaitement immobile. But the atoms in the hand could all just happen to move the same way at the same time, and again and again. Mais les atomes dans la main pourraient tous simplement se déplacer de la même manière en même temps, encore et encore. In this case, the hand would move and we’d see it waving at us in Middle World. Dans ce cas, la main se déplacerait et nous la verrions nous faire signe dans le Monde du Milieu. The odds against it, of course, are so great that if you set out writing zeros at the time of the origin of the universe, you still would not have written enough zeros to this day. Les chances contre cela, bien sûr, sont si grandes que si vous commenciez à écrire des zéros au moment de l'origine de l'univers, vous n'auriez toujours pas écrit assez de zéros à ce jour. Evolution in Middle World has not equipped us to handle very improbable events; we don’t live long enough. L'évolution dans le monde intermédiaire ne nous a pas équipés pour gérer des événements très improbables ; nous ne vivons pas assez longtemps.

In the vastness of astronomical space and geological time, that which seems impossible in Middle World might turn out to be inevitable. Dans l'immensité de l'espace astronomique et du temps géologique, ce qui semble impossible dans le monde intermédiaire pourrait s'avérer inévitable. One way to think about that is by counting planets. Une façon d'y penser est de compter les planètes. We don’t know how many planets there are in the universe, but a good estimate is about ten to the 20, or 100 billion billion. Nous ne savons pas combien de planètes il y a dans l'univers, mais une bonne estimation est d'environ dix à la puissance 20, ou 100 milliards de milliards. And that gives us a nice way to express our estimate of life’s improbability. |||||||||||||improbabilité Et cela nous donne une belle façon d'exprimer notre estimation de l'improbabilité de la vie. Could make some sort of landmark points along a spectrum of improbability, which might look like the electromagnetic spectrum we just looked at. |||||||||||d'improbabilité||||||||||| If life has arisen only once on any -- if -- if life could -- I mean, life could originate once per planet, could be extremely common, or it could originate once per star, or once per galaxy or maybe only once in the entire universe, in which case it would have to be here. Si la vie n'est apparue qu'une seule fois sur n'importe quelle -- si -- si la vie pouvait -- je veux dire, la vie pourrait apparaître une fois par planète, cela pourrait être extrêmement courant, ou elle pourrait apparaître une fois par étoile, ou une fois par galaxie ou peut-être seulement une fois dans tout l'univers, dans ce cas, elle devrait être ici.

And somewhere up there would be the chance that a frog would turn into a prince and similar magical things like that. Et quelque part là-haut, il y aurait la chance qu'une grenouille se transforme en prince et des choses magiques similaires. If life has arisen on only one planet in the entire universe, that planet has to be our planet, because here we are talking about it. Si la vie n'est apparue que sur une seule planète dans tout l'univers, cette planète doit être notre planète, parce qu'ici nous en parlons. And that means that if we want to avail ourselves of it, we’re allowed to postulate chemical events in the origin of life which have a probability as low as one in 100 billion billion. Et cela signifie que si nous voulons en profiter, nous sommes autorisés à postuler des événements chimiques à l'origine de la vie qui ont une probabilité aussi basse qu'un sur 100 milliards de milliards. I don’t think we shall have to avail ourselves of that, because I suspect that life is quite common in the universe. Je ne pense pas que nous devrons en profiter, car je soupçonne que la vie est assez commune dans l'univers. Eu não acho que teremos que nos valer disso, porque suspeito que a vida é bastante comum no universo. And when I say quite common, it could still be so rare that no one island of life ever encounters another, which is a sad thought. Et quand je dis assez commune, cela pourrait encore être si rare qu'aucune île de vie ne rencontre jamais une autre, ce qui est une pensée triste. How shall we interpret "queerer than we can suppose?

Queerer than in principle can be supposed, or just queerer than we can suppose, given the limitations of our brain’s evolutionary apprenticeship in Middle World? Could we, by training and practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World and achieve some sort of intuitive, as well as mathematical, understanding of the very small and the very large? ||||||nous émanciper||||||||||||||||||||||| I genuinely don’t know the answer. I wonder whether we might help ourselves to understand, say, quantum theory, if we brought up children to play computer games, beginning in early childhood, which had a sort of make believe world of balls going through two slits on a screen, a world in which the strange goings on of quantum mechanics were enlarged by the computer’s make believe, so that they became familiar on the Middle-World scale of the stream. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||fentes|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Je me demande si nous pourrions nous aider à comprendre, disons, la théorie quantique, si nous élevions des enfants à jouer à des jeux vidéo, dès la petite enfance, qui auraient une sorte de monde imaginaire de boules passant à travers deux fentes sur un écran, un monde dans lequel les étranges événements de la mécanique quantique seraient amplifiés par l'imaginaire de l'ordinateur, si bien qu'ils deviendraient familiers à l'échelle du Monde Intermédiaire du flux. Eu me pergunto se poderíamos nos ajudar a entender, digamos, a teoria quântica, se educássemos crianças para jogar jogos de computador, começando na primeira infância, que meio que faziam um mundo de faz de conta que passava por duas fendas na tela, um mundo em que os estranhos acontecimentos da mecânica quântica foram ampliados pelo computador, para que eles se familiarizassem na escala do fluxo no mundo médio. And, similarly, a relativistic computer game in which objects on the screen manifest the Lorenz Contraction, and so on, to try to get ourselves into the way of thinking -- get children into the way of thinking about it. ||||||||||||||Lorenz||||||||||||||||||||||| Et, de la même manière, un jeu vidéo relativiste dans lequel des objets à l'écran manifestent la Contraction de Lorentz, et ainsi de suite, pour essayer de nous mettre dans le bon état d'esprit - amener les enfants à penser de cette manière. I want to end by applying the idea of Middle World to our perceptions of each other. Je veux finir en appliquant l'idée de Monde Intermédiaire à notre perception les uns des autres.

Most scientists today subscribe to a mechanistic view of the mind: we’re the way we are because our brains are wired up as they are; our hormones are the way they are. We’d be different, our characters would be different, if our neuro-anatomy and our physiological chemistry were different. But we scientists are inconsistent. If we were consistent, our response to a misbehaving person, like a child murderer, should be something like, this unit has a faulty component; it needs repairing. ||||||||maladroit|||||||||||||||||| Si nous étions cohérents, notre réponse à une personne qui se comporte mal, comme un meurtrier d'enfants, devrait être quelque chose comme : cette unité a un composant défectueux ; elle a besoin d'être réparée. Se formos consistentes, nossa resposta a uma pessoa que se comporta mal, como um assassino de crianças, deve ser algo como: esta unidade tem um componente defeituoso; precisa ser reparado. That’s not what we say. Ce n'est pas ce que nous disons. What we say -- and I include the most austerely mechanistic among us, which is probably me -- what we say is, "Vile monster, prison is too good for you." Ce que nous disons - et j'inclus parmi nous les plus austèrement mécanistes, ce qui est probablement moi - ce que nous disons, c'est : « Monstre vile, la prison est trop bonne pour vous. » O que dizemos - e incluo o mais austero mecanicista entre nós, que provavelmente sou eu - o que dizemos é: "Monstro vil, prisão é bom demais para você". Or worse, we seek revenge, in all probability thereby triggering the next phase in an escalating cycle of counter-revenge, which we see, of course, all over the world today. |||||||||||||||escalant|||||||||||||| Ou pior, buscamos vingança, com toda probabilidade, desencadeando assim a próxima fase em um ciclo crescente de contra-vingança, que vemos, é claro, em todo o mundo hoje. In short, when we’re thinking like academics, we regard people as elaborate and complicated machines, like computers or cars, but when we revert to being human we behave more like Basil Fawlty, who, we remember, thrashed his car to teach it a lesson when it wouldn’t start on gourmet night. |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||Fawlty|||||||||||||||||| En bref, quand nous pensons comme des universitaires, nous considérons les gens comme des machines élaborées et compliquées, comme des ordinateurs ou des voitures, mais lorsque nous redevenons humains, nous agissons plus comme Basil Fawlty, qui, nous nous souvenons, a frappé sa voiture pour lui donner une leçon quand elle ne voulait pas démarrer lors d'une nuit gourmet. Em resumo, quando pensamos como acadêmicos, consideramos as pessoas como máquinas elaboradas e complicadas, como computadores ou carros, mas quando voltamos a ser humanos, nos comportamos mais como Basil Fawlty, que, lembramos, bateu no carro para ensiná-lo uma lição quando não começaria na noite gourmet. (Laughter) (Rires) The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world. ||||||||||||||||||||taupes||||||||||||||||||||| La raison pour laquelle nous personnifions des choses comme des voitures et des ordinateurs est que tout comme les singes vivent dans un monde arboré et les taupes dans un monde souterrain et les dériveurs d'eau vivent dans une plaine dominée par la tension superficielle, nous vivons dans un monde social. A razão pela qual personificamos coisas como carros e computadores é que, da mesma maneira que os macacos vivem em um mundo arbóreo e as toupeiras vivem em um mundo subterrâneo e as aves aquáticas vivem em uma planície dominada pela tensão superficial, vivemos em um mundo social.

We swim through a sea of people -- a social version of Middle World. Nadamos por um mar de pessoas - uma versão social do Mundo Médio. We are evolved to second-guess the behavior of others by becoming brilliant, intuitive psychologists. Nós evoluímos para adivinhar o comportamento dos outros, tornando-nos psicólogos brilhantes e intuitivos. Treating people as machines may be scientifically and philosophically accurate, but it’s a cumbersome waste of time if you want to guess what this person is going to do next. Traiter les gens comme des machines peut être scientifiquement et philosophiquement exact, mais c'est une perte de temps laborieuse si vous voulez deviner ce que cette personne va faire ensuite. Tratar as pessoas como máquinas pode ser cientificamente e filosoficamente preciso, mas é uma perda de tempo difícil se você quiser adivinhar o que essa pessoa fará a seguir. The economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful, goal-seeking agent with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt, blame-worthiness. |||||||||||||||||||||||||||culpabilité La manière économiquement utile de modéliser une personne est de la traiter comme un agent intentionnel, à la recherche d'objectifs, avec des plaisirs et des douleurs, des désirs et des intentions, de la culpabilité, de la responsabilité. Personification and the imputing of intentional purpose is such a brilliantly successful way to model humans, it’s hardly surprising the same modeling software often seizes control when we’re trying to think about entities for which it’s not appropriate, like Basil Fawlty with his car or like millions of deluded people with the universe as a whole. ||||||||||||||||||||||||prend||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| La personnification et l'imputation d'un but intentionnel sont des moyens brillamment réussis de modéliser les humains, il n'est donc guère surprenant que le même logiciel de modélisation prenne souvent le contrôle lorsque nous essayons de penser à des entités pour lesquelles cela n'est pas approprié, comme Basil Fawlty avec sa voiture ou comme des millions de personnes délirantes avec l'univers dans son ensemble. A personificação e a imputação de propósitos intencionais são uma maneira tão bem-sucedida de modelar seres humanos; não surpreende que o mesmo software de modelagem muitas vezes assuma o controle quando estamos tentando pensar em entidades para as quais não é apropriado, como Basil Fawlty com seu carro ou milhões de pessoas iludidas com o universo como um todo. (Laughter) If the universe is queerer than we can suppose, is it just because we’ve been naturally selected to suppose only what we needed to suppose in order to survive in the Pleistocene of Africa? |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||Pléistocène|| Si l'univers est plus étrange que nous ne pouvons le supposer, est-ce simplement parce que nous avons été sélectionnés naturellement pour supposer uniquement ce dont nous avions besoin de supposer afin de survivre au Pleistocène en Afrique ?

Or are our brains so versatile and expandable that we can train ourselves to break out of the box of our evolution? |||||||extensible|||||||||||||| Ou nos cerveaux sont-ils si polyvalents et extensibles que nous pouvons nous entraîner à sortir des limites de notre évolution ? Or, finally, are there some things in the universe so queer that no philosophy of beings, however godlike, could dream them? Ou, enfin, y a-t-il des choses dans l'univers si étranges qu'aucune philosophie des êtres, aussi divine soit-elle, ne pourrait les rêver ? Ou, finalmente, há algumas coisas no universo tão esquisitas que nenhuma filosofia dos seres, por mais divina que seja, poderia sonhá-los? Thank you very much.