COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY IN THE FUTURE
按照穆尔定律，芯片制造商大约每18个月就会把挤在指甲壳
那么大的硅片里的晶体管数量增加一倍。但是物理学定律认
为，这种成倍增长的速度不会永远持续下去。最终，晶体管
会变得非常小，小到晶体管的组件将只有几个分子那么大。
在这样小的距离里，起作用的将是古怪的量子定律，电子会
从一个地方跳到另外一个地方而不穿过这两个地方之间的空
间。就像破漏的消防水管中的水，这时电子会越过原子粗细
的导线和绝缘层，从而产生致命的短路。
寻找硅替代物已成为一场运动。以下是科学家正在探索的一
些理论上的选择方案：
光子计算机: 这种计算机使用激光束替代电子。目前已发明
了一种光学晶体管，可是光学组件仍然非常庞大而且笨拙。
DNA计算机: 其原理是把绞成两股的分子当成一种生物计算机
磁带使用（不同的是计算机使用0和1编码，而DNA使用ATCG四
个核酸编码）。这种方法在处理大批量数字方面很有希望。
因此，大型银行和机构有朝一日也许会使用它。然而，DNA计
算机也显得笨拙。因为这种计算机是由一堆装着有机液体的
试管组成，不大可能在不久的将来替换便携计算机。
分子计算机和点计算机: 这两种计算机分别使用单个的分子
和单个的电子代替硅晶体管。但是这两种方法都面临着很大
的技术困难，比如原子导线和绝缘层就很难批量生产。目前
还不存在切实可行的样机。
量子计算机: 最有望从脱颖而出的黑马是量子计算机，人们
有时也称其为"终极计算机"。其设计思想是把一束激光或者
电波照射到一些精心排列的像陀螺一般旋转的原子核上。当
光或者波从这些原子上反弹时，它会改变其中一些原子核的
旋转方向。分析这些旋转发生了什么改变就能够完成复杂的
计算任务。这些计算机机异常敏感，哪怕是最小的干扰--比
如一束从旁边经过的宇宙射线--也会改变机器内计算原子的
方向，从而导致错误的结果。目前，量子计算机只能利用大
约5个原子做最简单的计算。要想做任何有意义的工作都必
须使用数百万个原子。
显然，所有这些新设计都还不成熟。大多数仍处于计划阶段，
即使是那些有了工作样机的设计也还太粗糙，无法与硅计算
机的便利性和有效性竞争。
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The Fringe Benefits of Failure,
and the Importance of Imagination
J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter
book series, delivers her Commencement Address,
“The Fringe Benefits of Failure,and the Importance of
Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard
Alumni Association.
【J.K. Rowling】
Joanne "Jo" Rowling OBE (born 31 July 1965), who writes
under the pen name J. K. Rowling, is a British writer
and author of the Harry Potter fantasy series, the idea
for which was conceived whilst on a train trip from
Manchester to London in 1990. The Potter books have
gained worldwide attention, won multiple awards, and
sold nearly 400 million copies.
Aside from writing the Potter novels, Rowling is equally
famous for her "rags to riches" life story, in which she
progressed from living on welfare to multi-millionaire
status within five years. The 2008 Sunday Times Rich List
estimated Rowling's fortune at ￡560 million ($1.1 billion),
ranking her as the 12th richest woman in Britain.
Forbes ranked Rowling as the 48th most powerful celebrity
of 2007,and Time magazine named her as a runner-up
for its 2007 Person of the Year, noting the social, moral,
and political inspiration she has given her fandom.
She has become a notable philanthropist, supporting such
charities as Comic Relief, One Parent Families and the
Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain.
[Background]
Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling and Anne Rowling
(née Volant) on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire,
England, 10 miles (16.1 km) northeast of Bristol.
Her sister Dianne (Di) was born at their home on 28 June
1967 when Rowling was 23 months old.The family moved to
the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four.
She attended St Michael's Primary School,a school founded
almost 200 years ago by famed abolitionist William
Wilberforce[15] and education reformer Hannah More. Her
elderly headmaster at St. Michael's, Alfred Dunn, was
claimed as the inspiration for the Harry Potter character
Albus Dumbledore.
As a child, Rowling enjoyed writing fantasy stories, which
she often read to her sister. "I can still remember me
telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole
and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it,"
she recalls, "Certainly the first story I ever wrote down
(when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called Rabbit.
He got the measles and was visited by his friends,
including a giant bee called Miss Bee."
At the age of nine, Rowling moved to the Gloucestershire
village of Tutshill, close to Chepstow, South Wales.When
she was a young teenager, her great aunt, who Rowling said
"taught classics and approved of a thirst for knowledge,
even of a questionable kind", gave her a very old copy of
Jessica Mitford's autobiography, Hons and Rebels.
Mitford became Rowling's heroine, and Rowling subsequently
read all of her books.
She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College.
Rowling has said of her adolescence, "Hermione is loosely
based on me. She's a caricature of me when I was eleven,
which I'm not particularly proud of." Sean Harris, her best
friend in the Upper Sixth owned a turquoise Ford Anglia,
which she says inspired the one in her books. "Ron Weasley
isn't a living portrait of Sean, but he really is very
Sean-ish."[21] Of her musical tastes of the time, she said
"My favourite group in the world is The Smiths. And when I
was going through a punky phase, it was The Clash."
Rowling read for a BA in French and Classics at the
University of Exeter, which she says was a "bit of a shock"
as she "was expecting to be amongst lots of similar people–
thinking radical thoughts." Once she made friends with "some
like-minded people" she says she began to enjoy herself.
With a year of study in Paris, Rowling moved to London to
work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty
International.
In 1990, while she was on a four-hour-delayed train trip
from Manchester to London, the idea for a story of a young
boy attending a school of wizardry "came fully formed" into
her mind. "I really don't know where the idea came from",
she told the Boston Globe, "It started with Harry, then all
these characters and situations came flooding into my head."
When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began
to write immediately.
However, in December of that year, Rowling’s mother
succumbed to a ten-year battle with multiple sclerosis.
Rowling commented, "I was writing Harry Potter at the moment
my mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter."
Rowling said this death heavily affected her writing and
that she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in
the first book, because she knew about how it felt.
Rowling then moved to Porto, Portugal to teach English as a
foreign language.[19] While there, on 16 October 1992, she
married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes. Their
one child, Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes (named after Jessica
Mitford), was born on 27 July 1993 in Portugal.
They separated in November 1993.In December 1994, Rowling
and her daughter moved to be near her sister in Edinburgh,
Scotland.During this period Rowling was diagnosed with
clinical depression, and contemplated suicide.It was the
feeling of her illness which brought her the idea of
Dementors, soulless creatures featured in Harry Potter.
Unemployed and living on state benefits, Rowling completed
her first novel in many cafés (e.g. Nicolson's Café and
Elephant House Café), whenever she could get Jessica to fall
asleep. In a 2001 BBC interview, Rowling denied the rumour
that she wrote in local cafés to escape from her unheated
flat, remarking, "I am not stupid enough to rent an unheated
flat in Edinburgh in midwinter. It had heating." Instead,
as she stated on the American TV program A&E Biography,
one of the reasons she wrote in cafés was because taking her
baby out for a walk was the best way to make her fall asleep.
J.K.Rowling speaking at Harvard PART 1■> | 第二部分PART 2■> | 第三部分PART 3
J.K.Rowling,哈利波特系列丛书的作者,6月18日为哈佛大学
毕业生做了题目为: <<失败的好处和想象力的重要>>的演讲
President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation
and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty,
proud parents, and, above all, graduates.
The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’
Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour,
but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve experienced at
the thought of giving this commencement address have
made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I
have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red
banners and fool myself into believing I am at the
world’s best-educated Harry Potter convention.
Delivering a commencement address is a great
responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind
back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker
that day was the distinguished British philosopher
Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has
helped me enormously in writing this one, because it
turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said.
This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without
any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to
abandon promising careers in business, law or politics
for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the
‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve still come out ahead of Baroness
Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards
personal improvement.
Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I
ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I
wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important
lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired
between that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day
when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic
success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits
of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is
sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the
crucial importance of imagination.
These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but
please bear with me.
Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation,
is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old
that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking
an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself,
and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever,
was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came
from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been
to college, took the view that my overactive imagination
was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a
mortgage, or secure a pension.
They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree;
I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was
reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up
to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car
rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched
German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.
J.K.Rowling speaking at Harvard PART 2■> | 第三部分PART 3
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying
Classics; they might well have found out for the first time
on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think
they would have been hard put to name one less useful than
Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an
executive bathroom.
I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do
not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an
expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in
the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take
the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I
cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never
experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I
have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it
is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and
stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty
humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your
own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride
yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty,
but failure. At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of
motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in
the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at
lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that,
for years, had been the measure of success in my life and
that of my peers.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young,
gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or
heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated
anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for
a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence
of unruffled privilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard
suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure.
You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a
desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might
not be too far from the average person’s idea of success,
so high have you already flown academically.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what
constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give
you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to
say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after
my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale.
An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was
jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in
modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents
had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come
to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest
failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure
is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no
idea that there was going to be what the press has since
represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea
how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light
at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply
because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential.
I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than
what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing
the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at
anything else, I might never have found the determination to
succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was
set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised,
and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I
adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so
rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt
my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in
life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing
at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might
as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by
default.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained
by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about
myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered
that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had
suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value
was truly above rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from
setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your
ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or
the strength of your relationships, until both have been
tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all
that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me
than any qualification I ever earned.
Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my
21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing
that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement.
Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you
will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the
two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’
s total control, and the humility to know that will enable
you to survive its vicissitudes.
You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance
of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding
my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the
value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to
value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not
only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is
not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation.
In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity,
it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans
whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded
Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently
wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one
of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write
stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early
20s by working in the research department at Amnesty
International’s headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters
smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were
risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was
happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had
disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate
families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims
and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten,
eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of
kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who
had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile,
because they had the temerity to think independently of their
government. Visitors to our office included those who had
come to give information, or to try and find out what had
happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man
no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill
after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled
uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the
brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I
was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job
of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards,
and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took
my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future
happiness.
And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an
empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed
door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never
heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out
her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the
young man sitting with her. She had just given him the
news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against
his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and
executed.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded
how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a
democratically elected government, where legal
representation and a public trial were the rights of
everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind
will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain
power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares,
about some of the things I saw, heard and read.
And yet I also learned more about human goodness at
Amnesty International than I had ever known before.
Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been
tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf
of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to
collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners.
Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security
are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people
they do not know, and will never meet. My small
participation in that process was one of the most humbling
and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn
and understand, without having experienced. They can think
themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves
into other people’s places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional
magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an
ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to
understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all.
They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their
own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel
to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to
hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their
minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them
personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way,
except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares
than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a
form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors.
I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They
are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable
real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright
evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics
corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of
something I could not then define, was this, written by the
Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change
outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand
times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our
inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that
we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
J.K.Rowling speaking at Harvard PART 3■> | 第一部分PART 1 > | 第二部分PART 2 > | 第三部分PART 3
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely
to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your
capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and
received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities.
Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of
you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The
way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the
pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact
way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your
burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your
voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to
identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless;
if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives
of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not
only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but
thousands and millions of people whose reality you have
helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to
change the world, we carry all the power we need inside
ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is
something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I
sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are
my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able
to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough
not to sue me when I’ve used their names for Death Eaters.
At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our
shared experience of a time that could never come again, and,
of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic
evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us
ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar
friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember
not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca,
another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the
Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search
of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it
is, is what matters.I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.
■> | 第一部分PART 1■> | 第二部分PART 2■> | 第三部分PART 3
125 ANNIVERSARY OF WASEDA UNIVERSITY,2007
早稻田大学125周年校庆
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