经济学人下载: 《光明的时代》书评--沉睡的巨人(2)

Mr Falk acknowledges that medieval science was not the same as the modern kind. Astronomy was the most important discipline, but astrology was respectable too, and it shaded into magic. Monks and nuns toiled in scriptoria to understand “a living cosmos endowed by God”, not “a coldly mechanistic natural world”. But were the methods really so different? Confronted with the unknown, human beings generate a chaotic mass of hypotheses that gradually gets whittled down through observation and experiment. That describes medieval science as much as today’s.
福克承认，中世纪的科学与现代科学不一样。天文学是最重要的学科，但占星术也同样受人推崇，它渐渐演变成了魔法。修士和修女们在抄写间中不辞辛劳地去理解“上帝赋予的存在生命的宇宙”，而不是“冰冷机械的自然世界”。但是研究方法真的不同吗？面对未知，人类会提出大量不合理的假设，再通过观察和实验逐渐剥茧抽丝得出结论。中世纪科学与当今科学存在很多的一致性。

And medieval scientists had a virtue that their modern counterparts can seem to have lost: humility. That is the reason Mr Falk chooses an obscure 14th-century monk-scientist, John Westwyk, as his guide. He cites Westwyk’s description of the astrolabe, an instrument that assisted in many useful tasks, such as telling the time and finding north, based on calculations of the positions of celestial bodies. The astrolabe sometimes seems to have more personality than the monk, probably because of the paucity of biographical information available. Still, Westwyk plays a valuable role in Mr Falk’s story.
中世纪的科学家拥有一种现代科学家似乎已经失去的美德：谦卑。这就是福克选择14世纪一位默默无闻的修士科学家约翰·韦斯特维克作为引导的原因。他引用了韦斯特威克对星盘的描述。星盘是一种可以帮助完成多种有用任务的仪器，例如根据天体的位置计算出时间和寻找北面的方向。星盘有时似乎比这个修士更有个性，但也可能是因为关于修士的传记资料匮乏。尽管如此，韦斯特威克在福克的故事中还是起到了重要作用。

To become an astronomer, he had to learn mind-boggling quantities of information, often in the form of numerical tables for which the astrolabe provided a handy, but less accurate, shorthand. Reading about what Westwyk knew can be hardgoing, because people are not used to thinking that way any more; computers do it for them. The reward is an understanding of the daily feats of memory that he and his contemporaries performed. It was because their knowledge was derived from first principles, Mr Falk shows, that they regarded the night sky with such wonder.
为了成为一名天文学家，韦斯特威克必须学习大量信息，内容多到难以想象，这些信息通常是以数值的形式出现，星盘为此提供了方便但不太准确的速记方法。阅读韦斯特威克的知识体系的过程十分艰难，因为人们已经不习惯于以那样的方式进行思考，电脑取而代之。读懂这些东西的好处在于我们能够理解韦斯特威克和他同时代人们日常的惊人记忆力。福克表示，正是因为他们的知识来源于基本原理，所以他们对夜空充满了好奇。

The mechanical clock, spectacles, advances in navigation, a grasp of tides and currents—these were among the achievements of the Middle Ages. They produced a theory of impetus that influenced Galileo Galilei in the 17th century. By then Nicolaus Copernicus had overturned everything medieval astronomers held dear, by placing the sun at the centre of the universe; but he couldn’t have done so without their patiently elaborated geometry. Fittingly, a metaphor Isaac Newton used in 1675—“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”—was coined in a 12th-century cathedral school.
机械钟、眼镜、航海技术的进步、对潮汐和水流的掌握，都是中世纪的成就。中世纪提出的动力理论对17世纪的伽利略产生了影响。到那时，尼古拉斯·哥白尼通过日心说，推翻了中世纪天文学家所珍视的一切；但如果没有中世纪耐心细致的几何学，他是不可能做到这一点的。艾萨克·牛顿在1675年使用的一个比喻很恰当，“如果说我比别人看得更远些,那是因为我站在了巨人的肩上”，这个比喻是在12世纪的一所大教堂学校里创造的。