萬物簡史 第39期:埃文斯牧師的宇宙(8)

Supernovae are significant to us in one otherdecidedly central way. Without them we wouldn't behere. You will recall the cosmological conundrumwith which we ended the first chapter—that the BigBang created lots of light gases but no heavyelements. Those came later, but for a very long timenobody could figure out how they came later.

超新星還有一方面對我們來說是絕對重要的。要是沒有了超新星，我們就不會來到這個世界上。你會想得起來，第一章快結(jié)束的時候，我們談到宇宙之謎--大爆炸產(chǎn)生了許多輕的氣體，但沒有創(chuàng)造重的元素。重元素是后來才有的，但在很長時間里，誰也搞不清它們后來是怎么產(chǎn)生的。

The problem was that you needed something really hot—hotter even than the middle of thehottest stars—to forge carbon and iron and the other elements without which we would bedistressingly immaterial. Supernovae provided the explanation, and it was an Englishcosmologist almost as singular in manner as Fritz Zwicky who figured it out.

問題是，你需要有某種溫度確實很高的東西--比溫度最高的恒星中央的溫度還要高--來鍛造碳、鐵和其他元素;要是沒有這些元素，我們就令人苦惱地不會存在。超新星提供了解釋。這個解釋是一位幾乎像弗里茨•茲威基一樣行為古怪的英國宇宙學(xué)家作出的。

He was a Yorkshireman named Fred Hoyle. Hoyle, who died in 2001, was described in anobituary in Nature as a "cosmologist and controversialist" and both of those he most certainlywas. He was, according to Nature 's obituary, "embroiled in controversy for most of his life"and "put his name to much rubbish." He claimed, for instance, and without evidence, that theNatural History Museum's treasured fossil of an Archaeopteryx was a forgery along the lines ofthe Piltdown hoax, causing much exasperation to the museum's paleontologists, who had tospend days fielding phone calls from journalists from all over the world.

他是約克郡人，名叫弗雷德·霍伊爾?；粢翣査烙?001年，在《自然》雜志的悼文里被描寫成一位"宇宙學(xué)家和好辯論的人"，二者他都受之無愧?！蹲匀弧冯s志的悼文說，他"在一生的大部分時間里都卷入了爭論"，并"使自己名聲掃地"。比如，他聲稱，而且是毫無根據(jù)地聲稱，倫敦自然史博物館里珍藏的那件始祖鳥化石是假的，與皮爾當(dāng)人頭蓋骨的騙局如出一轍，這使得博物館的古生物學(xué)家們非常惱火。他們不得不花了幾天工夫來回答記者們從世界各地打來的電話。

He also believed that Earth was not only seeded by life from space but also by many of itsdiseases, such as influenza and bubonic plague, and suggested at one point that humansevolved projecting noses with the nostrils underneath as a way of keeping cosmic pathogensfrom falling into them.

他還認(rèn)為，地球不僅從空間接受了生命的種子，而且接受了它的許多疾病，比如感冒和腺鼠疫。他有一次還提出，人類在進(jìn)化過程中有了突出的鼻子和朝下的鼻孔，就是為了阻止宇宙病原菌掉進(jìn)去。