OBSERVING THE SPACE OF THE MIND

　　觀測心中的太空

　　作者：Alan Wallace

　　Parallels in Astronomy

　　天文學的比對

　　For thousands of years, people have been fascinated by the night sky and observed celestial phenomena very carefully, but with the unaided eye, only a few thousand stars can be seen. Everything else remained hidden in the “subconscious” of deep space, beyond the scope of empirical research and therefore confined to the domain of metaphysics until 1609, when Galileo heard of the telescope invented by a Flemish spectacle maker, Hans Lipperhey, and swiftly constructed one for himself. His fi rst attempt produced an eight-power telescope, which he later increased to twenty-power by grinding his own lenses, and he used his new instruments for observing the heavens in ways never before attempted. The next year he published his findings in a book, The Starry Messenger, in which he reported not only his observations of the moons of Jupiter but also his discovery that the Milky Way consists of a vast collection of stars that had never been seen before. In this way, the depths of the physical universe previously concealed from human consciousness began to be explored.

　　幾千年以來，人們一直爲夜空所吸引，對天體各種現象做仔細的觀察，只不過，沒有任何工具的幫助，裸眼能看到的不過幾千顆星星。其他的則深深隱藏在太空的“潛意識”裏，爲實驗型研究無法察覺而只能停留于形而上學的層面，直到1609年這種情況才發生變化，此時，伽利略(Galileo)聽說一位佛萊芒鏡片商——漢斯. 立博西(Hans Lipperhey)發明了望遠鏡，他很快找到他爲自己做了一臺。開始是8倍的，但他很快自己打磨鏡片，做了一臺20倍的，從此開始了前所未有的太空觀測。第二年，他出版了一本書《星辰信使》，書中他不僅報告了他對木星衛星的觀察，而且解釋了銀河系中實際有很多以前從未被發現的星體。就這樣，人們開始了對從未探索過的宇宙縱深處開始了新的探索。

　　The science of astronomy has continuously progressed since Galileo”s time, but it was more than 300 years before scientists discovered galaxies beyond the Milky Way. As a result of a series of observations in 1923–1924, the American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble, using the newly completed 100-inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson, established beyond doubt that the fuzzy “nebulae” seen earlier with less powerful telescopes were not part of our galaxy, as had been thought, but galaxies themselves, outside the Milky Way. Hubble announced his discovery in 1924, and five years later, together with another American astronomer, Milton Humason, he formulated the empirical Redshift Distance Law of galaxies, or “Hubble”s law,” which states that the greater the distance between any two galaxies, the greater their relative speed of separation. This influenced the formulation of the big bang theory by George Gamow in 1948, for which the discovery of cosmic background radiation in 1965 provided empirical support.

　　自伽利略之後天文學持續不斷的進步，但直到300年以後才發現了銀河系之外的星系。美國天文學家哈勃(Edwin Powell Hubble)采用安裝在威爾遜山上最新完成的100寸虎克望遠鏡，在1923-1924年期間做了一系列的觀測，結果表明，以前采用較低倍數望遠鏡所看到的星雲，不是通常大家認爲的銀河系的一部分，而本身就是銀河系之外的星系。

　　1924年哈勃公布了他的發現。5年以後，同另一位美國天文學家米爾頓.胡馬森(Milton Humason)合作，發現了星系的紅移距離定律，也稱哈勃定律，即兩個星系的距離越遠，他們分離開的速度越快。這個發現對喬治.加莫的宇宙大爆炸理論産生了深遠的影響，而天體背景輻射的發現爲大爆炸理論提供了支持。

　　Some of the most recent probes into deep space, made with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2003–2004, have unveiled the most detailed portrait of the visible universe ever achieved by humankind. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, a million-second-long photo exposure taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth, reveals the first galaxies to emerge from the so-called “dark ages,” the time shortly after the big bang when the fi rst stars reheated the cold, dark universe. The telescope was directed to a region of space in the constellation Fornax, of which ground-based telescopic images appear mostly empty. But in this long exposure from the orbiting Hubble telescope, with photons from the very faintest objects in space arriving at a trickle of one photon per minute, scientists were able to acquire a “deep” core sample of the universe, cutting across billions of light-years. By peering into a patch of sky just one-tenth the diameter of the full moon, sci…

《觀測心中的太空 Observing The Space Of The Mind》全文未完，請進入下頁繼續閱讀…