听力课堂TED音频栏目主要包括TED演讲的音频MP3及中英双语文稿，供各位英语爱好者学习使用。本文主要内容为演讲MP3+双语文稿:科学发现并不像你想的那样，希望你会喜欢！
【演讲者及介绍】Phil Plait
菲尔·普莱特，天文学家，他毕生致力于传播科学，传播关于真实世界的信息
【演讲主题】科学发现的秘密：犯错误
【中英文字幕】
翻译者 psjmz mz 校对者 Hanlin Wang
00:13
Now, people have a lot of misconceptionsabout science -- about how it works and what it is. A big one is that scienceis just a big old pile of facts. But that's not true -- that's not even thegoal of science. Science is a process. It's a way of thinking. Gathering factsis just a piece of it, but it's not the goal. The ultimate goal of science isto understand objective reality the best way we know how, and that's based onevidence.
人们对于科学有很多误解——关于科学原理和科学的含义。一个最大的误解是，科学只是一大堆陈旧的事实。但这并不正确——这甚至不是科学的目的。科学是一个过程。它是一种思考方式。收集事实只是其中一步，但并非目的。科学的最终目的是用我们所知道的最优方法来理解客观事实，即要以证据为基础。
00:42
The problem here is that people are flawed.We can be fooled -- we're really good at fooling ourselves. And so baked intothis process is a way of minimizing our own bias. So sort of boiled down morethan is probably useful, here's how this works. If you want to do some science,what you want to do is you want to observe something ... say, "The sky isblue. Hey, I wonder why?" You question it. The next thing you do is youcome up with an idea that may explain it: a hypothesis. Well, you know what?Oceans are blue. Maybe the sky is reflecting the colors from the ocean. Great,but now you have to test it so you predict what that might mean. Yourprediction would be, "Well, if the sky is reflecting the ocean color, itwill be bluer on the coasts than it will be in the middle of the country."OK, that's fair enough, but you've got to test that prediction so you get on aplane, you leave Denver on a nice gray day, you fly to LA, you look up and thesky is gloriously blue. Hooray, your thesis is proven. But is it really? No.You've made one observation. You need to think about your hypothesis, thinkabout how to test it and do more than just one. Maybe you could go to adifferent part of the country or a different part of the year and see what theweather's like then. Another good idea is to talk to other people. They havedifferent ideas, different perspectives, and they can help you. This is what wecall peer review. And in fact that will probably also save you a lot of moneyand a lot of time, flying coast-to-coast just to check the weather.
问题在于，人类是有缺陷的。我们可能被愚弄——我们真的很擅长欺骗自己。所以，融入科学的探究过程，是一种将偏见最小化的方法。总结起来说可能更好，科学的原理如下。如果你想要做点科学研究，观察一些事物…举例来说，“天空是蓝的，我很好奇为什么是这样？”你提出疑问。下一步你要做的是提出一个可能的解释：一个假设。首先，海水是蓝的。也许天空反射了海洋的蓝色。很好，但现在你得检验它，去推测这意味着什么。你的预测可能是，“哦，如果天空反射了海洋的颜色，那么海水在海边的颜色要比在一个国家的内陆部分更蓝。”好的，这很合理，但你得验证那个预测，于是你坐上飞机，在一个灰蒙蒙的好日子里离开丹佛，飞到洛杉矶，望向天空，天空映衬着壮丽的蔚蓝色。太好了，你的论点被证明了。但真是这样吗？不是。你做了一个观察。你得对这个假设进行斟酌，思考如何检验它，还要重复多次。也许你可以去这个国家的其他地方，或者在一年的不同时间去，看看那时的天气如何。另一个好主意是和其他人聊聊。他们有不同的想法，不同的视角，他们可以帮助到你。这就是我们所称的同行评议。事实上，这也会帮你省下很大一笔钱和时间，不必只为了看看天气两头飞。
02:16
Now, what happens if your hypothesis does adecent job but not a perfect job? Well, that's OK, because what you can do isyou can modify it a little bit and then go through this whole process again --make predictions, test them -- and as you do that over and over again, you willhone this idea. And if it gets good enough, it may be accepted by thescientific community, at least provisionally, as a good explanation of what'sgoing on, at least until a better idea or some contradictory evidence comesalong.
那么如果你的假设很好，但不是很完美怎么办？这不是大问题，因为你可以对它进行一点修正，然后再把整个流程走一遍——做预测，检验它——随着你一遍又一遍地重复，你的假设便会被优化。如果它变得足够好了，可能会被科学界采纳，至少暂时性地，作为一种对此自然现象的合理解释，直到有更好的观点或者出现了一些与之相矛盾的证据。
02:48
Now, part of this process is admitting whenyou're wrong. And that can be really, really hard. Science has its strengthsand weaknesses and they depend on this. One of the strengths of science is thatit's done by people, and it's proven itself to do a really good job. Weunderstand the universe pretty well because of science. One of science'sweaknesses is that it's done by people, and we bring a lot of baggage alongwith us when we investigate things. We are egotistical, we are stubborn, we'resuperstitious, we're tribal, we're humans -- these are all human traits andscientists are humans. And so we have to be aware of that when we're studyingscience and when we're trying to develop our theses. But part of this wholething, part of this scientific process, part of the scientific method, isadmitting when you're wrong. I know, I've been there.
科学探究过程的一部分就是承认你的错误。这真的非常、非常难。科学有其优势和不足，而它依赖于错误。科学的优点之一是，它是由人来完成的，长久以来我们获得的科学成就也毋庸置疑。因为科学，我们对宇宙有非常不错的认知。而科学的一个不足也恰恰是，它是由人来完成的，当我们调查研究的时候，会带着很多包袱。我们是任性主观的，我们固执且迷信，我们是群聚动物，我们是人类——这些都是人的特点，而科学家也是人。所以在研究和做出假设时，我们要意识到这一点。但这整件事的一部分，整个科学过程的一部分，整个科学方法的一部分，在于要承认自己在哪里犯了错。我曾经有过这样的经历。
03:45
Many years ago I was working on HubbleSpace Telescope, and a scientist I worked with came to me with some data, andhe said, "I think there may be a picture of a planet orbiting another starin this data." We had not had any pictures taken of planets orbiting otherstars yet, so if this were true, then this would be the first one and we wouldbe the ones who found it. That's a big deal. I was very excited, so I just dugright into this data. I spent a long time trying to figure out if this thingwere a planet or not. The problem is planets are faint and stars are bright, sotrying to get the signal out of this data was like trying to hear a whisper ina heavy metal concert -- it was really hard. I tried everything I could, butafter a month of working on this, I came to a realization ... couldn't do it. Ihad to give up. And I had to tell this other scientist, "The data's toomessy. We can't say whether this is a planet or not." And that was hard.Then later on we got follow-up observations with Hubble, and it showed that itwasn't a planet. It was a background star or galaxy, something like that.
许多年前，我在哈勃太空望远镜项目工作，有个一起共事的科学家带着数据来找我，他说：“我认为这个数据表明可能有颗行星围绕另一颗恒星转。”人们当时还没有拍到行星绕其他恒星转的照片，所以如果这个是真的，就会是世界上的首次发现，并且我们就是发现它的人。这可了不得。我非常激动，所以我就深入研究了这些数据。我花了很长的时间去搞清楚这个东西是不是行星。问题是行星很暗，恒星很亮，所以试图从这些数据中获取信号就像在重金属音乐会上听到耳语一样。真是非常难。我想尽了一切办法，但忙了一个月后，我意识到…我做不到。我不得不放弃。我得告诉其他科学家，“数据太混乱了，我们无法确定这是不是行星。”承认这件事真的非常难。后来我们用哈勃望远镜做了后续观测，结果发现它并不是一颗行星，只是个类似于背景恒星或星系的东西。
04:57
Well, not to get too technical, but thatsucked.
我不想说得太专业，但那真是太糟糕了。
04:59
(Laughter)
（笑声）
05:00
I was really unhappy about this. But that'spart of it. You have to say, "Look, you know, we can't do this with thedata we have." And then I had to face up to the fact that even thefollow-up data showed we were wrong. Emotionally I was pretty unhappy. But if ascientist is doing their job correctly, being wrong is not so bad because thatmeans there's still more stuff out there -- more things to figure out.
我对此真的非常失落。但就这是科学的一部分。你不得不承认，“看吧，我们无法用现有数据进行分析。”随后我还得面对 后续的数据证明 我们是错的这个事实。情感上，我非常失落。但如果一个科学家正确地进行了研究，犯了错误并不是坏事，因为这意味着在此之外还有更多事物——更多的东西等待着我们去探索。
05:29
Scientists don't love being wrong but welove puzzles, and the universe is the biggest puzzle of them all. Now havingsaid that, if you have a piece and it doesn't fit no matter how you move it,jamming it in harder isn't going to help. There's going to be a time when youhave to let go of your idea if you want to understand the bigger picture. Theprice of doing science is admitting when you're wrong, but the payoff is thebest there is: knowledge and understanding. And I can give you a thousandexamples of this in science, but there's one I really like. It has to do withastronomy, and it was a question that had been plaguing astronomers literallyfor centuries.
科学家不喜欢犯错，但我们喜欢谜题，而宇宙就是最大的迷题。话虽如此，如果你有一小块拼图，但怎么摆弄都拼不上，硬插进去并没有用。如果你想要理解更大的概念，就得放弃目前所持有的观点。科学研究的代价就是当你犯错时要承认，但这件事的回报是最好的：知识和理解。我可以给你上千个科学案例，但其中有一个我真的很喜欢。这当然与天文学有关，这个问题一直困扰了天文学家好几个世纪。
06:09
When you look at the Sun, it seems special.It is the brightest object in the sky, but having studied astronomy, physics,chemistry, thermodynamics for centuries, we learned something very importantabout it. It's not that special. It's a star just like millions of other stars.But that raises an interesting question. If the Sun is a star and the Sun hasplanets, do these other stars have planets? Well, like I said with my ownfailure in the "planet" I was looking for, finding them is superhard, but scientists tend to be pretty clever people and they used a lot ofdifferent techniques and started observing stars. And over the decades theystarted finding some things that were pretty interesting, right on the thin,hairy edge of what they were able to detect. But time and again, it was shownto be wrong.
太阳看起来很特别。它是天空中最亮的物体，但是经过了几个世纪的天文学，物理学，化学，热力学研究后，我们了解到了一些关于太阳的重要信息。它不再那么特别了。它不过跟其他数百万个恒星一样。但这又引申出了一个有趣的问题。如果太阳是恒星，并且太阳有行星，其他恒星会有行星吗？像我提到的在寻找“行星”上的失败经历，找到它们真的非常难，但科学家往往非常聪明，他们会应用很多不同的技术观察恒星。几十年后，他们开始发现一些真正有趣的东西，就在他们能够探测到的薄而粗糙的边缘。但事实一再证明，这是错的。
06:57
That all changed in 1991. A couple ofastronomers -- Alexander Lyne -- Andrew Lyne, pardon me -- and Matthew Bailes,had a huge announcement. They had found a planet orbiting another star. And notjust any star, but a pulsar, and this is the remnant of a star that haspreviously exploded. It's blasting out radiation. This is the last place in theuniverse you would expect to find a planet, but they had very methodicallylooked at this pulsar, and they detected the gravitational tug of this planetas it orbited the pulsar. It looked really good. The first planet orbitinganother star had been found ... except not so much.
事态在1991年才完全改变。几位天文学家——亚历山大·莱恩——安德鲁·莱恩，对不起——和马修·贝尔斯，发布了一项重大声明。他们发现了一个绕着另一颗恒星旋转的行星。不是随便一颗恒星，而是脉冲星，这是之前爆炸过的恒星的残骸。它在爆炸时释放了大量辐射。这是宇宙中你最不可能找到行星的地方。但他们非常系统地观察了这颗脉冲星，当这颗行星绕脉冲星旋转时，他们探测到了它的引力。这看起来真的很棒。第一颗绕另一颗恒星运行的行星被发现了…只是没有那么多。
07:38
(Laughter)
（笑声）
07:39
After they made the announcement, a bunchof other astronomers commented on it, and so they went back and looked at theirdata and realized they had made a very embarrassing mistake. They had notaccounted for some very subtle characteristics of the Earth's motion around theSun, which affected how they measured this planet going around the pulsar. Andit turns out that when they did account for it correctly, poof -- their planetdisappeared. It wasn't real.
在他们发布公告后，其他一些天文学家对此发表了评论，于是他们仔细地回去查看数据，并意识到自己犯了一个非常尴尬的错误。他们没有考虑到地球绕太阳的运动中一些非常不明显的特征，这些特征影响了他们测量这颗行星绕脉冲星运行的方式。结果，当他们做了正确的计算时，糟糕——他们的行星消失了。它其实并不存在的。
08:05
So Andrew Lyne had a very formidable task.He had to admit this. So in 1992 at the American Astronomical Society meeting,which is one of the largest gatherings of astronomers on the planet, he stoodup and announced that he had made a mistake and that the planet did not exist.And what happened next -- oh, I love this -- what happened next was wonderful.He got an ovation. The astronomers weren't angry at him; they didn't want tochastise him. They praised him for his honesty and his integrity. I love that!Scientists are people.
安德鲁·莱恩有个非常艰巨的任务，他得承认错误。于是在1992年美国天文学会会议，这个全世界最大的天文学会议上，他站起来并宣布他犯了个错误，那颗行星并不存在。接下来发生的是——太让我激动了——接下来的一幕很让人难忘。他得到了热烈的掌声。天文学家们并没有对他表示愤怒；他们不想谴责他，而是赞扬了他的诚实和正直。我非常喜欢这一点！科学家也是人。
08:42
(Laughter)
（笑声）
08:43
And it gets better!
事情在变得越来越好！
08:44
(Laughter)
（笑声）
08:45
Lyne steps off the podium. The next guy tocome up is a man named Aleksander Wolszczan He takes the microphone and says,"Yeah, so Lyne's team didn't find a pulsar planet, but my team found notjust one but two planets orbiting a different pulsar. We knew about the problemthat Lyne had, we checked for it, and yeah, ours are real." And it turnsout he was right. And in fact, a few months later, they found a third planetorbiting this pulsar and it was the first exoplanet system ever found -- whatwe call alien worlds -- exoplanets. That to me is just wonderful.
莱恩从讲台上走下来后，下一位上台的人是亚历山大·沃尔兹森，他拿起麦克风说道，“很遗憾，莱恩的团队没有发现脉冲星，但我的团队发现了不止一个，而是两颗行星围绕不同的脉冲星运行。我们知道莱恩存在的问题，我们仔细核实了自己的结果，我们的结果是真的。”结果他是对的。事实上，几个月后，他们发现了第三颗绕着这颗脉冲星的行星，这是迄今为止发现的第一个系外行星系统——我们称之为外星世界——系外行星。这对我来说太棒了。
09:24
At that point the floodgates were opened.In 1995 a planet was found around a star more like the Sun, and then we foundanother and another. This is an image of an actual planet orbiting an actualstar. We kept getting better at it. We started finding them by the bucketload.We started finding thousands of them. We built observatories specificallydesigned to look for them. And now we know of thousands of them. We even knowof planetary systems.
从那时起，就好像泄洪阀门被打开了一样。1995年，一个行星被发现绕着类似太阳的恒星运行，随后我们发现了一个又一个。这是一颗围绕恒星运行的行星图像。我们做得越来越好。我们开始成批成批地找到它们，数量达到了几千个。我们建造了专门用来寻找它们的天文台。利用这些天文台，我们发现了数千颗行星。我们甚至了解了行星系统。
09:53
That is actual data, animated, showing fourplanets orbiting another star. This is incredible. Think about that. For all ofhuman history, you could count all the known planets in the universe on twohands -- nine -- eight? Nine? Eight -- eight.
这是真实的数据，动画显示了围绕另一颗恒星运行的四颗行星。真是难以置信，想想看吧。纵观人类历史，用两只手就可以算出宇宙中所有的行星—— 9——8个？ 9个？8——8个。
10:10
(Laughter)
（笑声）
10:13
Eh.
呃。
10:15
(Laughter)
（笑声）
10:16
But now we know they're everywhere. Everystar -- for every star you see in the sky there could be three, five, tenplanets. The sky is filled with them. We think that planets may outnumber starsin the galaxy. This is a profound statement, and it was made because ofscience. And it wasn't made just because of science and the observatories andthe data; it was made because of the scientists who built the observatories,who took the data, who made the mistakes and admitted them and then let other scientistsbuild on their mistakes so that they could do what they do and figure out whereour place is in the universe. That is how you find the truth. Science is at itsbest when it dares to be human.
但现在我们知道它们到处都是。每个恒星——每个你在天空看到的星星，都可能拥有3，5，10个行星。它们布满了天空。我们认为行星的数量可能超过星系中的恒星。这是一个意义重大的结论，这全要归功于科学。得出这个结论不止要归功于科学研究和数据观测；能得出这个结论要归功于建造了天文台的科学家，他们得到了数据，他们犯了错误并承认了错误，然后让其他科学家在他们的错误之上前进，所以他们可以做到力所能及的事，并去弄清楚我们在宇宙中的位置。这就是你发现真相的方式。当科学敢于为人时，它就处于最佳状态。
11:02
Thank you.
谢谢。
11:03
(Applause and cheers)
（鼓掌和欢呼）
