OBSERVING THE SPACE OF THE MIND

　　观测心中的太空

　　作者：Alan Wallace

　　Parallels in Astronomy

　　天文学的比对

　　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.

　　几千年以来，人们一直为夜空所吸引，对天体各种现象做仔细的观察，只不过，没有任何工具的帮助，裸眼能看到的不过几千颗星星。其他的则深深隐藏在太空的“潜意识”里，为实验型研究无法察觉而只能停留于形而上学的层面，直到1609年这种情况才发生变化，此时，伽利略(Galileo)听说一位佛莱芒镜片商——汉斯. 立博西(Hans Lipperhey)发明了望远镜，他很快找到他为自己做了一台。开始是8倍的，但他很快自己打磨镜片，做了一台20倍的，从此开始了前所未有的太空观测。第二年，他出版了一本书《星辰信使》，书中他不仅报告了他对木星卫星的观察，而且解释了银河系中实际有很多以前从未被发现的星体。就这样，人们开始了对从未探索过的宇宙纵深处开始了新的探索。

　　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.

　　自伽利略之后天文学持续不断的进步，但直到300年以后才发现了银河系之外的星系。美国天文学家哈勃(Edwin Powell Hubble)采用安装在威尔逊山上最新完成的100寸虎克望远镜，在1923-1924年期间做了一系列的观测，结果表明，以前采用较低倍数望远镜所看到的星云，不是通常大家认为的银河系的一部分，而本身就是银河系之外的星系。

　　1924年哈勃公布了他的发现。5年以后，同另一位美国天文学家米尔顿.胡马森(Milton Humason)合作，发现了星系的红移距离定律，也称哈勃定律，即两个星系的距离越远，他们分离开的速度越快。这个发现对乔治.加莫的宇宙大爆炸理论产生了深远的影响，而天体背景辐射的发现为大爆炸理论提供了支持。

　　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…

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