TED英文演说-寻找暗物质——以及我们目前所发现的中英文演讲稿.docx

第 第 PAGE 1 页 The search for dark matter -- and what weve found so far 00:10 Do you ever think about what would happen if the world were a little bit different? How your life would be different if you were born 5,000 years from now instead of today? How history would be different if the continents were at different latitudes or how life in the Solar system would have developed if the Sun were 10 percent larger. 00:32 Well, playing with these kinds of possibilities is what I get to do for a living but with the entire universe. I make model universes in a computer. Digital universes that have different starting points and are made of different amounts of different kinds of material. And then I compare these universes to our own to see what it is made of and how it evolved. 01:00 This process of testing models with measurements of the sky has taught us a huge amount about our universe so far. One of the strangest things we have learned is that most of the material in the universe is made of something entirely different than you and me. But without it, the universe as we know it wouldnt exist. Everything we can see with telescopes makes up just about 15 percent of the total mass in the universe. Everything else, 85 percent of it, doesnt emit or absorb light. We cant see it with our eyes, we cant detect it with radio waves or microwaves or any other kind of light. But we know it is there because of its influence on what we can see. 01:58 Its a little bit like, if you wanted to map the surface of our planet and everything on it using this picture of the Earth from space at night. You get some clues from where the light is, but theres a lot that you cant see, everything from people to mountain ranges. And you have to infer what is there from these limited clues. We call this unseen stuff dark matter. 02:27 Now, a lot of people have heard of dark matter, but even if you have heard of it, it probably seems abstract, far away, probably even irrelevant. Well, the intere