If you look deep into the night sky, you see stars, and if you look further, you see more stars, and further, galaxies, and further, more galaxies. But if you keep looking further and further, eventually you see nothing for a long while, and then finally you see a faint, fading afterglow, and it's the afterglow of the Big Bang.
如果你望著深夜的天空, 你就會看到星星, 而且如果你看的更遠, 就能看到更多的星星, 更遠點,就能看到一些星系, 再遠點,更多星系。 但是如果你朝著更遠的地方看, 會有很長的一段時間, 你什麽也看不見。 最終你會看到一個模糊、褪色的餘暉, 這就是大爆炸後的餘暉。
Now, the Big Bang was an era in the early universe when everything we see in the night sky was condensed into an incredibly small, incredibly hot, incredibly roiling mass, and from it sprung everything we see.
大爆炸是宇宙初始的一個時代, 現在我們在夜空中看到的所有東西 都濃縮於一個不可思議小的、 極其熱的、不停翻滾的質體, 我們看到的所有東西,便是從這裡釋放出來的。
Now, we've mapped that afterglow with great precision, and when I say we, I mean people who aren't me. We've mapped the afterglow with spectacular precision, and one of the shocks about it is that it's almost completely uniform. Fourteen billion light years that way and 14 billion light years that way, it's the same temperature. Now it's been 14 billion years since that Big Bang, and so it's got faint and cold. It's now 2.7 degrees. But it's not exactly 2.7 degrees. It's only 2.7 degrees to about 10 parts in a million. Over here, it's a little hotter, and over there, it's a little cooler, and that's incredibly important to everyone in this room, because where it was a little hotter, there was a little more stuff, and where there was a little more stuff, we have galaxies and clusters of galaxies and superclusters and all the structure you see in the cosmos. And those small, little, inhomogeneities, 20 parts in a million, those were formed by quantum mechanical wiggles in that early universe that were stretched across the size of the entire cosmos.
我們已精確地勘測到了那片餘暉, 當我說「我們」的時候, 我指的是除我之外的人。 我們已經繪製了那些餘暉的地圖, 使用了驚人的精度, 令人驚訝的就是這些餘暉幾乎是完全相同的。 從那個方向140億光年之外 以及從那個方向140億光年之外, 有著相同的溫度。 從大爆炸開始算起, 如今已經有14億年。 所以它已開始變得模糊、變冷。 現在只有2.7度。 但並不恰好是2.7度。 僅僅只有百億分之十是2.7度。 在那裡,稍微熱一點; 在那裡,稍微冷一點。 這對在場的每一位都極其重要, 因為在稍微熱一點的地方, 那裡有更多的物體, 當那裡有更多的物體時, 我們就能觀測到星系、 星系團、超星系團, 以及你觀測到的所有宇宙結構。 這些小型的、少量的、不均勻的, 占了百億分之二十, 這些是由量子力學的產生的扭力形成的, 在宇宙的初期,它們被拉伸 穿過了整個宇宙的大小。 這是十分壯觀的,
That is spectacular, and that's not what they found on Monday; what they found on Monday is cooler. So here's what they found on Monday: Imagine you take a bell, and you whack the bell with a hammer. What happens? It rings. But if you wait, that ringing fades and fades and fades until you don't notice it anymore. Now, that early universe was incredibly dense, like a metal, way denser, and if you hit it, it would ring, but the thing ringing would be the structure of space-time itself, and the hammer would be quantum mechanics. What they found on Monday was evidence of the ringing of the space-time of the early universe, what we call gravitational waves from the fundamental era, and here's how they found it. Those waves have long since faded. If you go for a walk, you don't wiggle. Those gravitational waves in the structure of space are totally invisible for all practical purposes. But early on, when the universe was making that last afterglow, the gravitational waves put little twists in the structure of the light that we see. So by looking at the night sky deeper and deeper -- in fact, these guys spent three years on the South Pole looking straight up through the coldest, clearest, cleanest air they possibly could find looking deep into the night sky and studying that glow and looking for the faint twists which are the symbol, the signal, of gravitational waves, the ringing of the early universe. And on Monday, they announced that they had found it.
而且這並不是他們週一發現的, 他們週一的發現更加驚人。 這就是他們週一的發現: 想像你帶著一口鐘, 你用鐵錘猛擊這口鐘。 會發生什麽事?它會響。 但是如果你接著等,聲音就會減小, 減小並且減小, 直到你聽不見為止。 早期的宇宙密集的不可思議, 甚至比金屬還密集, 如果你撞擊它,它會產生聲音, 但是物體產生聲音就是 就是時空結構本身, 這時的鐵錘就是量子力學。 他們週一所發現的 就是早期宇宙時空產生的 響聲的證據, 我們叫做引力波, 來自一個基礎的時代, 現在我來解釋他們如何發現的。 這些波已消退很長的一段時間。 如果你出門散步, 你並不會擺來擺去。 這些在宇宙結構中的引力波 在實際用途中是完全感受不到的。 但是在早期的宇宙,當宇宙還在形成 最後的餘暉時, 引力波 在可見光的結構中產生了扭曲 所以透過對更遠以外夜晚天空的觀察, 事實上, 這些人在南極花了三年的時間, 透過了他們能找的最冷、最清楚、 最乾淨空氣進行直接觀察, 望著天空最深的地方並且進行研究 光暈以及尋找消退的扭曲, 這個信號就是引力波的標誌, 早起宇宙的響聲。 並且在週一,他們宣佈 他們已經找到了。
And the thing that's so spectacular about that to me is not just the ringing, though that is awesome. The thing that's totally amazing, the reason I'm on this stage, is because what that tells us is something deep about the early universe. It tells us that we and everything we see around us are basically one large bubble -- and this is the idea of inflation— one large bubble surrounded by something else. This isn't conclusive evidence for inflation, but anything that isn't inflation that explains this will look the same. This is a theory, an idea, that has been around for a while, and we never thought we we'd really see it. For good reasons, we thought we'd never see killer evidence, and this is killer evidence.
我對這件事感到震驚的原因 並不因為是這個響聲, 儘管這個已經很棒了。 這件事如此不可思議, 以致於讓我站在這裡的原因,在於 這個發現 告訴了我們早期宇宙深處的一些東西。 它告訴我們 我們現在身邊所看到的一切東西 其實是個極大的泡泡, 這就是宇宙暴漲的概念, 一個被其他東西所包圍的極大泡泡。 這並不是宇宙暴漲的決定性證據, 但其它解釋這情況卻非宇宙暴漲的東西 看起來就長這樣。 這是一個理論、一個想法, 已經存在了一段時間了, 我們從未覺得我們能觀察的到。 我們有充分的理由,認為永遠看不到 關鍵的證據,而這就是關鍵證據。
But the really crazy idea is that our bubble is just one bubble in a much larger, roiling pot of universal stuff. We're never going to see the stuff outside, but by going to the South Pole and spending three years looking at the detailed structure of the night sky, we can figure out that we're probably in a universe that looks kind of like that. And that amazes me.
但真正令人瘋狂的想法是, 我們的泡泡只是其中一個 存在於一個更大、攪動的宇宙體系中。 我們從未觀察到這之外的東西, 但是透過在南極花費了三年時間, 觀察著夜空結構的細節, 我們可以發現 我們可能生存在一個像這樣的宇宙。 這就是讓我覺得驚奇的地方。
Thanks a lot.
謝謝大家
(Applause)
(掌聲)