英語四級翻譯：那些復(fù)雜到讓你困惑的簡單小事(6)

英語四級翻譯：那些復(fù)雜到讓你困惑的簡單小事(6)

6.How Long Is A Piece Of String? It's Impossible To Know

一根繩子有多長?這是根本不可能知道的。

If someone was to give you a piece of string and ask you how long it was, you'd assume that answering them would be a fairly simple, if rather odd task. But how would you answer that person if they wanted to know exactly how long that piece of string was? That was something comedian Alan Davies wanted to ascertain for a BBC TV special aptly called How Long is a Piece of String? by posing the deceptively simple question to a group of scientists.

如果有人給你一根繩子，然后問你繩子有多長，你肯定會認(rèn)為回答他們真是太簡單了，盡管這個任務(wù)有些奇怪。但是如果這個人想要知道繩子的精確長度，你會怎么回答呢?這是在BBC一檔特別電視節(jié)目中，喜劇演員艾倫?戴維斯想要弄清楚的問題，這檔電視節(jié)目的名字很貼切，叫《一根繩子有多長》(How Long is a Piece of String?)。節(jié)目中，他把這個看似很簡單的問題拋給了一組科學(xué)家。

The answer was, rather ironically, "it depends," because the exact definition of how long something is depends on who you ask. Mathematicians told the comedian that a piece of string could theoretically be of infinite length, while physicists told him that due to the nature of subatomic physics and the fact that atoms can technically be in two places at once, measuring the string precisely is impossible.

相當(dāng)滑稽地是，答案居然是"要視情況而定，"因為某樣?xùn)|西長度的準(zhǔn)確定義也要根據(jù)被提問者而定。數(shù)學(xué)家們告訴這位喜劇演員，從理論上來說，一根繩子的長度可能是無限的。而物理學(xué)家們卻告訴他說，基于亞原子物理學(xué)的本質(zhì)和這樣一個事實-從技術(shù)上講，原子可以同時出現(xiàn)在兩個地方，想要精確測量繩子的長度是不可能的。

編輯推薦》》