【文章标题】：Why you won’t get a flying car
【标题翻译】：为何飞行汽车始终未能问世
【文章正文】：
Stripe Press was kind enough to send me several books it had published, and one of these was J. Storrs Hall’s
条纹出版社慷慨地寄来了他们出版的几本书，其中一本是J·斯托尔斯·霍尔的
Where Is My Flying Car?
《我的飞行汽车在哪里？》
. I had been meaning to read this book for a while, especially after
我早就想读这本书了，尤其是在
Tyler Cowen recommended it
泰勒·考恩推荐它
and Jason Crawford gave it
以及杰森·克劳福德给予
a glowing review
热情洋溢的评论之后
, so I was glad Stripe gave me a copy. I promptly stuck it on my shelf, paid for the audiobook, and listened to it while walking around San Francisco. That’s called
所以很高兴条纹出版社给了我一本。我立刻把它塞进书架，购买了有声书版本，在旧金山散步时聆听。这就是所谓的
ordinary abundance
平凡的丰裕
, folks!
朋友们！
In 2011, Peter Thiel famously said: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” When I first saw that quote, I chuckled, because for my entire life, we’ve had flying
2011年，彼得·蒂尔说过一句名言：“我们想要飞行汽车，却得到了140个字符（指推特）。“初次读到这句话时我笑了，因为在我有生之年，我们早就有飞行
buses
巴士
. And again and again, as I sit on a flying bus and marvel at the thrill of takeoff, and reflect on how amazing it is that man has conquered the air, I look around and see my fellow passengers with their window shades drawn, their noses buried in a book or staring at a phone.
一次又一次，当我坐在飞行巴士上为起飞时的刺激惊叹，感慨人类征服天空的壮举时，环顾四周却看到同机乘客拉下遮光板，要么埋头读书，要么盯着手机。
If we had flying cars, we’d enjoy the thrill for a few weeks, and then we’d be back to tweeting on our phones and wondering when the trip would be over.
就算有了飞行汽车，我们顶多兴奋几周，然后就会继续在手机上发推文，琢磨着何时才能结束旅程。
I’ve noticed a loose collection of beliefs and attitudes that I’ve decided to call “engineerism”, because I see it most often among engineers. I coined the term when I was in college, when I noticed that the engineering majors in my physics classes tended to think differently about the world than the physics majors like myself did. Later, I recognized “engineerism” in various sci-fi novels —
我注意到一组松散的信念和态度，决定称之为”工程师主义”，因为我在工程师群体中最常看到这种特质。大学时我创造了这个词，当时发现物理课上工程专业同学与我这样的物理专业学生对世界的思考方式截然不同。后来我在多部科幻小说中认出了这种特质——
Lucifer’s Hammer
《撒旦的锤子》
and
和
Footfall
《足降》
by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle,
拉里·尼文与杰里·波奈尔合著的
The Peace War
《和平战争》
by Vernor Vinge, and so on.
弗诺·文奇的作品等等。
1
1
When I say “engineerism”, I am not talking about Friedrich Hayek’s “engineering mentality” — the belief that society can be designed and optimized like a machine.
我说的”工程师主义”不同于弗里德里希·哈耶克的”工程思维”——即认为社会可以像机器般被设计和优化。
2
2
Nor am I referring to Evgeny Morozov’s “technological解决方案主义”, which is the idea that social problems can be fixed with technology. If I had to define what I call “engineerism” in succinct, simple terms, it would be something like: “The idea that if a technology
也不是指叶夫根尼·莫洛佐夫的”技术解决方案主义”——即认为技术能解决社会问题。如果要简明定义我所说的”工程师主义”，大致是：“只要某项技术
can
能够
be built, we
被建造出来，我们就
ought to
应该
build it.” Simply put, engineers like to
建造它。“简而言之，工程师喜欢
engineer
捣鼓
things, and they become disgruntled when society does not give them the resources to do this.
东西，当社会不提供资源时就会不满。
Of course, engineerism is not quite so simple in the real world. It involves a lot of thinking habits that come in handy in engineering — linear approximation, back-of-the-envelope calculations, and so on. And in America, it also involves a set of beliefs that have sort of accreted over the years — for example, a belief in the importance of nuclear power.
当然现实中工程师主义更复杂。它包含许多工程思维习惯——线性近似、粗略估算等。在美国还掺杂了多年积累的信念，比如对核能重要性的坚信。
I’ve had the concept of engineerism kicking around in my mind for many years, but in
工程师主义的概念在我脑海萦绕多年，但
Where Is My Flying Car?
《我的飞行汽车在哪里？》
I have found its perfect encapsulation — you might even say its Bible. Nowhere are both the value and the limitations of engineerism more perfectly on display than in this book.
完美诠释了这个概念——甚至可称其圣经。这本书将工程师主义的价值与局限展现得淋漓尽致。
Where Is My Flying Car?
《我的飞行汽车在哪里？》
occupies an interesting middle space between genres. Futurism is about predicting the future. Science fiction is about (among other things) speculating on possible futures. And history of technology explains the past.
占据着独特的文体交叉地带。未来主义预测未来，科幻小说畅想可能未来，技术史解读过去。
Where Is My Flying Car?
《我的飞行汽车在哪里？》
has bits of all three of these, but fundamentally it’s a book of
兼具三者特点，但本质上是本
retrofuturism
复古未来主义
— it’s about the technologies we thought we would get but didn’t, and why we didn’t, and how we could get them now.
著作——探讨那些我们以为会出现却未实现的技术，其失败原因，以及现在如何实现。
The main technology Hall talks about is, unsurprisingly, flying cars. The other three are cold fusion, nanotechnology (Hall’s
霍尔讨论的主要技术自然是飞行汽车。另外三项是冷聚变、纳米技术（霍尔
own area of research
的研究领域
), and nuclear (fission) power. Hall argues that a combination of overregulation, scientific groupthink, bad funding mechanisms, and cultural aversion prevented us from achieving all four of these.
）和核裂变能源。霍尔认为过度监管、科学群体思维、糟糕的资助机制和文化抵触共同阻碍了这四项技术的实现。
The Galileo Fallacy
伽利略谬误
Wait…cold fusion? Is that even real?? Well, not as far as we know, no. In 1989, two top chemists reported that they had managed to get much more heat out of a nuclear experiment than chemistry would be able to produce. The chemists thought that they had discovered a way to produce nuclear fusion without injecting huge amounts of energy — smashing ions together at insanely high speed, blasting them with a laser, etc. If it worked, cold fusion would be an incredible energy source.
等等…冷聚变？这真的存在吗？据我们所知并不存在。1989年两位顶尖化学家报告称，他们在核实验中获得了远超化学能的热量。他们认为发现了无需注入巨量能量就能实现核聚变的方法——比如让离子超高速碰撞或用激光轰击。若可行，冷聚变将是惊人能源。
So naturally, a lot of people tried to follow up on cold fusion. A wave of
自然很多人跟进研究。初期
initial replication efforts
复制实验
mostly failed (though some people claimed to find the effect). But there have been plenty more efforts, including:
大多失败（尽管有人声称发现了效应）。但后续仍有大量尝试，包括：
A
1990年代
Japanese government project
日本政府项目
in the 1990s, with funding of around $20 million
耗资约2000万美元
A
1990年代
project by Toyota
丰田项目
in the 1990s, with around $18 million in funding
投入约1800万美元
A project by
2000年代
the Electric Power Research Institute
电力研究院项目
in the 2000s, with around $10 million in funding
耗资约1000万美元
A
2010年代
project by Google
谷歌项目
in the 2010s, with $10 million of funding
投入1000万美元
None of these efforts have reliably reproduced the effect that the two chemists claimed in 1989. A few of the researchers found some strange anomalies and possible new physical effects, but nothing even remotely similar t
这些尝试都未能稳定复现1989年两位化学家宣称的效应。少数研究者发现异常现象和可能的新物理效应，但与…