Although everyone calls it the Big Bang, many bookscaution us not to think of it as an explosion in theconventional sense. It was, rather, a vast, suddenexpansion on a whopping scale. So what caused it?

虽然人人都称其为大爆炸，但许多书上都提醒我们，不要把它看做是普通意义上的爆炸，而是一次范围和规模都极其大的突然爆炸。那么，它的原因是什么?

One notion is that perhaps the singularity was therelic of an earlier, collapsed universe—that we'rejust one of an eternal cycle of expanding andcollapsing universes, like the bladder on an oxygenmachine. Others attribute the Big Bang to what they call "a false vacuum" or "a scalar field" or"vacuum energy"—some quality or thing, at any rate, that introduced a measure ofinstability into the nothingness that was. It seems impossible that you could get somethingfrom nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evidentproof that you can.

有人认为，那个奇点也许是早年业已毁灭的宇宙的残余--我们的宇宙只是一系列宇宙中的一个。这些宇宙周而复始，不停地扩大和毁灭，就像一台制氧机上的气囊。有的人把大爆炸归因于所谓的"伪真空"，或"标量场"，或"真空能"--反正是某种物质或东西，将一定量的不稳定性带进了当时的不存在。从不存在获得某种存在，这似乎不大可能，但过去什么也不存在，现在有了个宇宙，事实证明这显然是可能的。

It may be that our universe is merely part of many larger universes, some in differentdimensions, and that Big Bangs are going on all the time all over the place. Or it may be thatspace and time had some other forms altogether before the Big Bang—forms too alien for us toimagine—and that the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase, where the universewent from a form we can't understand to one we almost can. “These are very close to religiousquestions,” Dr. Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford, told the New York Times in 2001.

情况也许是，我们的宇宙只是众多更大的、大小不等的宇宙的部分，大爆炸到处不停地发生。要不然也许是，在那次大爆炸之前，时间和空间具有某种完全不同的形式--那些形式我们非常不熟悉，因此无法想像--大爆炸代表某个过渡阶段，宇宙从一种我们无法理解的形式过渡到一种我们几乎可以理解的形式。"这与宗教问题很相似。"斯坦福大学的宇宙学家安德烈·林德博士2001年对《纽约时报》的记者说。