2020年经济学人 物理学家弗里曼·戴森(4)（在线收听）

He was on the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, maintainers of the nuclear Doomsday Clock, which now stands at 100 seconds to midnight. There was far more to nuclear weapons, he knew, than the science that had spawned them. He wrestled with the moral questions they raised, studying game theory in an effort to work out when, if ever, it might make sense to use such a weapon in anger.

弗里曼是《原子能科学家公报》的赞助者之一，该报纸是核末日时钟的维护者，现在距离象征末日的午夜还有100秒。他知道，核武器远不只限于孕育他们的科学。弗里曼纠结于核武器引发的道德问题，研究博弈论，试图找出何时在愤怒时使用这种武器可能是有意义的，如果它会出现的话。

The problem of nuclear war, it seemed to him, was fundamentally not technical but human and historical. He was an iconoclast, too, and enjoyed being known as one. Heretics were useful in science. It was far better to be contradicted than ignored; better to be wrong than vague. As a colleague said, whenever consensus was forming like ice hardening on a lake, he would do his best to chip away at it. He dared to challenge natural selection as the only driver of evolution, and he queried climate change: not the fact that it was happening, but the usefulness of the models that aimed to predict its effects.

对他来说，核战争的问题从根本上来说不是技术上的问题，而是人性和历史的问题。他也是一名反社会习俗者，并且享受作为这样一个人。异端分子在科学上是有用的。被否定远远好于被忽略；犯错比含糊不清要好。正如一位同事所说，每当共识形成时，就像湖面上的冰变硬了一样，他就会尽自己最大的努力去打破它。弗里曼敢于挑战自然选择作为进化的唯一驱动力，他质疑气候变化：不是它正在发生的事实，而是旨在预测其影响的模型的有效性。

In any case, some of those effects might be beneficial—a longer growing season, for example, and fewer deaths from the cold. Environmentalism struck him as more a religion than a science. Not that he was against religion; he supported it, in a diffident Church of England way. To get back beyond the Big Bang, certainly, you needed religion. But the real faith that sustained him was a boundless belief in the power and possibilities of science. He had witnessed at first hand how it could give mere mortals the power to destroy their own world. Perhaps they could use science to save it, too—or, if not, leave it for another altogether.

无论如何，气候变化的一些影响可能是有益的-生长周期更长，因寒冷死去的人更少。他认为环保主义更多的是一种宗教，而不是一种科学。这并不表示他反对宗教；他支持宗教，以一种缺乏自信的英国国教的方式。当然，为了回到宇宙大爆炸之后，你需要宗教。但是支撑他的真正信念是对科学的力量和可能性的无限信念。弗里曼亲眼目睹了科学如何赋予凡人摧毁自己世界的力量。也许他们也可以用科学来拯救世界——或者，如果没有做到的话，把它完全留给另一个人来做。