Часть 1

(1) С.: Мне хотелось бы спросить Вас о сингулярности, но это очень сложный, мне кажется, вопрос, поэтому сначала, пожалуй, спрошу вот о чём. Когда Вы говорили о теории стационарной Вселенной, Вы упомянули об эстетичности теорий в космологии. Не могли бы Вы пояснить немного этот пункт?

(2) У.: I suppose it’s partly the big bang, which was unpleasant in some ways. The idea that you have this singular origin, which seems to go against physics. It’s where your view of physics goes wrong. If you have to have this singular state in the beginning, that’s ugly. It’s ugly because you don’t understand it. Aesthetics has a lot to do with understanding. It’s a difficult issue.

(3) С.: Я хочу задать вопрос о теории твисторов, которой Вы немного коснулись. Как Вы себя чувствуете, будучи уже на протяжении 20 лет лидером столь неортодоксального подхода к пространству-времени? Что Вы думаете о его необычности?

(4) У.: I suppose I don’t care about that. It’s a complicated question you’re asking. It’s unconventional and it’s not unconventional. It’s unconventional because people don’t know about it. A lot of it is mathematical techniques. I like somehow to make the analogy more with, say, Langrangian theory or Hamiltonian theory. See, there was Newtonian physics, and that had become conventional physics. Then a body of mathematics developed for how to treat Newtonian physics. It may be that Hamiltonian theory was not the best way to do Newtonian mechanics. But it was just nice, because it related to mathematical ideas that were interesting for their own sake. But it didn’t actually change the physics. Twistor theory is to a large extent like that. It’s a way of formulating physics which is unconventional – people don’t know about it much – but it doesn’t change the physics. One can use twistors in standard physics, like Maxwell theory or Yang-Mills theory. On the other hand, a lot of the motivation behind twistor theory is unconventional.

(5) С.: Позвольте задать вопрос насчёт теорем о сингулярности. После того, как Вы и Хокинг с Джорджем Эллисом применили их к космологии, почувствовали ли Вы тогда и чувствуете ли Вы сейчас, что наблюдаемая нами Вселенная полностью удовлетворяет условиям Ваших теорем? Если, конечно, предположить, что сингулярность всё-таки есть.

(6) У.: I always felt that the required conditions were probably satisfied, without knowing much about the observations. The words one uses here sometimes shift a little. When I first looked at the problem, I didn’t like to use the word singularity or think of the universe as singular, because I always believed it just meant that classical general relativity has to be replaced by some other theory. We shouldn’t be throwing up our hands and saying physics gives up. We should be understanding what physics is. And so I would tend to say that you don’t really have a singularity; what you have is some change in our physics.

(7) С.: Что ж, давайте используем определение сингулярности. И если мы вернёмся во времена Планка, то назовём сингулярностью то, что и было так названо.

(8) У.: Yes, okay. But then I think I did use the word singularity, because Stephen Hawking tended to use it that way to say that the universe had a singularity. I'm not sure that his viewpoint was the same as mine, but I got round to thinking that way. I tended to say it’s some new physics, maybe its quantum theory. Quantum gravity is what I think I really said. We tended to talk more about singular states, just as a way of talking. But I did think that we knew enough to believe that is what the universe did.