托福阅读材料：宇宙大爆炸

　　【宇宙大爆炸之背景提示】

　　This is the most,definitely not one of, marvelous piece of news I haveheard this year!!!With respect to some fundamental and ultimate questions,suchas where we are from or why we are what we are now,the discovery is just tooessential to be ignored，both physically and philosophically in everymeasure.According to the Daoism and Buddhism,every being in the earthy worldexists in a somewhat uniform way,and the latest breakthrough may lendcredibility to such a perception,which may purvey some kind of bedrock forfuture final unification of the relativity theory and the quantum mechanics—thetwo most sophisticated theories ever in the annals of physics.

　　【宇宙大爆炸正文】

　　If imagining the big bang makes your head ache, what happened an instantlater might make it explode. Cosmologists think the just-born universe—a hot,dense soup of matter and energy—went through a burst of expansion faster thanthe speed of light. Like a magical balloon, the cosmos doubled its size 60 timesin a span of 10-32 seconds. This phase, known as inflation, ended well beforethe universe was even a second old.

　　【素材解读】

　　本段勾勒了宇宙大爆炸瞬间的一些场景，比如宇宙刚开始时就像一团密度极大地能量物质热汤(a hot, dense soup of matter andenergy)，然后在10-32秒的时间内膨胀为原来的60倍。

　　Now, 13.7 billion years later, cosmologists have detected what they say isthe first direct evidence of this inflation—one of the biggest discoveries inthe field in 20 years. From studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—theleftover radiation from the big bang—they have spotted traces of gravitationalwaves—undulations in the fabric of space and time—that rippled through theuniverse in that infinitesimally short epoch following its birth. The imprint ofthese gravitational waves upon the CMB matches what theorists had predicted fordecades. The findings, announced this morning at a scientific presentation atthe Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts,also show that gravity—at the smallest scale—follows the rules of quantummechanics, similar to other forces such as electromagnetism.

　　137亿年的今天宇宙学家终于第一次观察到直接的证据来证明宇宙“暴涨”理论，可谓意义重大。cosmic microwave background(CMB)宇宙背景辐射——大爆炸的极短时间内充盈宇宙间(ripple through the universe in that infinitesimallyshortepoch)，但是很快湮灭，只剩下微量残留。科学家探测到了CMB的间接映像引力波的存在，进而更近一步证明大爆炸的存在。这个突破证明了宏观力引力符合量子力学的原理，进而为相对论和量子力学的终极融合带来了一丝曙光。

　　“This is an astounding result,” says Alan Guth, a cosmologist atMassachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and one of the originalproponents of inflation. Guth—who was not involved in the work being highlightedtoday—says the researchers showed him a draft paper a week ago, after swearinghim to secrecy. “The observations are at a very high level of significance,” hesays. Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford University in California whodeveloped one of the most theoretically successful models of inflation, agrees:“If these results are right, inflationary theory has passed its most difficulttest ever.”

　　本段引用了一些科学家对这个发现的评价。首先是来自于麻省理工学院的艾伦?古思(大爆炸理论早期提出者之一)和来自于斯坦福大学的安德瑞?林德均给与了极高的评价。