If Alan enjoyed Back to Methuselah, it would also have been because Shaw dramatised his theory of the Life Force,

如果说艾伦很喜欢《千岁人》，那就是因为萧伯纳在戏剧里表现了他的思想，生命有其自身的力量。

Which raised the same questions as the 'spirit'.

这又引起了灵魂的问题。

One of Shaw's characters said 'Unless this withered thing religion, and this dry thing science, come alive in our hands, alive and intensely interesting, we may just as well go out and dig the garden until it is time to dig our graves.'

萧伯纳笔下的角色说：抛开那枯萎的宗教和乏味的科学吧，掌控自己的生命，我们可以尽情地在花园中嬉戏，直至时间让我们进入墓园。

This was Alan's problem in 1933, although he could not accept Shaw's easy solution.

这是1933年艾伦遇到的问题，但他不能接受萧伯纳的轻易结论。

Bernard Shaw had no compunction about rewriting science if it did not agree with his ideas; determinism had to go, if it conflicted with a Life Force.

对萧伯纳来说，如果科学不符合他的想法，他就会毫无顾忌地改写科学。

What damns Darwinian Natural Selection as a creed is that it takes hope out of evolution, and substitutes a paralysing fatalism which is utterly discouraging.

达尔文的自然选择，作为一个纲领，让我们从进化论中看到一种希望，取代令人沮丧的宿命论。

As Butler put it, it 'banishes Mind from the universe.'

正如勃特勒所说，心灵与整个宇宙有别。

The generation that felt nothing but exultant relief when it was delivered from the tyranny of an Almighty Busybody by a soulless Determinism has nearly passed away, leaving a vacuum which Nature abhors.

这一代人，欣喜地觉得自己被从全能的裁决者那里拯救出来了。

Science, for Shaw, had to be a Life Force, of which the super-intelligent Oracle of A.D.3000 could say 'Our physicists deal with it. Our mathematicians express its measurements in algebraic equations.'

为了这个目的，生命必须要有一种力量，对这种力量，公元3000年的超级智能可以说，我们的物理学家解出了它，我们的数学家在方程中表示了它。

But for Alan, science had to be true, rather than comforting.

但对艾伦来说，科学是一种事实，而不是一种自慰。

His Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik had arrived in October 1932, but perhaps Alan had put off tackling it until the summer, when he also obtained books on quantum mechanics by Schr?dinger and Heisenberg.

数学家兼物理学家约翰.冯.诺伊曼对生命的力量这种话题没说什么，但他的《量子力学的数学基础》1932年10月已经到了艾伦手里，艾伦大概直到夏天才读它，这时他还收到了薛定谔和海森堡的关于量子论的书。

On 16 October 1933 he wrote:

1933年十月他写道：