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What is at the center of the universe?
宇宙的中心是什么？
It's an essential question that humans have been wondering about for centuries.
这是个很重要的问题，几百年来，人们一直在探索。
But the journey toward an answer has been a strange one.
但这段探索之旅的结果却十分奇怪。
If you wanted to know the answer to this question in third century B.C.E. Greece, you might look up at the night sky and trust what you see, that's what Aristotle, THE guy to ask back then, did.
如果你想知道公元三世纪希腊人给出的答案，你就要问亚里士多德了，他的回答是仰望星空，相信自己的所见。
He thought that since we're on Earth, looking up, it must be the center, right?
他想：既然我们从地球向天上看，那么地球一定就是宇宙的中心，不是吗？
For him, the sphere of the world was made up of four elements: Earth, water, air, and fire.
他认为，宇宙是由四种元素组成的：土，水，空气和火。
These elements shifted around a nested set of solid crystalline spheres.
这些元素在一套嵌套的固体球核周围流动。
Each of the wandering stars, the planets, had their own crystal sphere.
每个浮于夜空的恒星和行星都有它们自己的球核。
The rest of the universe and all of its stars were on the last crystal sphere.
宇宙剩下的部分和所有星星在最后的球核上。
If you watch the sky change over time, you could see that this idea worked fine at explaining the motion you saw.
如果你观察天空随时间的变化，就可以发现这个理论很好得解释了你所看到的变化。
For centuries, this was central to how Europe and the Islamic world saw the universe.
几个世纪以来 ，它就是欧洲和伊斯兰世界的宇宙观核心。
But in 1543, a guy named Copernicus proposed a different model.
但是在1543年，一位名叫哥白尼的人提出了一个不同的模型。
He believed that the sun was at the center of the universe.
他认为太阳才是宇宙的中心。
This radically new idea was hard for a lot of people to accept.
这个十分激进的新思想让大多数人难以接受。
After all, Aristotle's ideas made sense with what they could see, and they were pretty flattering to humans.
毕竟亚里士多德的理论在人们眼中才符合事实，它对人类更有吸引力。
But a series of subsequent discoveries made the sun-centric model hard to ignore.
但是随后的一系列发现让日心说无法被忽视。
First, Johannes Kepler pointed out that orbits aren't perfect circles or spheres.
首先，约翰尼斯·开普勒指出行星运动的轨道并不是完美的圆弧或者球型。
Then, Galileo's telescope caught Jupiter's moons orbiting around Jupiter, totally ignoring Earth.
其次，伽利略的望远镜发现木星也有围绕自己的卫星，完全与地球无关。
And then, Newton proposed the theory of universal gravitation, demonstrating that all objects are pulling on each other.
接着牛顿提出了万有引力定律，说明所有的物体都互相吸引。
Eventually, we had to let go of the idea that we were at the center of the universe.
最终， 我们不得不放弃地球是宇宙中心的想法。
Shortly after Copernicus, in the 1580s, an Italian friar, Giordano Bruno, suggested the stars were suns that likely had their own planets and that the universe was infinite.
哥白尼死后不久，在十六世纪80年代，意大利修道士焦尔达诺·布鲁诺提出，太阳这样的恒星都有自己的卫星，宇宙是无限的。
This idea didn't go over well.
这个理论推广得并不好。
Bruno was burned at the stake for his radical suggestion.
布鲁诺因他的激进言论被烧死在刑柱上。
Centuries later, the philosopher Rene Descartes proposed that the universe was a series of whirlpools, which he called vortices, and that each star was at the center of a whirlpool.
几个世纪之后，哲学家勒奈·笛卡尔提出，宇宙是一系列的螺旋体，这些螺旋体被称为漩涡，每个恒星都位于漩涡的中心。
In time, we realized there were far more stars than Aristotle ever dreamed.
随着时间的推移， 我们发现星星的数量远多于亚里士多德所能想到的。
As astronomers like William Herschel got more and more advanced telescopes, it became clear that our sun is actually one of many stars inside the Milky Way.
由于威廉·赫歇尔这样的天文学家发明出了更加先进的望远镜，太阳实际是银河系诸多恒星之一这个事实变得清楚。
And those smudges we see in the night sky?
那些我们在黑夜里看见的印迹呢？
They're other galaxies, just as vast as our Milky Way home.
它们其实是其他星系，它们与我们的母星系银河一样庞大。
Maybe we're farther from the center than we ever realized.
我们离宇宙中心的距离可能要比想象中遥远多了。
In the 1920s, astronomers studying the nebula wanted to figure out how they were moving.
在20世纪20年代，研究星云的天文学家想弄明白它们的运动规律。
Based on the Doppler Effect, they expected to see blue shift for objects moving toward us, and red shift for ones moving away.
根据多普勒效应，他们预期向我们飞来的物体会呈现蓝移，飞走的物体呈现红移。
But all they saw was a red shift.
但所有观测到的现象都是红移。
Everything was moving away from us, fast.
所有星星都在快速远离我们。
This observation is one of the pieces of evidence for what we now call the Big Bang Theory.
这些观测结果构成了现在被我们称为大爆炸理论的证据。
According to this theory, all matter in the universe was once a singular, infinitely dense particle.
根据这一理论，宇宙中的所有物质最初都源于一个密度无限高的单一粒子。
In a sense, our piece of the universe was once at the center.
从某种意义上说，我们所在的这部分宇宙曾处在中心。
But this theory eliminates the whole idea of a center since there can't be a center to an infinite universe.
但这个理论排除了”宇宙中心”的想法，因为无限宇宙根本没法有中心。
The Big Bang wasn't just an explosion in space; it was an explosion of space.
大爆炸并不只是在空间的一次爆炸，而是空间本身的爆炸。
What each new discovery proves is that while our observations are limited, our ability to speculate and dream of what's out there isn't.
新的发现表明，虽然我们的探索有限，但我们探索和幻想更外层宇宙空间的能力是无限的。
What we think we know today can change tomorrow.
我们今天所认可的事实有可能很快就被改变。
As with many of the thinkers we just met, sometimes our wildest guesses lead to wonderful and humbling answers and propel us toward even more perplexing questions.
和我们刚刚看到的许多思想家一样，有些时候人类最狂野的想象可以引领我们找到奇妙或屈辱的答案，并指导我们向更加复杂的问题发出挑战。
来源：TED演说
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