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Almost at once the Bogdanov paper excited debate among physicists as to whether it was twaddle, a work of genius, or a hoax. "Scientifically, it's clearly more or less complete nonsense," Columbia University physicist Peter Woit told the New York Times, "but these days that doesn't much distinguish it from a lot of the rest of the literature."
波格丹諾夫理論幾乎立即在物理學家中間引起爭論：它到底是胡說八道，一項天才的成就，還是一個騙局？“從科學的角度來看，顯而易見，它多少是徹頭徹尾的胡說八道。”哥倫比亞大學的物理學家彼得·沃伊特對《紐約時報》記者說，“不過，近來，它跟許多別的文獻沒有多大區別。”
Karl Popper, whom Steven Weinberg has called "the dean of modern philosophers of science," once suggested that there may not be an ultimate theory for physics—that, rather, every explanation may require a further explanation, producing "an infinite chain of more and more fundamental principles." A rival possibility is that such knowledge may simply be beyond us. "So far, fortunately," writes Weinberg in Dreams of a Final Theory, "we do not seem to be coming to the end of our intellectual resources."
卡爾·波普爾被斯蒂芬·溫伯格稱之為“現代科學哲學家的泰斗”。有一次，他提出，物理學很可能沒有一種終極理論──每一種解釋都需要進一步的解釋，形成“永無窮盡的一連串越來越基本的原理”。與之相對的可能性是，這種知識也許是我們完全無法理解的。“幸虧，迄今為止，”溫伯格在《終極理論之夢》中寫道，“我們的理智資源似乎尚未耗盡。”
Almost certainly this is an area that will see further developments of thought, and almost certainly these thoughts will again be beyond most of us.
幾乎可以肯定的是，這個領域將出現更多的見解；幾乎同樣可以肯定的是，這些見解將是我們大多數人所無法理解的。
While physicists in the middle decades of the twentieth-century were looking perplexedly into the world of the very small, astronomers were finding no less arresting an incompleteness of understanding in the universe at large.
正當20世紀中葉的物理學家在迷惑不解地觀測小世界的時候，天文學家發現，同樣引人注目的是，對大宇宙的理解也是不完整的。
When we last met Edwin Hubble, he had determined that nearly all the galaxies in our field of view are flying away from us, and that the speed and distance of this retreat are neatly proportional: the farther away the galaxy, the faster it is moving.
上次談到，埃德溫·哈勃已經確認，我們視野里的幾乎所有星系都在離我們遠去，這種退行的速度和距離是成正比的：星系離得越遠，運動的速度越快。
