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What leaps out from profound understanding of the fundamental laws of nature that we seem to have achieved, is that you get much more out than you put in.
根据我们似乎已经实现的对自然基本规律的深刻理解，我们得到的要比投入的多得多。
So nature manages to use fundamentally simple principles to power emergent complexity.
所以，大自然会使用本质上很简单的原则去衍生出新的复杂性。
It's striking when you look at it that the equations have this kind of generative power.
如果你看一下，就会发现方程的这种生成能力很令人惊讶。
That you start with simple building blocks that have very precisely determined properties, and like LEGO blocks, you can put them together to make chemistry and pharmaceuticals and Large Hadron Colliders; all these very complex engineering projects.
比如从简单的积木开始，这些积木有非常精确的决定性质，就像乐高积木一样，你可以把它们组合在一起，制造化学、制药和大型强子对撞机；所有非常复杂的工程项目。
You can reliably produce, because you know how the little parts work.
这种生产很靠谱，因为你知道小部件的工作原理。
By example, in the 19th century with Maxwell's synthesis of the laws of electricity and magnetism, physicists started to realize that what we perceive as light is deeply understood as a kind of disturbance in electric and magnetic fields.
例如，在19世纪，随着麦克斯韦对电和磁定律的综合，物理学家开始意识到，我们所感知的光被深深地理解为电场和磁场中的一种扰动。
That gave us a new concept of the possibilities of perception of light.
这给了我们一个新的感知光的可能性的概念。
Visual imagery is very important to our understanding of the world because humans are intensely visual creatures.
视觉意象对于我们理解世界是非常重要的，因为人类是强烈的视觉生物。
Depending on how you do the accounting, between 20 and 50% of our brain is devoted to processing visual information.
根据计算方式，我们大脑的20%到50%都是处理视觉信息的。
We have some very impressive capabilities in that direction.
我们在这方面有一些非常惊人的能力。
We face in interpreting the world, a very challenging problem that we're good at solving; we're so good at it that we don't consciously realize how difficult it is.
我们在解释世界的过程中面临着一个我们擅长解决的极具挑战性的问题；在这方面，我们非常擅长，以至于都忽略了它的难度。
That's the problem of taking the electromagnetic radiation, the light, that impinges on our retina, giving a two-dimensional image that's all scrambled, and interpreting that as a world of three-dimensional objects moving around in three-dimensional space.
那就是，利用电磁辐射，也就是光，照射到我们的视网膜上，给出一个完全被扰乱的二维图像，并将其视为在三维空间中移动的三维物体。
That's a very difficult, in fact, impossible mathematical problem.
这是一个非常困难的，事实上，不可能的数学问题。
But we have many sophisticated tricks and rules of thumb, plus a systematic, although unconscious, knowledge of projective geometry so that we can recognize that the same thing seen from different positions represents the same object.
但我们有许多复杂的技巧和经验法则，加上系统的、尽管是无意识的射影几何知识，就能认出从不同位置看到的东西代表的是同一个物体。
When they were made conscious, as geometric theorems and discoveries, astonishing achievements, that when Brunelleschi discovered the science of perspective in 1420, helped kick off the glorious episode of the Italian Renaissance, and has been a foundation of art ever since.
当布鲁内莱斯基在1420年发现透视科学时，人们意识到了这一点，就像几何定理和发现以及惊人的成就那样，它帮助拉开了意大利文艺复兴的辉煌篇章，并从此成为了艺术的基础。
And so, we can look at the record of what people have found beautiful, what they were hoping for in their understanding of the world, with what the remarkable understanding of the world we've achieved in recent years looks like,
因此，我们可以看一下人类发现美的记录，在理解世界的时候，他们在希望着什么，以及我们近年来对世界的非凡理解是什么样子的，
and we can therefore frame a meaningful discussion, and a meaningful question, a meaningful meditation on the issue of: Does the world embody beautiful ideas?
就可以提出一个有意义的讨论，一个有意义的问题，一个有意义的思考：世界是否呈现了美的概念？
