唐好色
[个人文集]
加入时间: 2006/03/20
文章: 3893
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作者：唐好色 在 驴鸣镇 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
偶正想轉載一段, 胡先生先提了. 開頭的幾段正是對症下藥:
As I got off the plane, he was waiting for me, holding up a scrap of
cardboard with my name scribbled on it. I was on my way to a
conference of scientists and TV broadcasters devoted to the seemingly
hopeless prospect of improving the presentation of science on commercial
television. The organizers had kindly sent a driver.
"Do you mind if I ask you a question?" he said as we waited for my
bag.
No, I didn't mind.
"Isn't it confusing to have the same name as that scientist guy?"
It took me a moment to understand. Was he pulling my leg? Finally,
it dawned on me.
"I am that scientist guy," I answered.
He paused and then smiled. "Sorry. That's my problem. I thought
it was yours too."
He put out his hand. "My name is William F. Buckley." (Well, he
wasn't exactly William F. Buckley, but he did bear the name of a contentious
and well-known TV interviewer, for which he doubtless took
a lot of good-natured ribbing.)
As we settled into the car for the long drive, the windshield wipers
rhythmically thwacking, he told me he was glad I was "that scientist
guy"—he had so many questions to ask about science. Would I mind?
No, I didn't mind.
And so we got to talking. But not, as it turned out, about science.
He wanted to talk about frozen extraterrestrials languishing in an Air
Force base near San Antonio, "channeling" (a way to hear what's on
the minds of dead people—not much, it turns out), crystals, the
prophecies of Nostradamus, astrology, the shroud of Turin . . . He introduced
each portentous subject with buoyant enthusiasm. Each
time I had to disappoint him:
"The evidence is crummy," I kept saying. "There's a much simpler
explanation."
He was, in a way, widely read. He knew the various speculative nuances
on, let's say, the "sunken continents" of Atlantis and Lemuria.
He had at his fingertips what underwater expeditions were supposedly
just setting out to find the tumbled columns and broken minarets of a
once-great civilization whose remains were now visited only by deep
sea luminescent fish and giant kraken. Except. . . while the ocean
keeps many secrets, I knew that there isn't a trace of oceanographic or
geophysical support for Atlantis and Lemuria. As far as science can
tell, they never existed. By now a little reluctantly, I told him so.
As we drove through the rain, I could see him getting glummer
and glummer. I was dismissing not just some errant doctrine, but a
precious facet of his inner life.
And yet there's so much in real science that's equally exciting, more
mysterious, a greater intellectual challenge —as well as being a lot
closer to the truth. Did he know about the molecular building blocks
of life sitting out there in the cold, tenuous gas between the stars? Had
he heard of the footprints of our ancestors found in 4-million-year-old
volcanic ash? What about the raising of the Himalayas when India went
crashing into Asia? Or how viruses, built like hypodermic syringes, slip
their DNA past the host organism's defenses and subvert the reproductive
machinery of cells; or the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence;
or the newly discovered ancient civilization of Ebla that
advertised the virtues of Ebla beer? No, he hadn't heard. Nor did he
know, even vaguely, about quantum indeterminacy, and he recognized
DNA only as three frequently linked capital letters.
Mr. "Buckley"—well-spoken, intelligent, curious —had heard virtually
nothing of modern science. He had a natural appetite for the
wonders of the Universe. He wanted to know about science. It's just
that all the science had gotten filtered out before it reached him. Our
cultural motifs, our educational system, our communications media
had failed this man. What the society permitted to trickle through was
mainly pretense and confusion. It had never taught him how to distinguish
real science from the cheap imitation. He knew nothing about
how science works.
There are hundreds of books about Atlantis —the mythical continent
that is said to have existed something like 10,000 years ago in the
Atlantic Ocean. (Or somewhere. A recent book locates it in Antarctica.)
The story goes back to Plato, who reported it as hearsay coming
down to him from remote ages. Recent books authoritatively describe
the high level of Atlantean technology, morals, and spirituality, and
the great tragedy of an entire populated continent sinking beneath the
waves. There is a "New Age" Atlantis, "the legendary civilization of advanced
sciences," chiefly devoted to the "science" of crystals. In a trilogy
called Crystal Enlightenment, by Katrina Raphaell —the books
mainly responsible for the crystal craze in America—Atlantean crystals
read minds, transmit thoughts, are the repositories of ancient history
and the model and source of the pyramids of Egypt. Nothing
approximating evidence is offered to support these assertions. (A resurgence
of crystal mania may follow the recent finding by the real science
of seismology that the inner core of the Earth may be composed
of a single, huge, nearly perfect crystal—of iron.)
A few books —Dorothy Vitaliano's Legends of the Earth, for example—
sympathetically interpret the original Atlantis legends in terms of
a small island in the Mediterranean that was destroyed by a volcanic
eruption, or an ancient city that slid into the Gulf of Corinth after an
earthquake. This, for all we know, may be the source of the legend,
but it is a far cry from the destruction of a continent on which had
sprung forth a preternaturally advanced technical and mystical civilization.
What we almost never find —in public libraries or newsstand magazines
or prime time television programs — is the evidence from sea
floor spreading and plate tectonics, and from mapping the ocean floor
which shows quite unmistakably that there could have been no continent
between Europe and the Americas on anything like the timescale
proposed.
Spurious accounts that snare the gullible are readily available.
Skeptical treatments are much harder to find. Skepticism does not sell
well. A bright and curious person who relies entirely on popular culture
to be informed about something like Atlantis is hundreds or thousands
of times more likely to come upon a fable treated uncritically
than a sober and balanced assessment.
....
作者：唐好色 在 驴鸣镇 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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[转贴] 地球编年史 作者:撒迦利亚 西琴. 翻译: 宋易.
