那一天朋友圈刷爆霍金，但是你真的了解他么？

Stephen Hawking, the English cosmologist and black hole maven, liked to say he was born 300 years to the day after Galileo died, and he died Wednesday, 139 years after Albert Einstein was born.

喜欢说自己出生在伽利略300周年忌日的英国宇宙学家、黑洞专家斯蒂芬.霍金(Stephen Hawking)于周三去世，这一天正好是阿尔伯特.爱因斯坦(Albert Einstein)的139周年诞辰。

That was a fitting bookend.

这是一个适宜的结束。

In the popular press, he was often referred to as the greatest physicist since Einstein. That, he always said, was media hype, driven by the public’s thirst for heroes.

在大众媒体上，霍金常被称作继爱因斯坦之后最伟大的物理学家。他总说这是媒体的炒作，是受公众渴望英雄的驱使。

As someone who might have contributed in some small way over the years to this impression, I have to say I agree. History will pass judgment on that dubious and problematic distinction.

作为一个多年来或许亦曾为这种印象做出过些微贡献的人，我不得不说我同意他的观点。他的杰出之处尚且存在疑问，历史自会作出评判。

But Hawking’s life was Einsteinian and he was a hero, not just for what he taught about the universe, but for what he taught us about how to live.

但霍金的一生是爱因斯坦式的。他是一位英雄，这不仅仅是因为他教给我们的有关宇宙的知识，还因为他对我们该如何生活的教导。

Whether or not he overturned the universe, he did overturn our imaginations. To the public, however, he was, in Homer Simpson’s words, “the wheelchair guy,” who despite being slowly paralyzed by Lou Gehrig’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to the point where he could move only an eyeball, roamed the world and figuratively the universe, married twice, fathered three children, wrote best-sellers and nurtured generations of graduate students.

无论是否颠覆了宇宙，他的确颠覆了我们的想象。但在公众眼里，用霍默.辛普森(Homer Simpson)的话说，他是“那个坐在轮椅里的家伙”。尽管他因葛雷克氏症(Lou Gehrig’s disease)，又名肌萎缩性脊髓侧索硬化症而慢慢瘫痪，最终只能移动一个眼球，他却漫游了世界和宇宙（象征性地），结了两次婚，育有三个孩子，写出多本畅销书，还培养了一代又一代研究生。

He was the kind of guy who showed up at his own 60th birthday party with a broken leg after flipping his wheelchair trying to take a street corner too fast, a guy whose eyes lit up with a mischievous grin at good and bad jokes. He mingled with kings and presidents and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. He had hoped someday to take a trip to the edge of space on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spaceship.

他是那种在推着轮椅试图转过街角时因为速度太快而摔断腿后，还会出现在自己60岁生日聚会上的人；他会因为好笑和不好笑的笑话而两眼发亮，露出淘气的笑容。他的朋友里有国王和总统，也有达拉斯牛仔队(Dallas Cowboys)的拉拉队员。他希望有一天能搭乘理查德.布兰森(Richard Branson)的维珍银河(Virgin Galactic)公司的宇宙飞船去往宇宙边缘。

He preferred to be called Stephen. He was proud of being a family man.

他喜欢别人叫他斯蒂芬。他为自己是一个顾家的男人感到自豪。

“His sense of humor was legendary,” said Kip Thorne, his old friend and recent Nobel laureate from Caltech, with whom he collaborated on the seeds of what would become the movie “Interstellar.” “When he started a sentence, laboriously on his computer, I never knew whether it would end in a deep pearl of wisdom or an off-the-wall joke,” Thorne said in an email.

“他的幽默感赫赫有名，”霍金在加州理工学院(Caltech)的老朋友，最近获得诺贝尔奖的基普.索恩(Kip Thorne)说。他和索恩一起合作，播下了电影《星际穿越》(Interstellar)的种子。“当他费力地在用他的电脑开始说一句话的时候，我从来不知道它最后会是一句如深海珍珠般的智慧之语，还是一个稀奇古怪的笑话，”索恩在一封电子邮件中写道。

To scientists, however, he will be forever known for finding a relation between gravity — in the form of Einstein’s general theory of relativity — that bends the cosmos and determines its destiny and the atomic randomness that lives inside it, swept helplessly along in the river of time.

但对科学家来说，霍金会被永远铭记，是因为他发现了让宇宙发生弯曲，并决定着宇宙命运的引力（以爱因斯坦广义相对论的形式）与宇宙中被无助地卷入时间长河中的原子的随机性之间的关系。

Like Einstein, and Galileo, he did his greatest work on gravity, a force we all feel in our bones, a force that, Einstein decreed, would even bend starlight, leaving, “lights all askew in the heavens.”

与爱因斯坦和伽利略一样，他最大的贡献是在引力方面。引力是我们所有人都能在骨子里感受到的一种力量。爱因斯坦认定，引力甚至会让星光发生弯曲，造成“天空中的所有光线都是偏斜的”。

As a result, Hawking became an icon of mystery and curiosity and determination to understand this place we are in.

因此，霍金象征着神秘、好奇，以及了解我们所处之地的决心。

He was only 22, a lackadaisical graduate student, when he was given a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s disease, which usually kills in two to five years. By the time he died, he had lived with it for half a century, and doctors had added the word “atypical” to his diagnosis. As if that explained anything at all.

被诊断患上葛雷克氏症时，霍金才22岁。彼时的他还是一个懒散的研究生。葛雷克氏症的患者通常会在两到五年内死亡。但到霍金去世时，他已经带病活过了半个世纪。医生在他的诊断结果中加进了“非典型”这个词。仿佛这解释了什么似的。

I was an assistant typesetter at Sky and Telescope magazine, hungry for action, when I first glimpsed Hawking whirring in his electric wheelchair through a ballroom in Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel in 1976. It struck me as the most dramatic moment I had experienced in science. I felt like I had somehow known him forever. The genius, the brilliant mind trapped in a wrecked body, are archetypes of literature and folklore.

1976年，当我第一次在波士顿科普利广场酒店的一间宴会厅看到坐着电动轮椅疾驶而过的霍金时，我还是《天空与望远镜》(Sky and Telescope)杂志的一名渴望干一番大事业的助理排字员。那是我在科学的世界里经历的最戏剧性的时刻。不知何故，我感觉自己与他早已相识。一个天才，一个被困在残疾身体之中的伟大头脑，这是文学和民间传说的原型人物。

Of course, I didn’t know him at all.

当然，我根本不认识他。

He was there to talk about black holes, the scariest things that otherwise sober physicists had ever dreamed up. Black holes, objects so dense that not even light can escape them, are the most extreme manifestations of gravity. You didn’t need to understand the mathematics to grasp the notion of gaping maws sitting at the bottoms of galaxies or at the end of time, or the six-foot-deep hole with your own name on it.

他要讲的话题是黑洞，那是通常头脑清醒的物理学家们想出的最为可怕的东西。黑洞，密度大到连光都无法逃脱的物体，是万有引力最极端的表现形式。要理解这个概念并不需要懂数学，这就是一个在宇宙的尽头、在时间的终点裂开的无底深渊，或是一个有你名字的、纵深六英尺的洞。

Einstein himself had rejected the notion, but in the early 1970s astronomers were finding black-hole candidates all over the sky. The universe was rife with death.

爱因斯坦本人对这个概念拒不接受，但在1970年代初，天文学家在天上发现了许多有可能是黑洞的东西。宇宙中充斥着死亡。

In my own hopelessly romantic eyes, Hawking in the Copley Plaza will always be St. George in a wheelchair, sallying forth to slay the black-hole dragon.

在我浪漫得无可救药的眼中，科普利广场的霍金永远都会是坐着轮椅的圣乔治，出击向前，砍向黑洞这条巨龙。

In intricate calculations that even his friends doubted he could perform, Hawking discovered that black holes were not black at all when quantum rules were taken into consideration, but were in fact fountains of energy, fizzing faintly with particles and radiation. Over vast eons they would eventually explode, giving back to the universe all the mass and energy that had once disappeared, in a sort of cosmic reincarnation.

在连他朋友都不相信他能演算成功的复杂计算中，霍金发现，如果考虑到量子定则，黑洞其实根本不黑，而是一眼能量之泉，粒子和辐射从里面缓缓涌出。在漫长的时间之后，它们最终会发生爆炸，将所有一度消失的质量与能量还给宇宙，仿佛一场宇宙的转世。

In a statement that felt like it was about much more than just mathematics, Dennis Sciama, Hawking’s former Cambridge professor, called Hawking’s discover “the most beautiful paper” in the history of physics. St. George had slain the dragon.

在一则声明中，曾是霍金在剑桥的教授的丹尼斯.夏马(Dennis Sciama)感到这远非只是数学，他把霍金的发现称为物理学史上“最美的文章”。圣乔治杀死了巨龙。

He could talk back then and a colleague and I spent some time after his speech sticking a pencil in his tie to make it stand up, in defiance of gravity.

当时他还能够说话，在听完他的演讲后，我和一位同事花了些时间往他的领带里塞了支铅笔，让领带立起来，公然违抗地心引力。

My article about all this got me promoted at the magazine. A year later, I was on a plane to England to do an in-depth profile. Later on, Hawking was one of the main characters in my book, “Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos.”

我就这些事写下的文章让我在杂志社得到了提拔。一年后，我为了写一篇人物特稿去了英国。后来，霍金成为了我那本《环宇孤心》(Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos)中的主要人物之一。

He didn’t always appreciate the attention. He was mad when he came home one day in Cambridge and found me interviewing Jane, his wife at the time. And frustrated by my obstinate refusal to understand some point of quantum physics (that I still don’t understand), he ran over my toes in an elevator with his wheelchair.

他并不总是喜欢人们的关注。有一天，当他回到剑桥的家中，发现我在采访当时的妻子简，他十分生气。有一次，我执拗地拒绝理解（至今也无法理解）量子物理学中的某些主张，他一气之下在电梯里用轮椅碾过了我的脚趾。

As he continued to outlive the odds and progressed from a cane to a wheelchair and from grunting to a computerized voice synthesizer operated first by a thumb and then by an eyeball, it was hard not to think of him as his own best metaphor, a man with one foot in his own black hole.

他不断地突破预期，从拐杖变为轮椅，从含糊的话语变成先是靠一根拇指、后来靠一只眼球控制的电脑语音合成器。这让人很难不用他自己的最佳比喻来看待他：一只脚踏进了自己的黑洞里的男人。

But Hawking was not interested in being anyone’s metaphor. “I’ve always found a way to communicate,” he once told me. He was not about to surrender his narrative or anything else without a good fight.

但霍金对成为任何人的比喻并不感兴趣。“我总能找到一种方式来交流，”他有一次对我说。他不会轻易放弃自己的叙事，或者是其他东西，不会束手就擒。