So in 1781, an English composer, technologist and astronomer called William Herschel noticed an object on the sky that didn't quite move the way the rest of the stars did. And Herschel's recognition that something was different, that something wasn't quite right, was the discovery of a planet, the planet Uranus, a name that has entertained countless generations of children, but a planet that overnight doubled the size of our known solar system. Just last month, NASA announced the discovery of 517 new planets in orbit around nearby stars, almost doubling overnight the number of planets we know about within our galaxy. So astronomy is constantly being transformed by this capacity to collect data, and with data almost doubling every year, within the next two decades, me may even reach the point for the first time in history where we've discovered the majority of the galaxies within the universe.
1781 年,一位英國作家、 工程師兼天文學家 名叫威廉•赫歇爾, 在浩瀚的夜空中觀測到一個天體, 其運行方式與其他恒星大相徑庭。 赫歇爾覺得這個天體不同尋常, 有些不太對勁, 事實上他發現的是一顆行星, 也就是我們熟知的天王星。 天王星這個名字 讓一代又一代年輕人興趣盎然, 然而,這顆高懸於天際的行星 一經發現便讓人類已知的 太陽系範圍整整擴大了一倍。 就在上個月,美國太空總署 (NASA) 宣佈其又發現了 517 顆環繞近地恒星 運行的行星, 幾乎在一夜間使銀河系中 已知的行星數量翻了一倍。 人類收集的資料資訊 為天文學的不斷進步 注入了源源不斷的動力, 而這些資料資訊幾乎 以每年翻一倍的速度增長, 未來二十年內,人類甚至可以 首次實現有史以來的一個夢想: 探索浩瀚宇宙中 的大部分星系。
But as we enter this era of big data, what we're beginning to find is there's a difference between more data being just better and more data being different, capable of changing the questions we want to ask, and this difference is not about how much data we collect, it's whether those data open new windows into our universe, whether they change the way we view the sky. So what is the next window into our universe? What is the next chapter for astronomy? Well, I'm going to show you some of the tools and the technologies that we're going to develop over the next decade, and how these technologies, together with the smart use of data, may once again transform astronomy by opening up a window into our universe, the window of time.
但是,人類開闢的是一個大資料資訊的時代, 我們開始探究的是 資料資訊越多越好 與資料資訊越多差別越大, 兩者之間有何差異, 這足以改變我們想問的一些問題, 這個差異並不在於我們收集多少資料資訊, 而是,那些資料資訊是否可以 為人類開啟一扇通往深邃宇宙的窗戶, 那些資料資訊是否有助於 改變人類對觀測天空的方式。 下一扇通往宇宙的窗戶會有何奧秘呢? 人類將如何譜寫天文學的下一個篇章? 好,我會向諸位介紹一下 未來十年內人類將開發的一些工具與技術, 這些先進技術,連同人類 在運用資料資訊上展現的聰明才智, 將再一次開啟一扇通往宇宙的窗戶 使天文學發生革命性的變化, 時間之窗。
Why time? Well, time is about origins, and it's about evolution. The origins of our solar system, how our solar system came into being, is it unusual or special in any way? About the evolution of our universe. Why our universe is continuing to expand, and what is this mysterious dark energy that drives that expansion?
為什麼是時間?好,時間與起源 和進化息息相關。 太陽系的起源、 太陽系是如何形成的、 有什麼不同尋常或獨特之處嗎? 關於宇宙的演化。 為什麼宇宙處於不斷的膨脹中? 促使宇宙膨脹的 神秘暗能量是什麼呢?
But first, I want to show you how technology is going to change the way we view the sky. So imagine if you were sitting in the mountains of northern Chile looking out to the west towards the Pacific Ocean a few hours before sunrise. This is the view of the night sky that you would see, and it's a beautiful view, with the Milky Way just peeking out over the horizon. but it's also a static view, and in many ways, this is the way we think of our universe: eternal and unchanging. But the universe is anything but static. It constantly changes on timescales of seconds to billions of years. Galaxies merge, they collide at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. Stars are born, they die, they explode in these extravagant displays. In fact, if we could go back to our tranquil skies above Chile, and we allow time to move forward to see how the sky might change over the next year, the pulsations that you see are supernovae, the final remnants of a dying star exploding, brightening and then fading from view, each one of these supernovae five billion times the brightness of our sun, so we can see them to great distances but only for a short amount of time. Ten supernova per second explode somewhere in our universe. If we could hear it, it would be popping like a bag of popcorn. Now, if we fade out the supernovae, it's not just brightness that changes. Our sky is in constant motion. This swarm of objects you see streaming across the sky are asteroids as they orbit our sun, and it's these changes and the motion and it's the dynamics of the system that allow us to build our models for our universe, to predict its future and to explain its past.
首先,我要向諸位介紹科學技術 將有望改變人類對觀測天空的方式。 不妨設想一下,如果你在 智利北部山區 仰望西天, 面向太平洋方向, 就在日出前幾個小時。 這便是你將親眼目睹的夜空, 景色美麗動人, 銀河懸掛於天際。 但眼前是一幅靜止的美景, 而很多時候這也正是 我們腦海中勾勒出的宇宙: 永恆不滅且一成不變。 但宇宙絕不是靜止的。 宇宙處於永恆的變化中, 變化時間各不相同 有短短幾秒,也有幾十億年。 不同的星系 在以幾十萬英里的時速融合、碰撞。 恒星不斷誕生,也不斷消亡, 這些絢麗多彩的畫面展示了恒星的爆炸。 事實上,如果可以回到 智利遙望寧靜的夜空, 我們讓時間長河向前流淌 一覽未來十年的天空, 會呈現出什麼模樣, 你會觀察到宇宙的脈動 正是超新星,恒星在消亡中留下的殘餘, 爆炸、發出耀眼的光芒, 然後逐漸消失在視野中, 任何一顆超新星 都比太陽亮上五十億倍, 因此,人類在相當遙遠的地方 就能發現它們的蹤跡 但其光芒轉瞬即逝。 宇宙中每一秒都會 有十顆超新星發生爆炸。 如果我們可以聽見爆炸聲, 會同一袋爆米花爆開的聲音一樣。 超新星的光芒逐漸暗淡, 這不只是亮度的變化。 天空處於永恆的運動之中。 你會看到大量天體源源不斷地掠過天空 這些是環繞太陽運行的小行星, 正是這些變化與運動 以及天體系統的動態變化 讓我們得以創建宇宙的模型, 便於我們解讀過去,展望未來。
But the telescopes we've used over the last decade are not designed to capture the data at this scale. The Hubble Space Telescope: for the last 25 years it's been producing some of the most detailed views of our distant universe, but if you tried to use the Hubble to create an image of the sky, it would take 13 million individual images, about 120 years to do this just once.
然而,過去十年裡,我們使用的望遠鏡 其設計初衷並非用於 收集如此大規模的資料資訊。 哈伯太空望遠鏡: 在過去二十五年內, 已為人類生成了部分宇宙深處 最生動具體的畫面, 不過,若要使用哈伯太空望遠鏡 去還原一幅天空全景圖, 則需要彙聚 1300 萬個獨立的景象, 即使一次也得歷時 120 年之久。
So this is driving us to new technologies and new telescopes, telescopes that can go faint to look at the distant universe but also telescopes that can go wide to capture the sky as rapidly as possible, telescopes like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or the LSST, possibly the most boring name ever for one of the most fascinating experiments in the history of astronomy, in fact proof, if you should need it, that you should never allow a scientist or an engineer to name anything, not even your children. (Laughter) We're building the LSST. We expect it to start taking data by the end of this decade. I'm going to show you how we think it's going to transform our views of the universe, because one image from the LSST is equivalent to 3,000 images from the Hubble Space Telescope, each image three and a half degrees on the sky, seven times the width of the full moon. Well, how do you capture an image at this scale? Well, you build the largest digital camera in history, using the same technology you find in the cameras in your cell phone or in the digital cameras you can buy in the High Street, but now at a scale that is five and a half feet across, about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, where one image is three billion pixels. So if you wanted to look at an image in its full resolution, just a single LSST image, it would take about 1,500 high-definition TV screens. And this camera will image the sky, taking a new picture every 20 seconds, constantly scanning the sky so every three nights, we'll get a completely new view of the skies above Chile. Over the mission lifetime of this telescope, it will detect 40 billion stars and galaxies, and that will be for the first time we'll have detected more objects in our universe than people on the Earth. Now, we can talk about this in terms of terabytes and petabytes and billions of objects, but a way to get a sense of the amount of data that will come off this camera is that it's like playing every TED Talk ever recorded simultaneously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 10 years. And to process this data means searching through all of those talks for every new idea and every new concept, looking at each part of the video to see how one frame may have changed from the next. And this is changing the way that we do science, changing the way that we do astronomy, to a place where software and algorithms have to mine through this data, where the software is as critical to the science as the telescopes and the cameras that we've built.
面對這一形勢,我們必須開發新技術 並建造全新的望遠鏡, 這些望遠鏡不僅觀測距離更遠, 讓人類深入宇宙腹地。 而且觀測視野更寬, 可迅速拍攝天空中的一舉一動, 像大口徑全景巡天望遠鏡之類的望遠鏡 又稱為 LSST。 縱觀天文學歷史, 在所有最有趣的科學實驗中 這個名稱算是最最無聊的, 事實上,你如果非得有個名稱, 那千萬別讓科學家或工程師來命名, 甚至不要讓他們為你的孩子起名字。(笑聲) LSST 工程已開工建設。 有望於2020年年底前開始收集資料資訊。 我將為諸位解讀一下我們的思維方式 這將轉變我們對宇宙的認識, 因為 LSST 拍攝的每個圖像 相當於哈伯太空望遠鏡拍攝的 3000 個圖像, LSST 的每個圖像覆蓋了天空中 3.5 度的區域, 相當於七個滿月的寬度。 如何拍攝這麼大的圖像呢? 那就得製造有史以來最大的數位相機, 採用的技術與你的手機鏡頭 或在大街上購買的數位相機 採用的技術完全相同, 而眼下這個數位相機的鏡頭 足足寬5.5英尺, 相當於一輛福斯金龜車的長度, 這個鏡頭拍攝的每個圖像 有30億個圖元。 因此,如果你想一睹 LSST 全解析度圖像的風采, 哪怕只是一個圖像, 也得用 1500 個高清電視螢幕。 這台相機將用於拍攝天空的全景, 每隔 20 秒鐘拍攝一張照片, 永不停息地掃描天空。 這樣只要三個夜晚, 我們就能掃描一次天空, 重新繪製一幅智利上空的天空全景圖。 這台望遠鏡會在其生命週期內 探測 400 億恒星與星系, 這也會是我們首次 能探索的宇宙天體數量 超過地球上的人口數。 目前,我們可以按 百萬位元組與十億位元組, 通過研究數十億個天體 來解讀宇宙, 但如果想要親身感受一下 這款相機收集的訊息量, 好比同時播放已錄製的每一個 TED 演講, 一天二十四小時, 一周七天不停地播放,可以長達連續十年。 若要處理這些資料資訊,則如同 在所有訪談節目中搜索 每一個全新的觀點與理念, 關注影片中的每個細節。 查看每一幀內容 有何變化。 我們正在開闢一個科學研究的新紀元, 顛覆天文學研究的傳統模式, 在全新的模式下人們 將運用軟體技術與演算法則 挖掘隱藏在資料資訊中的無窮奧秘, 屆時軟體技術對科學研究至關重要, 其重要性並不亞於這些 尚未問世的望遠鏡與相機。
Now, thousands of discoveries will come from this project, but I'm just going to tell you about two of the ideas about origins and evolution that may be transformed by our access to data at this scale.
目前,這個專案將為人類 開啟成千上萬的探索發現之門, 但我今天只向諸位講述 有關起源與進化的兩個理念 這兩個理念也會隨著人們 對大規模資料資訊的研究而不斷發展。
In the last five years, NASA has discovered over 1,000 planetary systems around nearby stars, but the systems we're finding aren't much like our own solar system, and one of the questions we face is is it just that we haven't been looking hard enough or is there something special or unusual about how our solar system formed? And if we want to answer that question, we have to know and understand the history of our solar system in detail, and it's the details that are crucial. So now, if we look back at the sky, at our asteroids that were streaming across the sky, these asteroids are like the debris of our solar system. The positions of the asteroids are like a fingerprint of an earlier time when the orbits of Neptune and Jupiter were much closer to the sun, and as these giant planets migrated through our solar system, they were scattering the asteroids in their wake. So studying the asteroids is like performing forensics, performing forensics on our solar system, but to do this, we need distance, and we get the distance from the motion, and we get the motion because of our access to time.
過去五年內,NASA 已在近地恒星 附近發現了 1000 多個行星系, 但我們力求探尋的這些行星系 並不十分類似於我們的太陽系。 我們面臨的一個問題是 究竟是人類對宇宙的觀測還不夠全面, 還是我們太陽系的起源 本來就與眾不同? 如果我們要解答這一問題, 就得深入瞭解 太陽系的前世與今生, 這些具體資訊十分重要。 因此,時下當我們仰望星空, 無數小行星掠過天際, 彷彿是太陽系中遺落的殘骸。 小行星所處的位置 就像海王星與木星早期運行軌道, 離太陽更近的時候在 宇宙中留下的指紋, 這些體積巨大的行星在太陽系中遷徙, 一路遺落不計其數的小行星。 因此,探究小行星就像 在進行法醫鑒定, 對整個太陽系的法醫鑒定。 但為此,我們需要距離, 通過天體的運行,可以得知距離, 而由於對時間掌握, 我們才瞭解了天體的運行。
So what does this tell us? Well, if you look at the little yellow asteroids flitting across the screen, these are the asteroids that are moving fastest, because they're closest to us, closest to Earth. These are the asteroids we may one day send spacecraft to, to mine them for minerals, but they're also the asteroids that may one day impact the Earth, like happened 60 million years ago with the extinction of the dinosaurs, or just at the beginning of the last century, when an asteroid wiped out almost 1,000 square miles of Siberian forest, or even just last year, as one burnt up over Russia, releasing the energy of a small nuclear bomb. So studying the forensics of our solar system doesn't just tell us about the past, it can also predict the future, including our future.
我們可以從中得到什麼啟示呢? 你是否注意到一些黃色小行星 匆匆掠過螢幕, 這些小行星的運行速度很快, 是因為它們距離地球最近。 有朝一日人類或許會派 太空船造訪這些行星 開發上面的礦產資源, 但這些小行星或許會在未來的某一天 撞擊地球, 就像 6000 萬年前的那次撞擊 造成了恐龍的滅絕, 也像上世紀初葉 一顆小行星徑直墜落於西伯利亞, 1000 平方英里的森林頓時化為烏有, 甚至就在去年,有一顆小行星 在俄羅斯上空的大氣層內燒毀, 釋放的能量相當於一個小型核彈。 因此,對太陽系進行法醫鑒定 不只能讓我們瞭解過去, 更可以展望未來,包括人類自身的未來。
Now when we get distance, we get to see the asteroids in their natural habitat, in orbit around the sun. So every point in this visualization that you can see is a real asteroid. Its orbit has been calculated from its motion across the sky. The colors reflect the composition of these asteroids, dry and stony in the center, water-rich and primitive towards the edge, water-rich asteroids which may have seeded the oceans and the seas that we find on our planet when they bombarded the Earth at an earlier time. Because the LSST will be able to go faint and not just wide, we will be able to see these asteroids far beyond the inner part of our solar system, to asteroids beyond the orbits of Neptune and Mars, to comets and asteroids that may exist almost a light year from our sun. And as we increase the detail of this picture, increasing the detail by factors of 10 to 100, we will be able to answer questions such as, is there evidence for planets outside the orbit of Neptune, to find Earth-impacting asteroids long before they're a danger, and to find out whether, maybe, our sun formed on its own or in a cluster of stars, and maybe it's this sun's stellar siblings that influenced the formation of our solar system, and maybe that's one of the reasons why solar systems like ours seem to be so rare.
眼下只要我們得知距離, 就能觀察到小行星以其自然的方式, 環繞太陽運行。 所以,諸位在這幅景象中 看到的每一個亮點 都是一顆真實的小行星。 憑藉這顆小行星在空中的運行狀況, 就能計算出其運行軌跡。 這些小行星的顏色顯示了其組成物質, 中心部分是乾燥的岩石, 而表面卻粗糙不平,富含水分, 含水量較高的小新星上可能會有 和地球上一模一樣的海洋, 地球上的海洋正是小行星 早年撞擊地球後留下的。 由於 LSST 不僅觀察視野更寬, 而且探測距離更遠。 我們將在遠離太陽系中心的區域 一窺這些小行星的身影, 觀察木星與火星軌道之外的小行星, 跟蹤距離太陽 幾乎一光年之遙的彗星與小行星。 我們會更加詳細地解讀這些照片 將解讀細節從 10 個提高到 100 個, 就能找到一些問題的答案,例如 是否有證據顯示木星軌道之外還存在行星, 在可能撞擊地球的小行星威脅地球之前很久 便鎖定它們的行蹤, 並解答太陽只有一個 還是宇宙中存在一大把這樣的恒星, 或許正是太陽的姊妹星 對太陽系的形成產生了巨大的影響, 或許這正是太陽系在宇宙中 如此罕見的原因之一。
Now, distance and changes in our universe — distance equates to time, as well as changes on the sky. Every foot of distance you look away, or every foot of distance an object is away, you're looking back about a billionth of a second in time, and this idea or this notion of looking back in time has revolutionized our ideas about the universe, not once but multiple times.
宇宙中的距離與變化, 距離等於時間, 以及天空中的變化。 你的目光每延伸一英尺 或某一個天體運行每一英尺, 其實在諸位眼睛中留下的景象 是之前十億分之一秒發生的事情, 眺望宇宙就是眺望過去的時光 這個觀點或概念讓我們 對宇宙的認識發生了革命性的變化, 這種變化不止一次,而是多次。
The first time was in 1929, when an astronomer called Edwin Hubble showed that the universe was expanding, leading to the ideas of the Big Bang. And the observations were simple: just 24 galaxies and a hand-drawn picture. But just the idea that the more distant a galaxy, the faster it was receding, was enough to give rise to modern cosmology.
第一次發生在 1929 年, 一位名叫愛德文·哈伯的天文學家 指出宇宙處在不斷的膨脹中, 形成了宇宙大爆炸觀點。 觀察結果非常簡單: 只有 24 個星系 和一張手工繪製的圖片。 但星系的距離越遠, 它遠離我們的速度就越快, 這一觀點足以促成現代宇宙學的誕生。
A second revolution happened 70 years later, when two groups of astronomers showed that the universe wasn't just expanding, it was accelerating, a surprise like throwing up a ball into the sky and finding out the higher that it gets, the faster it moves away. And they showed this by measuring the brightness of supernovae, and how the brightness of the supernovae got fainter with distance. And these observations were more complex. They required new technologies and new telescopes, because the supernovae were in galaxies that were 2,000 times more distant than the ones used by Hubble. And it took three years to find just 42 supernovae, because a supernova only explodes once every hundred years within a galaxy. Three years to find 42 supernovae by searching through tens of thousands of galaxies. And once they'd collected their data, this is what they found. Now, this may not look impressive, but this is what a revolution in physics looks like: a line predicting the brightness of a supernova 11 billion light years away, and a handful of points that don't quite fit that line.
第二次革命發生在 70 年後, 兩組天文學家指出 宇宙不僅在不斷地膨脹, 而且正在加速膨脹。 這個觀點令人驚訝, 好比將一個球拋到空中, 你會發現這個球離地面越高, 飛行的速度也越快。 他們展示研究結果的方法是 通過測量超新星的亮度, 和超新星的亮度 如何隨著距離增加而不斷減弱。 這些觀察結果更加複雜。 於是新技術與全新的望遠鏡呼之欲出, 由於超新星存在於一些星系中 而這些星系比哈伯望遠鏡 拍攝到的星系還要遠 2000 倍。 經過三年鍥而不捨的觀察, 只發現了 42 顆超新星, 由於一個星系中的超新星 幾百年中才爆炸一次。 整整三年才發現了 42 顆超新星, 搜索了成千上萬個星系。 收集了這些資料資訊, 這是他們發現的。 這一研究成果可能看上去不起眼, 但可以堪稱物理學上的一次革命: 這條直線預測距離地球 110 億光年之遙的超新星亮度, 一些小點與這條直線並不十分吻合。 細微的變化往往會催生重大結果。
Small changes give rise to big consequences. Small changes allow us to make discoveries, like the planet found by Herschel. Small changes turn our understanding of the universe on its head. So 42 supernovae, slightly too faint, meaning slightly further away, requiring that a universe must not just be expanding, but this expansion must be accelerating, revealing a component of our universe which we now call dark energy, a component that drives this expansion and makes up 68 percent of the energy budget of our universe today.
細微的變化讓我們實現突破,探索發現, 就像赫歇爾當年發現天王星一樣。 細微的變化顛覆了 我們對浩瀚宇宙的理解。 因此,42 顆超新星,十分昏暗, 可見其距離地球稍遠, 由此可推斷宇宙肯定不只是在膨脹, 而是在加速膨脹。 揭示了宇宙的一個組成部分 就是我們目前所稱的暗能量, 正是暗能量在加速宇宙的膨脹, 已知宇宙中的能量預計有68%為暗能量。
So what is the next revolution likely to be? Well, what is dark energy and why does it exist? Each of these lines shows a different model for what dark energy might be, showing the properties of dark energy. They all are consistent with the 42 points, but the ideas behind these lines are dramatically different. Some people think about a dark energy that changes with time, or whether the properties of the dark energy are different depending on where you look on the sky. Others make differences and changes to the physics at the sub-atomic level. Or, they look at large scales and change how gravity and general relativity work, or they say our universe is just one of many, part of this mysterious multiverse, but all of these ideas, all of these theories, amazing and admittedly some of them a little crazy, but all of them consistent with our 42 points.
下一次革命可能會發生在哪個領域? 暗能量是什麼,暗能量為什麼會存在? 每一條直線為我們展現了 一種不同的暗能量可能存在的模式 揭示了暗能量的各種屬性。 已發現的 42 個亮點完全符合這些屬性, 但隱藏在這些直線背後的理念 則截然不同。 有人設想暗能量 隨著時間的流逝而變化, 或是暗能量的屬性是否不同, 取決於你觀察天空時所處的地點。 其他人則在亞原子的層面 釐定物理學上的差異與變化。 或者,他們關注 重力與廣義相對論作用的規模與變化, 或他們覺得我們的宇宙只是 這個神秘莫測的多元宇宙中的一部分而已, 但是所有這些觀點、理論 非常不可思議,毋庸置疑 其中一些稍稍有些瘋狂, 但所有這些觀點與理論 都於我們發現的 42 個亮點相互印證。
So how can we hope to make sense of this over the next decade? Well, imagine if I gave you a pair of dice, and I said you wanted to see whether those dice were loaded or fair. One roll of the dice would tell you very little, but the more times you rolled them, the more data you collected, the more confident you would become, not just whether they're loaded or fair, but by how much, and in what way. It took three years to find just 42 supernovae because the telescopes that we built could only survey a small part of the sky. With the LSST, we get a completely new view of the skies above Chile every three nights. In its first night of operation, it will find 10 times the number of supernovae used in the discovery of dark energy. This will increase by 1,000 within the first four months: 1.5 million supernovae by the end of its survey, each supernova a roll of the dice, each supernova testing which theories of dark energy are consistent, and which ones are not. And so, by combining these supernova data with other measures of cosmology, we'll progressively rule out the different ideas and theories of dark energy until hopefully at the end of this survey around 2030, we would expect to hopefully see a theory for our universe, a fundamental theory for the physics of our universe, to gradually emerge.
因此,我們如何在未來十年內 理解其中的奧秘? 設想一下,如果給你兩個骰子, 我問你如何知道這兩個骰子 是不是被人做了手腳。 只投一次骰子,你得不出什麼結論, 但多投幾次, 積攢起數據, 就會對自己更有信心, 不僅知道這些骰子 有沒有被人做過手腳, 而且還知道做了多少手腳, 而且怎麼做的。 我們歷時整整三年 才發現了 42 個超新星, 因為我們已建造的望遠鏡 只能探索天空中的很小一部分。 有了 LSST,每三個夜晚我們就可以觀察到 智利上空的一個全新景象。 觀測的第一個夜晚, 發現的超新星的數量, 就會是當初發現暗能量時 所用的超新星數量的整整十倍。 最初的四個月內的觀測數字將提升 1000: 這次觀察後會發現 150 萬顆超新星, 每一顆超新星就像投一次骰子 每一個超新星測試哪些暗能量理論吻合, 哪些不吻合。 所以,這些超新星資料資訊會 與宇宙學的其他措施相結合, 我們會逐步篩除 不同的暗能量觀點與理論, 此次觀察有望在 2030 年左右結束, 我們希望屆時發現 一種宇宙理論, 一種宇宙物理的基本理論 漸漸顯出雛形。
Now, in many ways, the questions that I posed are in reality the simplest of questions. We may not know the answers, but we at least know how to ask the questions. But if looking through tens of thousands of galaxies revealed 42 supernovae that turned our understanding of the universe on its head, when we're working with billions of galaxies, how many more times are we going to find 42 points that don't quite match what we expect? Like the planet found by Herschel or dark energy or quantum mechanics or general relativity, all ideas that came because the data didn't quite match what we expected. What's so exciting about the next decade of data in astronomy is, we don't even know how many answers are out there waiting, answers about our origins and our evolution. How many answers are out there that we don't even know the questions that we want to ask?
我在許多領域提出過一些問題 實際上都是最簡單的問題。 但答案至今無從知曉, 但我們至少知道該如何提問。 但是如果縱觀成千上萬個星系 結果只發現了 42 顆超新星, 足以轉變我們對茫茫宇宙的理解, 當我們專注於研究數十億星系, 我們費盡周折只發現了 42 個亮點, 這顯然不符合我們的期望值, 但這樣事倍功半的事情還會發生多少次呢? 就像赫歇爾發現天王星 或暗能量, 或量子力學或廣義相對論, 這些理論的產生,都是因為資訊 並不符合我們的期望, 天文學資訊的下一個十年 激動人心的一面正是 我們甚至不知道會有多少問題 等待著我們去解答, 這些解答關乎宇宙起源與演化。 還有多少解答已經擺在面前, 但我們甚至不知道 要問些什麼?
Thank you.
謝謝。
(Applause)
(掌聲)