My prize book from Sherborne is turning out very interesting, and not at all difficult reading, although the applied mathematicians seem to find it rather strong.
我从舍尔伯尼获奖的书,读起来很有意思,应用数学家觉得它难懂,但我却觉得毫无困难。
Von Neumann’s account was very different from Eddington’s.
冯•诺伊曼与爱丁顿的观点很不一样。
In his formulation, the state of a physical system evolved perfectly deterministically; it was the observation of it that introduced an element of absolute randomness.
在他的构想中,物理系统的状态变化是叠加的,观察它的过程使它坍缩,
But if this process of observation were itself observed from outside, it could be regarded as deterministic.
但这个测量过程本身又是叠加的,
There was no way of saying where the indeterminacy was; it was not localised in any particular place.
你不能说这整个系统到底在哪个环节坍缩了,它并不在任何特定的环节上。
Von Neumann was able to show that this strange logic of observations — quite unlike anything encountered with everyday objects – was consistent in itself, and agreed with known experiments.
冯•诺伊曼表明了他的这种奇怪的观察逻辑是自洽的,而且与已知的实验现象吻合。
It left Alan sceptical about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, but certainly gave no support to the idea of the mind manipulating wave-functions in the brain.
艾伦并不完全接受这种解释,但是当然,它更不支持心灵操纵脑的波函数这种观点。
Alan would not only have found von Neumann’s book ‘very interesting’ because it was tackling a subject of such philosophical importance to himself.
艾伦觉得冯•诺伊曼的书是很有趣的,不仅是因为它试图解决一个对他来说在哲学上很重要的问题,