雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第3章:思考什麼是思考(26)

Eddington was careful to say that in some sense the theory actuAlly worked, for it produced numbers which agreed with the outcome of experiments.

愛丁頓很小心地說，在某些情況下，這套理論是好用的，因爲與實驗結果相符。

Alan had grasped this point back in 1929: 'Of course he does not believe that there are really about 1070 dimensions, but that this theory will explain the behaviour of an electron.

1929年，艾倫抓住這一點：當然，儘管這個理論能解釋電子的行爲，但他仍不相信會有10^70個維度。

He thinks of 6 dimensions, or 9, or whatever it may be without forming any mental picture.' But it seemed no longer possible to ask what waves or particles really were, for their hard nineteenth century billiard-ball concreteness had evaporated.

他想到過6維，9維，或者隨便多少維，反正是畫不出來的。但是，現在似乎不該再問，波或粒子到底是什麼，因爲十九世紀的波粒戰爭已經結束了。

Physics had become a symbolic representation of the world, and nothing more, Eddington argued, edging towards a philosophical idealism (in the technical sense) in which everything was in the mind.

物理變成了世界的符號化描述，而這個世界的哲學則是一切都在意識中。

This was the background of Alan's assertion that 'We have a will which is able to determine the action of the atoms probably in a small portion of the brain, or possibly all over it.' Eddington's ideas had bridged the gap between the 'mechanism' of the body, which Alan had learnt from Natural Wonders, and the 'spirit' in which he wanted to believe.

這就是艾倫的知識背景。我們有一種意識，能夠決定大腦中一部分、或者所有原子的行爲。愛丁頓的想法，填補了二者之間的鴻溝：身體（艾倫從《自然奇蹟》那裏學到的），和靈魂（他想要相信的）。