The Big Bang theory isn't about the bang itself butabout what happened after the bang. Not long after,mind you. By doing a lot of math and watchingcarefully what goes on in particle accelerators,scientists believe they can look back to 10-43secondsafter the moment of creation, when the universewas still so small that you would have needed amicroscope to find it. We mustn't swoon over everyextraordinary number that comes before us, but itis perhaps worth latching on to one from time totime just to be reminded of their ungraspable andamazing breadth. Thus 10-43is 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001, orone 10 million trillion trillion trillionths of a second.

大爆炸理论并不是关于爆炸本身，而是关于爆炸以后发生的事。注意，是爆炸以后不久。科学家们做了大量计算，仔细观察粒子加速器里的情况，然后认为，他们可以回顾爆炸发生10^-43秒之后的情况，当时宇宙仍然很小，要用显微镜才看得见。对于每个出现在我们面前的非同寻常的数字，我们无须把自己搞得头昏脑涨，但有时候也许不妨理解一个，只是为了不忘其难以掌握、令人惊奇的程度。于是，10^-43秒就是0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1秒，或者是一千亿亿亿亿分之一秒。

Most of what we know, or believe we know, about the early moments of the universe is thanksto an idea called inflation theory first propounded in 1979 by a junior particle physicist, thenat Stanford, now at MIT, named Alan Guth. He was thirty-two years old and, by his ownadmission, had never done anything much before. He would probably never have had his greattheory except that he happened to attend a lecture on the Big Bang given by none other thanRobert Dicke. The lecture inspired Guth to take an interest in cosmology, and in particular inthe birth of the universe.

我们知道的或认为知道的有关宇宙初期的大部分情况，都要归功于一位年轻的粒子物理学家于1979年首先提出的膨胀理论。他的名字叫艾伦·古思，他当时在斯坦福大学工作，现在任职于麻省理工学院。他当时32岁，自己承认以前从没有作出过很大的成绩。要是他没有恰好去听那个关于大爆炸的讲座的话，很可能永远也提不出那个伟大的理论。开那个讲座的不是别人，正是罗伯特·迪克。讲座使古思对宇宙学，尤其是对宇宙的形成产生了兴趣。