我在中学时读了斯蒂芬·霍金的《时间简史》，觉得非常精彩。高中时我还有机会亲眼见到他演讲。他是激发我对物理学兴趣的科普作家之一，这份兴趣最终让我在哈佛大学获得了物理学学位。

I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time in middle school and thought it was great. I also got a chance to see him speak in person when I was in high school. He was one of the populizers of science who sparked my interest in studying physics that eventually led to receiving my degree in the subject from Harvard.

霍金一直以来给人的印象是一个有着坚定信仰的人。不过，他信仰的并非神。他是一名坚定的无神论者。他把信仰寄托于人类心智发现“万物统一理论”（大统一理论）的能力。这样的理论存在吗？霍金深信不疑，和爱因斯坦以及许多其他物理学家一样，他把一生都献给了探寻这一理论的工作。

What was always clear about Hawking was that he was a man of great faith. Not faith in God, though. He was a staunch atheist. He put his faith in the human mind’s ability to discover the “Grand Unified Theory of Everything.” Does such a theory exist? Hawking strongly believed so, and like Einstein and many other physicists, he dedicated his life to attempting to discover it.

我作为physics学生时，曾为这些问题所困扰：我们怎么知道这样一个理论存在？我们又怎么知道它能够被发现？然而，我的教授们都没有给出令人信服的答案。他们最多只能说：宇宙如此精妙，展现出如此的复杂性与崇高的秩序，因此其背后必定有某种东西作为根基。必定有一个更深的真理！必定有一个理由，解释为什么这种秩序、这种“宏大设计”会存在！霍金推测，这个理由在于，有一个包罗万象的理论，或许甚至是一个能解释一切的方程，即某些物理学家所称的“上帝方程”，支撑着这一切。 Hawking 1 2 The Modernist Menace to Islam (Note: the running header/page-number text "Hawking 1 2 The Modernist Menace to Islam" appears in the original and is kept as-is.)