The Risk of Discovery

January 2017 Because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take.

2017 年 1 月 因为著名科学家的传记往往会删除他们的错误，所以我们低估了他们愿意承担的风险程度。

And because anything a famous scientist did that wasn't a mistake has probably now become the conventional wisdom, those choices don't seem risky either.

而且因为著名科学家所做的任何不是错误的事情现在可能已经成为传统智慧，所以这些选择似乎也没有风险。

Biographies of Newton, for example, understandably focus more on physics than alchemy or theology.

例如，牛顿的传记更多地关注物理学而不是炼金术或神学，这是可以理解的。

The impression we get is that his unerring judgment led him straight to truths no one else had noticed.

我们得到的印象是，他准确的判断使他直接发现了其他人没有注意到的真理。

How to explain all the time he spent on alchemy and theology?

如何解释他花在炼金术和神学上的所有时间？

Well, smart people are often kind of crazy.

好吧，聪明人往往有点疯狂。

But maybe there is a simpler explanation.

但也许有一个更简单的解释。

Maybe the smartness and the craziness were not as separate as we think.

也许聪明和疯狂并不像我们想象的那么分开。

Physics seems to us a promising thing to work on, and alchemy and theology obvious wastes

对我们来说，物理学似乎是一件很有前途的事情，而炼金术和神学显然是浪费

of time.

的时间。

But that's because we know how things turned out.

但那是因为我们知道事情的结果。

In Newton's day the three problems seemed roughly equally promising.

在牛顿时代，这三个问题似乎大致同样有希望。

No one knew yet what the payoff would be for inventing what we now call physics; if they had, more people would have been working on it.

当时还没有人知道发明我们现在所说的物理学会带来什么回报。如果他们这样做了，就会有更多的人致力于此。

And alchemy and theology were still then in the category Marc Andreessen would describe as "huge, if true." Newton made three bets.

炼金术和神学当时仍属于马克·安德森（Marc Andreessen）所说的“如果属实的话，其影响力巨大”的范畴。牛顿下了三个赌注。

One of them worked.

其中一位工作了。

But

但