双语畅销书《艾伦图灵传》第8章:面朝大海(233)

If he was looking for something new, it was in theoretical physics, which likewise he had put on one side since the 1930s.

如果说，图灵在追寻什么新的东西，那就是在理论物理方面。

Before the war he had spoken to Alister Watson of his interest in the 'spinors' that appeared in Dirac's theory of the electron, and in his last year he did some work on the algebraic foundations of the spinor calculus.

早在世界大战之前，图灵曾对艾力斯特·沃森说过，他对狄拉克电子理论中的"旋量"很感兴趣。在生命的最后一年里，他做了一些关于旋量的代数基础的研究。

He defined what he called 'founts', after printers' founts of type.

他定义了一个"活字"的概念注，不是活字印刷的那个活字。

He was also interested in the idea Dirac had suggested in 1937,according to which the constant of gravitation would change with the age of the universe.

1937年，狭拉克提出，引力常数会随着宇宙年龄而改变，图灵对这个想法颇有兴趣。

Once at lunchtime he said to Tony Brooker, 'Do you think that a palaeontologist could tell from the footprint of an extinct animal, whether its weight was what it was supposed to be?'

有一次午餐时，图灵问托尼·布鲁克："如果引力常数是变化的，那么古生物学家还能通过脚印来辨认灭绝的动物吗？"

And always distrustful of the official line in quantum mechanics, he revived his interest in the foundations of the subject.

此外，图灵对量子力学的基础也重新产生了一些兴趣，他在标准的解释中，发现了一个悖论。

He found a paradox within the standard interpretation, as von Neumann had set it out, because he noticed that if a quantum system were 'observed' frequently enough, its evolution could be made indefinitely slow, and in the limit of continuous observation would freeze to a stop.

冯·诺伊曼也发现了这个问题：如果一个量子系统被频繁观测，它的扩散速度会变得无限慢，有限的连续观测将使扩散完全停滞。