萬物簡史 第13期:如何營造一個宇宙(5)

Unknown to them, just thirty miles away at PrincetonUniversity, a team of scientists led by Robert Dickewas working on how to find the very thing they weretrying so diligently to get rid of. The Princetonresearchers were pursuing an idea that had beensuggested in the 1940s by the Russian-bornastrophysicist George Gamow that if you looked deepenough into space you should find some cosmicbackground radiation left over from the Big Bang.

他們不知道，就在50公里以外的普林斯頓大學，一組以羅伯特·迪克為首的科學家正在設法尋找的，就是這兩位天文學家想要除去的東西。普林斯頓大學的研究人員正在研究20世紀40年代在蘇聯(lián)出生的天文物理學家喬治·伽莫夫提出的假設：要是你看到空間深處，你就會發(fā)現(xiàn)大爆炸殘留下來的某種宇宙背景輻射。

Gamow calculated that by the time it crossed the vastness of the cosmos, the radiationwould reach Earth in the form of microwaves. In a more recent paper he had even suggested aninstrument that might do the job: the Bell antenna at Holmdel. Unfortunately, neither Penziasand Wilson, nor any of the Princeton team, had read Gamow's paper.

伽莫夫估計，那種輻射穿過茫茫的宇宙以后，便會以微波的形式抵達地球。在新近發(fā)表的一篇論文中，他甚至提出可以用一種儀器達到這個目的，這種儀器就是霍爾姆德爾的貝爾天線。不幸的是，無論是彭齊亞斯和威爾遜，還是普林斯頓大學小組的任何專家，都沒有看過伽莫夫的論文。

The noise that Penzias and Wilson were hearing was, of course, the noise that Gamow hadpostulated. They had found the edge of the universe, or at least the visible part of it, 90billion trillion miles away. They were "seeing" the first photons—the most ancient light in theuniverse—though time and distance had converted them to microwaves, just as Gamow hadpredicted.

彭齊亞斯和威爾遜聽到的噪聲，正是伽莫夫所假設的。他們已經(jīng)找到了宇宙的邊緣，至少是宇宙150億光年以外的可見部分。他們在"觀望"第一批質(zhì)子--宇宙中最古老的光--果然不出伽莫夫所料，時間和距離已經(jīng)將其轉(zhuǎn)變成了微波。

In his book The Inflationary Universe , Alan Guth provides an analogy that helps to put thisfinding in perspective. If you think of peering into the depths of the universe as like lookingdown from the hundredth floor of the Empire State Building (with the hundredth floorrepresenting now and street level representing the moment of the Big Bang), at the time ofWilson and Penzias's discovery the most distant galaxies anyone had ever detected were onabout the sixtieth floor, and the most distant things—quasars—were on about the twentieth.Penzias and Wilson's finding pushed our acquaintance with the visible universe to within halfan inch of the sidewalk.

艾倫·古思在他的《不斷膨脹的宇宙》一書中提出一種類比，有利于擺正這一發(fā)現(xiàn)的位置。要是你把觀望宇宙深處比做是在美國紐約帝國大廈的100層上往下看(假設100層代表現(xiàn)在，街面代表大爆炸的時刻)，那么在彭齊亞斯和威爾遜發(fā)現(xiàn)那個現(xiàn)象的時候，已經(jīng)有人發(fā)現(xiàn)的最遠的星系是在大約60層，最遠的東西--類星體--是在大約20層。彭齊亞斯和威爾遜的發(fā)現(xiàn)，把我們對宇宙可見部分的認識在大廳的地板上推進了約1厘米。