Twenty-five centuries, ten thinkers, one map二十五个世纪，十位思想者，一张图
The first five lived between roughly 600 and 300 BCE — the so-called Axial Age. The second five lived between 1809 and now. Both clusters arrived at the same five planes; the second cluster, with better instruments, gave its answers in math instead of metaphor.前五位生于大约公元前 600 到 300 年——所谓"轴心时代"。后五位生于 1809 至今。两组人得出的， 是同样的五个位面；只是后一组工具更好，于是用数学代替了隐喻。
Ten thinkers, in order十位思想者，按时序
Author of the Dao De Jing. The shortest book of all-time philosophy, and the one whose central claim — that the Way that can be named is not the eternal Way — anticipates Gödel, anticipates Heisenberg, and anticipates every later argument that some structures cannot be self-described.《道德经》作者。哲学史上最短的一部经典，其核心宣言——可道之道非常道——预示了哥德尔、海森堡，以及一切关于某些结构无法自描述的后世论证。
Founder of the Pythagorean school. The claim that 'all is number' is the seed of every subsequent mathematical physics. Music, geometry, and ethics shared one substrate in his school: ratio.毕达哥拉斯学派创始人。『万物皆数』是其后一切数理物理学之种子。在他的学派中，音乐、几何与伦理共享同一基底：比例。
Founder of Buddhism. The Four Noble Truths are the first known formalization of an algorithm for inner state regulation: state the problem, identify its cause, prove it can be ended, and provide the procedure that ends it.佛教创始人。四圣谛是已知最早的内在状态调节算法的形式化：陈述问题，识别原因，证明可终止，并给出能终止它的程序。
Founder of the Confucian tradition. The five virtues — Rén, Yì, Lǐ, Zhì, Xìn — are not a moral score sheet but a coordinate system for navigating roles. The Analects is the user manual.儒家奠基者。五常——仁、义、礼、智、信——不是道德记分卡，而是用以在各种角色中导航的坐标系。《论语》是其使用手册。
Founder of formal logic, of biology as a discipline, and of the four-cause analysis (material, formal, efficient, final). His prime mover argument is the earliest sustained attempt to give the source plane its own seat at the philosophical table.形式逻辑、作为学科的生物学，以及四因说（质料、形式、动力、目的）的创立者。『不动的推动者』论证是为本源位面争得哲学席位的最早系统性尝试。
Discovered natural selection — a special case of the recursive procedure Laozi had described in cosmological language two and a half millennia earlier. Could not, in his lifetime, see that the rule generalized to languages, firms, and minds.发现自然选择——老子两千五百年前以宇宙学语言所述递归程序的一个特例。终其一生未能看清此规则在语言、企业与心智中同样适用。
Austrian economist. The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945) is the foundational paper for why distributed coordination outperforms central planning on any sufficiently complex domain — economic or otherwise.奥地利经济学家。《知识在社会中的运用》（1945）是分布式协调在任何足够复杂的领域——经济或其他——优于中央计划之根本论文。
American economist. Founder of monetarism. Showed empirically and theoretically that the supply of money is the variable that decides whether a society's economic operating system runs cleanly or seizes.美国经济学家，货币主义奠基人。以经验与理论同时表明：货币供给是决定一个社会经济操作系统平稳运转或卡死的变量。
British mathematician. The Turing machine, the Turing test, and the breaking of Enigma. The single individual most responsible for making 'cognition is computation' a falsifiable working hypothesis instead of a metaphor.英国数学家。图灵机、图灵测试、破译 Enigma。一人之力，把『认知即计算』从隐喻变为可证伪的工作假说。
American theoretical physicist. The 1995 introduction of M-theory unified the five competing string theories into one eleven-dimensional structure — the most concrete candidate to date for a single mathematical description of reality.美国理论物理学家。1995 年提出 M 理论，把五种相互竞争的弦论统一为一个十一维结构——迄今为止关于『现实的统一数学描述』最具体的候选。