萬物簡(jiǎn)史 第30期:走進(jìn)太陽系(8)

　　Now the first thing you are likely to realize is thatspace is extremely well named and ratherdismayingly uneventful. Our solar system may be theliveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visiblestuff in it—the Sun, the planets and their moons, thebillion or so tumbling rocks of the asteroid belt,comets, and other miscellaneous drifting detritus—fills less than a trillionth of the available space.

　　你可能首先意識(shí)到，空間這個(gè)名字起得極其恰當(dāng)，空間是個(gè)平淡無奇的地方。在幾萬億公里范圍內(nèi)，最充滿生氣的要算我們的太陽系，而所有可看得見的東西--太陽、行星及其衛(wèi)星、小行星帶的上億塊翻滾的巖石、彗星和別的各種飄浮的碎石--僅僅充滿不足現(xiàn)有空間的萬億分之一。

　　You also quickly realize that none of the maps you have ever seen of the solar system wereremotely drawn to scale. Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the otherat neighborly intervals—the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in manyillustrations—but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptunein reality isn't just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it's way beyond Jupiter—five times farther fromJupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 percent as much sunlight asJupiter.

　　你還很快意識(shí)到，你所見到的太陽系圖是根本不按比例制作的。在教室里的大多數(shù)圖上，行星們一顆挨著一顆，相距很近--在許多插圖里，外側(cè)巨星的影子實(shí)際上落在彼此身上--但是，為了把所有的行星畫在同一張紙上，這種騙術(shù)也是必不可少的。海王星其實(shí)不是在土星以外一點(diǎn)兒，而是在土星以外很遠(yuǎn)的地方--它離土星的距離比土星離我們的距離還要遠(yuǎn)5倍。它在外面那么遙遠(yuǎn)的地方，接受的陽光只有土星的3%。

　　Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solarsystem to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a reallylong sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close.

　　實(shí)際上，距離是那么遙遠(yuǎn)，無論如何不可能按比例來畫太陽系圖。即使你在教科書里增加許許多多折頁(yè)，或者使用長(zhǎng)得不得了的標(biāo)語紙，你也無法接近這個(gè)比例。

　　On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of apea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant(and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway). On the samescale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away. Even ifyou shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the period at the end of thissentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over thirty-five feetaway.

　　在一張成比例的太陽系圖上，如果將地球的直徑縮小到大約一粒豆子的直徑，土星便會(huì)在300多米以外，冥王星會(huì)在2.5公里外的遠(yuǎn)處(約為一個(gè)細(xì)菌的大小，因此你怎么也看不見它)。按照同樣的比例，離我們最近的恒星比鄰星會(huì)在1.6萬公里以外。即使你把一切都加以縮小，土星會(huì)像英文的句點(diǎn)那么小，冥王星不超過分子的個(gè)兒，那么冥王星依然在10多米以外。