Часть 2

(1) С.: Основываясь на Ваших теоремах и наблюдениях, Вы действительно полагаете, что должна была быть эта квантовая эра? Я спрашиваю Вас об этом, потому что большинство из тех, кто работает в космологии, признают сингулярность, но очень немногие задаются вопросом, насколько это зависит от идеализированных допущений. Вы один из тех, кто может мыслить об этом более широко.

(2) У.: It was a fair question. Stephen Hawking was more cognizant of the direct observations and what the presence of the microwave background meant. We wrote this paper together, with an appendix that addressed this very issue. Stephen had already addressed this issue in an earlier paper. It’s just that since we had a more powerful theorem, we could weaken the physical assumptions. But I think that exactly to what extent the presence of the microwave background could satisfy the required conditions was something more Hawking’s than mine. I was prepared to believe that the universe was very close to a singular state at one time, from observations. One might then have believed in a previously collapsing phase, such as in an oscillating universe model. But the singularity theorems really showed that that couldn’t happen unless one had a gross violation of energy conditions.

(3) С.: Я хочу немного сменить тему. Меня интересует, насколько часто учёные используют в своей работе метафоры, наглядность, иллюстрации и подобные вещи. Мне кажется, это отличает Ваш стиль от других учёных – все эти диаграммы, геометрические фигуры… Не могли бы Вы побольше рассказать о роли всех этих картинок для Вас?

(4) У.: They’ve always been extremely important in my way of thinking. Mathematicians certainly don’t think the same as each other; some are much more geometrical, some much more analytical. This impressed me very much when I first started as a mathematical undergraduate student. I thought they would be more uniform in their thinking. I found myself to be much more geometrical than my mathematical colleagues. I tended to think about problems that other people thought were not geometrical in a geometrical way. So it’s always been very important in my thinking. On the whole, I think mathematicians are not always that geometrical. Sometimes they find geometrical arguments quite hard. In physics, people are a bit more geometrical. It’s curious that often if one is going to write a popular work, the editors say that one must have lots of pictures, and that’s to explain it to people who are not mathematicians. Whereas, mathematicians often find it difficult to think that way.

(5) С.: Я хочу спросить о Вашей реакции на некоторые последние исследования. Вы помните, что первое Вы узнали о проблеме горизонта событий?

(6) У.: I remember the first time I looked at this. I knew about horizons from Wofgang Rindler’s article. Well, it depends on what you mean by the horizon problem.

(7) С.: В смысле как мы её видим, например, в микроволновой коммуникации. Вы помните, что Вы тогда думали?

(8) У.: The first time that I began thinking about this in connection with the sort of thing that people now worry about – in terms of inflation and so on – was when George Sparling was talking to me about symmetry breaking. The question was: if one believes the standard models, then how it is that if you look at two distant quasars in opposite directions, they both seem to have broken their symmetries in the same way. My reaction, being unconventional in other ways, was completely the opposite from other people’s reactions. It's a problem. If you take the standard view, you have to believe that those two quasars were causally connected in some way.