托福閱讀材料之宇宙大爆炸

　　This is the most,definitely not one of, marvelous piece of news I have heard this year!!!With respect to some fundamental and ultimate questions,such as where we are from or why we are what we are now,the discovery is just too essential to be ignored，both physically and philosophically in every measure.According to the Daoism and Buddhism,every being in the earthy world exists in a somewhat uniform way,and the latest breakthrough may lend credibility to such a perception,which may purvey some kind of bedrock for future final unification of the relativity theory and the quantum mechanics—the two most sophisticated theories ever in the annals of physics.

　　【宇宙大爆炸正文】

　　If imagining the big bang makes your head ache, what happened an instant later might make it explode. Cosmologists think the just-born universe—a hot, dense soup of matter and energy—went through a burst of expansion faster than the speed of light. Like a magical balloon, the cosmos doubled its size 60 times in a span of 10-32 seconds. This phase, known as inflation, ended well before the universe was even a second old.

　　【素材解讀】

　　本段勾勒了宇宙大爆炸瞬間的一些場(chǎng)景，比如宇宙剛開始時(shí)就像一團(tuán)密度極大地能量物質(zhì)熱湯(a hot, dense soup of matter and energy)，然后在10-32秒的時(shí)間內(nèi)膨脹為原來的60倍。

　　Now, 13.7 billion years later, cosmologists have detected what they say is the first direct evidence of this inflation—one of the biggest discoveries in the field in 20 years. From studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—the leftover radiation from the big bang—they have spotted traces of gravitational waves—undulations in the fabric of space and time—that rippled through the universe in that infinitesimally short epoch following its birth. The imprint of these gravitational waves upon the CMB matches what theorists had predicted for decades. The findings, announced this morning at a scientific presentation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, also show that gravity—at the smallest scale—follows the rules of quantum mechanics, similar to other forces such as electromagnetism.

　　137億年的今天宇宙學(xué)家終于第一次觀察到直接的證據(jù)來證明宇宙“暴漲”理論，可謂意義重大。cosmic microwave background (CMB)宇宙背景輻射——大爆炸的極短時(shí)間內(nèi)充盈宇宙間(ripple through the universe in that infinitesimally short epoch)，但是很快湮滅，只剩下微量殘留。科學(xué)家探測(cè)到了CMB的間接映像引力波的存在，進(jìn)而更近一步證明大爆炸的存在。這個(gè)突破證明了宏觀力引力符合量子力學(xué)的原理，進(jìn)而為相對(duì)論和量子力學(xué)的終極融合帶來了一絲曙光。

　　“This is an astounding result,” says Alan Guth, a cosmologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and one of the original proponents of inflation. Guth—who was not involved in the work being highlighted today—says the researchers showed him a draft paper a week ago, after swearing him to secrecy. “The observations are at a very high level of significance,” he says. Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford University in California who developed one of the most theoretically successful models of inflation, agrees: “If these results are right, inflationary theory has passed its most difficult test ever.”

　　本段引用了一些科學(xué)家對(duì)這個(gè)發(fā)現(xiàn)的評(píng)價(jià)。首先是來自于麻省理工學(xué)院的艾倫•古思(大爆炸理論早期提出者之一)和來自于斯坦福大學(xué)的安德瑞•林德均給與了極高的評(píng)價(jià)。