阿姆斯特朗
阿姆斯特朗关于工程的演讲?
2000 年 2 月，阿姆斯特朗作为美国国家工程院（NAE）的代表在美国国家记者俱乐部就工程学在上个世纪取得的巨大成就发表了演讲。其中，他以“书呆子”自称，并介绍了由 NAE 排名推选出的二十世纪最具影响力的 20 个工程发明。
“任何足够先进的技术，初看都与魔法无异。”
亚瑟克拉克
Fellow engineers, honored guests, ladies and gentlemen: It is National Engineers Week, and I am honored to be speaking on behalf of the National Academy of Engineering and our nation’s professional engineering societies.
各位工程师，各位来宾，女士们，先生们：这周是国家工程师周，我很荣幸能代表美国国家工程院1以及我们国家的专业工程协会在此发表讲话。
I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer -- born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow.
我现在是——将来也会是——一个穿白袜子的，使用口袋保护套2的书呆子工程师，在热学第二定律下出生，浸泡在水蒸气表格中，喜欢画受力分析图，被拉普拉斯方程同化以及被可压缩气流推动3。
As an engineer, I take a substantial amount of pride in the accomplishments of my profession. Bill Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering, has said that science is about what is, and engineering is about what can be. The Greek letter eta, in lower case, often shows up in engineering documents. Engineers pay a good bit of attention to eta and improving eta, because it is a symbol for efficiency -- doing an equivalent or better job with less weight, less power, less time, less cost. Engineers's entire existence is dedicated to doing things better and more efficiently.
作为一名工程师，我对我所在的职业所取得的成就感到巨大的自豪。NAE 院长 Bill Wulf 曾说，科学是探索“是什么”而工程则探求“能怎么样”。小写希腊字母“eta”经常出现在工程相关的文档中。工程师非常关注“eta”，改进“eta”，因为“eta”代表着效率——用更少的重量、能源、时间、成本完成同等甚至更好的工作。工程师们的存在意味着把事情更好、更高效地完成。
When knowledge, or facts, or solutions are sought, there are a number of techniques available from which to select. They can be ranked according to their effectiveness, from the most certain to the most uncertain. At the top, or level one, is measurement; but even excellent measurements can be subject to small amounts of error. Level two are called cause and effect. That’s a rigorous deduction based on the laws of nature; on the conservation of mass, energy, and momentum; on Newtonian mechanics, Ohm’s law, Charles’s law, and all those kinds of relationships. These techniques for solving problems are not error free, but they do provide reliable and repeatable results.
追寻知识、事实或寻求解决方案时，有很多种技术可以选择。这些技术可以按照有效性进行划分，从确定的到不确定的。最精确的，测量，（可惜）就算是极优秀的测量手段也会有小的误差。其次是因果推断。那是基于自然定律的严格推理——基于质量、能量、动量的守恒，牛顿力学，欧姆定律，查尔斯定律以及诸如此关系的定律。这些技术手段并非没有错误，但是它们因可重验的结果提供了可靠性保障。
At the third level I put correlation studies. These are statistical techniques which allow the drawing of general and reasonable conclusions, but imprecise conclusions. An example of this is when you hear a conclusion as 62 percent of the people who eat pistachio ice cream 20 or more times a week tend to gain weight.
第三有效的我觉得是相关性研究。使用统计学手段可以得出总体来说合理、但是不精确的结论。比方说你应该听过的这个结论：每周吃 20 次或更多次开心果冰淇淋的人里，其中 62% 的人容易发胖。
The fourth level is opinion sampling. Conclusions here can be useful, but they are often temperable and not repeatable. Five, six, seven, and eight are all a variety of techniques that vary from focus groups to intuition to dream analysis and just plain guessing.
第四则是意见抽样。（使用意见抽样得到的）结论可能用用，但往往有时效性或不可验证。再往后，第五点、六、七、八则是大量（其它）技术，（按精确性）划分为焦点小组、直觉，再到梦境分析，最后是纯粹的猜测。
Uncertainty increases with the number of independent variables. So engineers use measurement and cause-and-effect methods for problem solution as much as possible, and use correlation studies only when the number of independent variables is too great for explicit solutions.
不确定性随着独立变量的增加而增加，所以工程师们尽可能优先使用测量以及因果推理来解决问题，只在因独立变量数量过多无法得出明确的解决方案时才使用相关性研究。
Engineering is a profession which leaves its imprint on our society in countless ways. We all intuitively understand the "quality of life," but we have difficulty in attempting to define it. Each individual has a unique group of factors which are important to him, or her, in quality of life. One person might think having no obligation to work whatsoever would be ideal, while another person would think having a great deal of work to do would be ideal. We do know that a century ago the world really needed improvements in quality of life -- health, mobility, living standards. At that time, life was a constant struggle. There were epidemics of tuberculosis. Child labor and 12-hour work days were used to ensure economic output. The average life expectancy had barely budged in a thousand years. If you reached senior-citizen status you beat the odds; to have all your children reach adulthood was rare. Waterborne diseases like typhoid fever and cholera were scourges around the globe. Industries blanketed cities with soot. Streets were filled with garbage and sewage. The world’s forests were being decimated by the fuel burgeoning industries and to build and heat homes for the world’s growing population.
工程学给社会留下了无法计量的印记。我们都凭直接理解“生活质量”的含义，但试图精确地给它做出定义时却很难。（因为）对每个个体而言都有一组独特的因素会产生巨大的影响。有些人可能会认为没有工作义务时是理想的，而另一些人会觉得做大量工作才是理想的。我们确实知道，一个世纪以前，世界确实需要改善生活的质量——（人们的）健康，（阶层的）流动性，生活条件。在那时，生活是一场持续的斗争。那时流行结核病。（人们用）童工以及十二小时工作制用来确保经济产出。一千年来，平均预期寿命几乎没有变化。如果你能（顺利地）到老年就意味着你打败了大多数人；使你的所有孩子都顺利成年也是极其罕见。水源传播的疾病，比如说伤寒和霍乱，成为了全球的祸患。工业给城市笼罩一层煤烟。街道上到处是垃圾和污水。世界上的森林被砍伐，以用作蓬勃发展的工业的燃料，以及给世界上急速增长的人口用作家庭供暖。
The twentieth century was often punctuated with the terror of war and darkened with societal struggles to overcome injustice. But the twentieth was also the first century in which technology enabled the tenets and the images of those traumas to reach across the world and touch people in ways that were previously. John Pierce, the engineer who fathered Telstar, the first satellite to relay television across the Atlantic, said that engineering helped create a world in which no injustice could be hidden.
二十世纪常常被战争的恐怖所打断，被为了克服不公正的社会斗争所掩盖。但同时二十世纪也是第一次使用科技的力量把这些创伤的信条和场景传遍世界，比以往的方式更给人们带来触动的世纪。研制了第一个跨大西洋广播卫星 Telstar 的工程师 John Pierce 曾说，工程帮助创造了一个不公正现象再也不能隐藏的世界。
Engineers are dedicated to solving problems and creating new, useful, and efficient things. So should not the world admire and respect them? Answer: Only occasionally.
工程学意味着解决问题以及创造新的，有用的，更高效率的事物。难道世界不尊敬他们？答案是：只是偶尔。
Many of our fellow citizens are mistrustful of logic and critical of technocrats, and often with reason. Bridges fail, airplanes crash, storage tanks leak, radiation escapes, and automobiles are recalled. Such failures are widely reported, and the search for whom to blame is initiated. But a couple of problems is here. Engineers are not good communicators. We are mistrusted because we are perceived as being slaves to technology, technocrats who don’t care a whit about the environment or safety or human values. And I reject those criticisms. In my experience, engineers really aren’t bad folks. A little too focused, maybe too intense for some, but they are as caring and concerned as other segments of our society. The fact that their failures are so widely reported is evidence of their rarity.
我们中的许多同胞不信任逻辑并且对技术官僚持批评态度，而且往往是有理由的。大桥倒塌，飞机坠毁，燃油泄漏，辐射泄露，汽车被召回...此类故障被广泛报道，并开始寻找责任人。但这有几个问题。工程师并不是很好的沟通者。我们不被信任是因为我们被当成了技术的奴隶，是一点也不关心环境、安全或人类价值的技术官僚。我拒绝这些批评。依我来看，工程师真的不是坏孩子。他们只是有些过于专注，也许其中有些有点过于紧张，但他们显然和社会其它成员一样关心这些问题。事实上，对于工程失败事件的广泛报道证明了此类事件的稀缺性。
Now, here in this final year of this twentieth century, many will look back to see how we have changed and what we have accomplished. By measuring our successes and our failures, they will gauge the progress that we have made as individuals and as a society. The evolution of popular culture, politics, and business has given us a world that is vastly different from that of our grandparents, and engineering has played a significant role in those changes. And so we decided we would take a focused look at how engineering has changed the quality of life in this past century.
现在，在二十世纪的最后一年，很多人会回首过去，看看我们有什么变化，有什么成就。通过度量我们的成功或者失败事件，测算出个体以及个体组成的社会的进程。流行文化、政治以及商业的进化给了我们一个与我们的祖父母所拥有的相比大不相同的世界，而工程在这些变化中发挥了重要作用。所以我们决定打起劲儿看看在过去的一个世纪里工程是如何提高生活质量的。
Over the past year, a rather impressive consortium of professional engineering societies, representing nearly every engineering discipline, has given its time, resources, and attention to a nationwide effort to identify and to communicate the ways that engineering has affected our lives. Engineering is the second largest profession in the United States, behind teaching, and so a large group of minds was looking at this issue.
在去年一年里，一个令人影响深刻的专业工程社团联盟，代表几乎所有工程学科，付出时间、资源及注意力，在全国范围内去甄别和讨论工程是如何影响我们生活的。工程学在美国是第二大的专业，仅次于教育，所以有一大群人在关注这个问题。
Each organization independently polled its membership to find out what individual engineers believed to be the greatest achievements in their respective fields. This effort covered areas as diverse as agricultural engineering, chemical engineering, electrical and mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, and so on. Because these professional societies are unrelated to each other, the American Society of Engineering Societies and the National Academy of Engineering provided the work to coordinate the effort. The Academy, in particular, took a leadership role in this effort because of its unique ability to convene the world’s greatest engineering minds under the congressional charter that it shares with the National Academy of Sciences.
每个组织都独立地对其成员进行调查，以找到各个工程师所认为的在他们各自的专业领域中的最伟大的（工程）成就。这项工作涵盖了广阔的学科，包括农业工程，化学工程，电气工程，航天工程等。由于这些专业的协会彼此不相关，所以美国国家工程院以及工程协会参与了协调工作。也别是美国国家工程院，在活动中发挥了领导作用，因为它和美国国家科学院一样次属于国会成员，有召集世界顶尖工程师的独特能力。
It was the NAE that issued the call for nominations to the societies, convened the selection committee of top engineers from all fields, and set about the laborious practice of qualifying and quantifying the information in the nominations. I was pleased to be asked to serve on the selection committee, which was chaired so capably by Guy Stever, here at the head table.
也正是美国国家工程院发出了提名呼吁，召集各领域中顶尖的工程师组成了选举委员会，并在排名以及限定排名范围及筛选信息中做了大量工作。我很高兴能为这个选举委员会工作，该委员会由就坐在主席台上的 Guy Stever 干练地领导。
After several rounds of narrowing the nominations, the committee met for two full days toward the end of last year and debated about just how to tackle this task and determine which engineering achievements of the twentieth century had the greatest positive effect on mankind. While intercontinental ballistic missiles and laser-guided bombs were undoubtedly technological marvels with important and perhaps justifiable reasons for their existence, projects of this type were somewhat disadvantaged on the quality-of-life basis.
经过几轮投票缩小了排名范围后，委员会在去年年底聚集起来，花了整整两天时间辩论，以确定如何甄别在二十世纪中哪一种工程成就对人类产生的正面影响最大。虽然洲际导弹和激光制导炸弹无疑是科技奇迹，他们的存在有着合理的理由，不过此类的工程技术在以生活质量为标准的排名中似乎处于不利地位。
Unfortunatly I was committed elsewhere and unable to partecipate that final meeting and the final round of selection so at least there is Wolf to help me to handle complains and corrections in that arena.
不幸的是，我也在其他地方工作，没有参加最后的会议和最后一轮排名，不过好在 Wolf 帮我矫正了相关工程的影响力问题。
Engineers should, and often do, present their projects, their ideas, and their conclusions with both the strengths and the weaknesses in full view. And I feel an obligation to maintain that tradition. A popular 14th century phrase was "comparisons are odious" -- Shakespeare, Swift and Fortescue used that phrase -- and perhaps they are. Nevertheless, we are, in contemporary society, engulfed in comparisons and ratings and lists: the top 25 teams, Mvps, Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, the top 10 money winners, New York Time book list, etc. etc. etc. And we engineers, not to be left out, have developed our own list.
工程师应该，也总是这样做：在介绍他们的专业，他们的理想时，要结合优劣势一起考虑。我觉得有义务保持这个传统。在十四世纪有一条有名的诗句，“人比人，气死人”。莎士比亚、Swift 和 Fortescue 都用过这个句子，也许吧。不管如何，我们处在一个有排名社会，被各种榜单和排名所吞噬：最棒的 25 只球队、最有价值球员、奥斯卡奖、艾美奖、格莱美奖、十大奖金得主、《纽约时报》书单等等等等。我们工程师也不甘示弱，开发出了我们自己榜单。
Such lists are, handedly, somewhat self-serving. And this one certainly is. Comparisons could not use measurements, and we found it difficult to use cause-and-effect or correlation studies. So we were obliged to reach way down to level four, opinion sampling, to reach consensus. Although this was an uncomfortable process for engineers, they did aggregate a committee of exceptional breadth and experience, considered seriously the recommendations of the nominators -- all very well-informed and experienced engineers in their respective fields -- and sifted.
通常榜单之类的排名很便利，也稍许有些自娱自乐。这个榜单也是这样。没有用于测量排名的工具，而且我们发现使用几乎没办法使用因果推理和相关性研究。所以只好使用第四级，意见抽样，来达成共识。尽管这对工程师来说不是舒服的过程，但我们确实聚集了一个有广泛经验的委员会，认真考虑了提名人的推荐——他们都是各自专业领域最具名望的有经验的工程师——并进行了筛选。
And Bill Wolf can help reporting that process.
Bill Wolf 可以帮助报道这个过程。
Now, as we take a look at the things considered by the NAE, we will see that if any of them were removed, our world would be a very different and less hospitable place. Each one of these achievements has been important to the change in our society.
现在，看到美国国家科学院思考得到的榜单，我们会发现从中移除任何一项，我们的世界都会变得非常不同且不那么友好。这些成就的每一项对我们的社会变革都有重要影响。
Now, if you were to ask a person on the street to name a great engineering achievement, he or she might say the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Panama Canal, or the Empire State Building. And while each of those is a great engineering achievement, none of them made the list. What did make the list were technologies that have become inextricable parts of the fabric of our lives -- some spectacular, some nearly invisible, but all critically important. So, let me introduce you to the list, the 20 engineering achievements that had the greatest positive impact on society in the twentieth century.
现在，如果你在街上随便问一个人说出一项伟大的工程成就，他可能会说金门大桥，或是巴拿马运河，或帝国大厦。这几项确实是伟大的工程成就，但它们没有上榜。上榜的是与我们的生活交织在一起的科技——有些很壮观，有些几乎不会被注意到，但都非常重要。现在请允许我向你们介绍这个榜单，即对二十世纪人类生活产生巨大正面影响的 20 大工程成就。
At number 20 we have high-performance materials. Early in the century the first synthetic resins were developed, and plastics have since become ubiquitous worldwide. In the second half of the century, polymers, composites, and ceramic materials found extensive applications.
排名 20 的是高性能材料。自第一种合成树脂在世纪初被研发出来后，塑料如今已无处不在。在二十世纪下半叶，聚合物，合成材料，陶瓷材料得到了广泛的应用。
Number 19 is nuclear technology. Controversial in the public mind, the engineering achievements related to conflict deterrence, power generation, and medical diagnostics and treatment remain among the most important of the twentieth century.
排名 19 的是核技术。尽管在公众中这可能有争议，但这项工程成就相关冲突威慑、发电、医疗诊断和治疗，从二十世纪至今仍然保持着其重要性。
At number 18 are lasers and fiber optics. Lasers brought xerographic printers and bar code readers, transformed survey methods, and revolutionized the storage of music, data, and images. And when the laser was combined with optical fiber, information flow rate was dramatically increased. Tonight, three engineers who were key players in the development of optical fiber will receive the NAE’s Charles Stark Draper Prize.
排名 18 的是激光以及光纤。激光带来了静电复印机和条形码读取器，改变了调查方式，并彻底改变了音乐、数据和图像的储存方式。当激光和光纤相结合时，信息流传输速率得到极大提升。今晚，三位在光纤技术中起到关键作用的工程师将会获得美国国家工程院颁发的 Charles Stark Draper 奖。
Number 17: petroleum technology. Transportation became petroleum-based in the twentieth century, too much of the energy business and the chemical business as well was petroleum-based.
排名 17 的是石油技术。二十世纪中，运输业演变为以石油为基础，很多能源业务和化学业务同样也以石油为基础。
Next 16 health technologies, which include devices such as pacemakers, artificial limbs, eye lens implants, and so on, and so on.
第 16 名是和健康相关的科技技术，其中包括起搏器、义肢、晶体植入体等设备。
15 is household appliances, which radically reduced the drudgery and time required for maintain a home.
第 15 名是家用电器，它们极大减轻了家务工作，减少了家务时间。
Next 14 imaging technologies, like those used for medical diagnostics and weather forecasting and ultrasound scans.
下一项，第 14 名是成像技术，比如用于医疗诊断、天气预报以及超声波扫描中的一些技术。
Next was the Internet, which to the surprise of many made it only to number 13. It was the consensus of the committee that the impact of the Internet will be felt more significantly in the twenty-first century. Check later.
下一项是互联网，令许多人惊讶的是它只排在第 13 名。委员会的共识时，互联网会在二十一世纪带来更重要的作用。我们马上就能看到。
I believe that space flight was certainly one of, and perhaps the greatest engineering achievement, but it was selected number 12 on the basis of its effect on the quality of life, and I do not disagree. While the impact of seeing our planet from afar has an overpowering effect on people around the Earth and provided the technology for tens of thousands of new products, other nominees were judged to have a greater impact on worldwide living standards.
我相信航天科技当然是其中之一，它甚至可能是最重要的一项，但基于对改善生活质量的评估，它只排在了第 12 名，我并不反对。从远处观察我们的星球对地球上的人而言有着重大影响，它为带来了数以万计的新产品提供技术，而其它排名项则是被考虑到对改善生活条件带来了影响更大。
Next is the interstate highway system. With 44,000 miles of limited-access, multiple-lane roads without one stop sign or stop light, it’s a model of efficiency and an engineer’s dream. While it clearly improves the lives of all who travel on it and all who are served by it, its rating suffers because it is not worldwide.
下一项是州际高速公路系统。它有着 44000 公里限制通行的多车道公路，没有一个站牌或红绿灯，是效率的典范以及工程师的梦想。它极大改善了使用它旅行或被服务过的人们的生活，不过排名不利的原因是它不是世界的。
Moving on to the top 10, we have air conditioning and refrigeration, which provided improvements in comfort and health and gave us the ability to transport fresh food and extend the shelf life of food, and to make tropical locations livable and productive.
进入前十名，第 10 名，我们有空调和制冷技术，给我们带来了舒适和健康，使我们有能力运送新鲜食物，并延长货架上食物的保质期，使热带更宜居，更有生产力。
Next 9 telephone. Instantaneous worldwide communications serve both family and business needs, and have introduced telemarketing to the dinner hour.
第 9 名是电话。世界范围内的即时通信可以用于家庭或商业需求，同时也在晚餐时间引进了电话营销。
When the founder of IBM, Tom Watson, during World War II, said the predicted that world market for computers would be about 5, he slightly underestimated the number of machines and applications for these devices, which reached number 8 on our list.
IBM 公司的成立者 Tom Watson 在二战时曾预测，在世界范围内电脑市场（销量）将会达到五位数，（显然）他稍微低估了这些设备以及应用这些设备的数量。电脑在我们的榜单中名列第八。
The world’s population grew from 1.6 billion to 6 billion souls during this past century, that could not been possible without number 7, agricultural mechanization. More impressive is the fact that the part of the population necessary to feed the world has been reduced from slightly more than half to just a few percent today.
过去的这个世纪，世界人口从 16 亿的人增长到 60 亿，如果没有榜单中的第七项，农业工程，这不可能做到。更令人印象深刻的是，（从事农业）以养活世界上其它人口的那部分人口从过去略高于一半减少到今天的百分之几。
One step higher 6 are radio and television. Although Marconi first demonstrated radio in 1895, he broadcast the first transoceanic signal in 1901, sufficient justification for the committee to include radio on the list. Some countries first introduced television to enable their citizenry to watch the Apollo program achievements as they happened. And now it’s difficult to find a place on the entire globe that is unburdened with daytime television.
更高一名的第 6 名是无线电和电视。尽管他是在 1895 年首次展示了无线电，但 1901 年他首次试验了跨洋广播——就足以让委员会将无线电列入榜单。一些国家首次引进电视，使他们的公民有能力在阿波罗计划正在发生时就看到其成就。现在，全球很难去找到一个没有日间电视负担的地方4。
In the 5th position is electronics, from vacuum tubes to transistors, integrated circuits, and microcircuitry. I’m told that transistorized radio in midcentury was the fastest-selling retail item of all time -- at least up until the time of Pokemon.
排第 5 名的是电子学，从真空管到晶体管、集成电路、微电路。我听说二十世纪中叶的晶体管收音机是世界上最畅销的零售品——至少在宝可梦出现前是这样。
4th are the technologies that purify and deliver safe and abundant water. At the outset of the century in the United States, typhoid alone killed more than 150 of each 100,000 citizens. Water treatment and distribution techniques led to longer lives and better living standards around the globe.
第 4 名是纯化以及分发大量安全的水资源的技术。在二十世纪初的美国，仅伤寒就杀死了每 10 万公民中 150 人。饮水处理及分发技术改善了全球范围的生活质量，（给人们）带来了更长的寿命。
The airplane is ranked 3rd. From its birth in 1903 with no obvious important use, aircraft rapidly changed the character of warfare, found dozens of new uses, and in the latter half of the century decimated passenger competition in trains and ships.
飞机排名第 3。从 1903 年诞生时还没有什么显著作用开始，飞机（迅速发挥作用）彻底的改变了战争的性质，并找到了几十种新的用途，并在在世纪后半叶消灭了火车及轮船间的客运竞争。
The 2nd ranked engineering contribution is the automobile. It too was a nineteenth century invention, but its development in the twentieth century demanded that it be considered a competitor. Passenger cars and trucks are the major transporter of people and cargo around the world, it has expanded the ease, practicality, and affordability of short- to medium-range travel enormously.
排名第 2 的工程贡献是汽车。他也是十九世纪的发明，不过它在二十世纪的（迅速）发展要求它被视为一个竞争者。客车和卡车是世界上人员和货物运输的主要交通工具，它扩展了了中短途旅行的易用性、便捷性和经济性。
Now, at this point, if we were in the entertainment world, we would have drum rolls, fanfares, and rockets. But as engineers we are not so inclined -- well, maybe a few rockets. The winner, the top-rated engineering improvement to the life of earthlings in this century was electrification.
现在，到了关键时刻，如果我们是在娱乐界，可能会摇鼓，彩花或者火箭（助兴）。但工程师们没有这种倾向，好吧，可以来些火箭（助助兴）。冠军登场了，赢得二十世纪改善生活质量最多选票的工程是电力工程。
The majority of the top 20 achievements would not have been possible without electricity. Electrification changed the country’s economic development and gave rural populations the same opportunities and amenities as people in the cities. Electricity provides the power for small appliances in the home, for computers in control rooms that route power and telecommunications, and for the machinery that produces capital goods and consumer products. If anything shines as an example of how engineering has changed the world during the twentieth century, it is clearly the power that we use in our homes and businesses.
排名前 20 中的大多数成就脱离电力没有办法实现。电力工程改变了国家的经济发展水平，使乡村人口获得了和城市居民一样的机会和设施。电力为家庭中的小型电器提供能源，给控制室的电脑、路由器、通讯设备以及为生产资本货物和消费品的机器提供能源。如果有什么东西能作为在二十世纪改变了世界的例子，显然，那就是家庭和企业中使用的电力。
So, there you have it, the top 20. My descriptions have been sometimes trite, and it’s likely that I missed some of the most important societal contributions from the nominees. And, without question, I did not even mention the work from those nominations that did not make the top 20 list, yet in many cases were of enormous importance to certain sectors of society or certain parts of the world. And in all honestly, I am guilty of a bit of subterfuge. Certainly the nominations were worthy, certainly the committee was honest and diligent in evaluating those candidations. And certainly you have been given their well-reasoned conclusions. The subterfuge is that my purpose was not to promote the competitive nature of the event, or to congratulate the winner, or to convince you that electrification was the most important technical activity of this past century. All of you have your own opinions on the importance of various technical developments to our society. What I really hoped to do was shamelessly use this occasion to remind you of the breadth, and the depth, and the importance of engineering as a whole to human existence, human progress, and human happiness.
好了，前 20 名你们都清楚了。我的描述可能有时显得陈词滥调，我也很可能还遗漏了一些做出过重要社会贡献提名。而且，毫无疑问，我甚至没有提及20 名开外的提名项所作的贡献。老实说，我犯了一点潜规则的毛病。当然，这些提名是有价值的；当然，委员会在评估这些候选项时也是辛劳而真诚的。当然，你会得到一个有依据的结论。潜规则的意思是说，我的目的不是为了促进这些项目中的竞争性，也不是为了祝贺获胜者，也不是为了说服你们相信在上个世纪电力工程才是最重要的技术活动。对于影响我们社会的各样技术，你们有着自己的看法。我希望要做的是只是厚着脸皮在这提醒各位，工程学科的广度、深度以及影响力作为一个整体对于人类存在、人类进程以及人类幸福的影响。
There are perhaps, even more far-reaching consequences of this exercise. The likelihood of today marking the end of creative engineering is nil. The future is a bit foggy, but it’s not unreasonable to suggest that the twenty-first century will enjoy a rate of progress not unlike the twentieth. In 2000 may be viewed a century hence, as quite a primitive period in human history. It’s something to hope for.
这项工作可能会产生更深远的影响。今天，标志着创意性工程结束的可能性为零。尽管未来有些迷茫，但如果说二十一世纪会和二十世纪有着更迅速的发展也不是不可能的。2000 年可能被一个世纪后视为人类历史中一个相当原始的阶段。这是值得期待的。
For three decades I have enjoyed the work and friendship of Arthur Clarke, a prolific science and science fiction writer, who back in 1945 first suggested the possibility of the communications satellite. In addition to writing some wonderful books, he has also proposed a few memorable laws. Clarke’s third law seems particularly apt today: Any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic.
在过去三十年里，我很享受阿瑟克拉克的作品和与他的友谊。他是一个多产科学家与科幻作家，早在 1945 年就首次提出了通讯卫星的可能性。除了写了精彩的书，他还提出了几条令人难忘的定律。克拉克第三定律在今天看来格外贴切：任何足够先进的科技都与魔法无异。
It has been a magical century.
我们刚经历了一个有魔力的世纪。