萬物簡史 第16期:如何營造一個宇宙(8)

The Big Bang theory isn't about the bang itself butabout what happened after the bang. Not long after,mind you. By doing a lot of math and watchingcarefully what goes on in particle accelerators,scientists believe they can look back to 10-43secondsafter the moment of creation, when the universewas still so small that you would have needed amicroscope to find it. We mustn't swoon over everyextraordinary number that comes before us, but itis perhaps worth latching on to one from time totime just to be reminded of their ungraspable andamazing breadth. Thus 10-43is 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001, orone 10 million trillion trillion trillionths of a second.

大爆炸理論并不是關于爆炸本身，而是關于爆炸以后發(fā)生的事。注意，是爆炸以后不久。科學家們做了大量計算，仔細觀察粒子加速器里的情況，然后認為，他們可以回顧爆炸發(fā)生10^-43秒之后的情況，當時宇宙仍然很小，要用顯微鏡才看得見。對于每個出現在我們面前的非同尋常的數字，我們無須把自己搞得頭昏腦漲，但有時候也許不妨理解一個，只是為了不忘其難以掌握、令人驚奇的程度。于是，10^-43秒就是0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1秒，或者是一千億億億億分之一秒。

Most of what we know, or believe we know, about the early moments of the universe is thanksto an idea called inflation theory first propounded in 1979 by a junior particle physicist, thenat Stanford, now at MIT, named Alan Guth. He was thirty-two years old and, by his ownadmission, had never done anything much before. He would probably never have had his greattheory except that he happened to attend a lecture on the Big Bang given by none other thanRobert Dicke. The lecture inspired Guth to take an interest in cosmology, and in particular inthe birth of the universe.

我們知道的或認為知道的有關宇宙初期的大部分情況，都要歸功于一位年輕的粒子物理學家于1979年首先提出的膨脹理論。他的名字叫艾倫·古思，他當時在斯坦福大學工作，現在任職于麻省理工學院。他當時32歲，自己承認以前從沒有作出過很大的成績。要是他沒有恰好去聽那個關于大爆炸的講座的話，很可能永遠也提不出那個偉大的理論。開那個講座的不是別人，正是羅伯特·迪克。講座使古思對宇宙學，尤其是對宇宙的形成產生了興趣。