“我最敬畏两件事：头顶的星辰和心中的正义”，这是刻在康德墓碑上的墓志铭。很多年前，当我还是一个简单快乐的理工男的时候，我曾被这句话深深感动，还曾立志要把自己的一生奉献给“星辰”或“正义”中的一个。多年过去了，头上的“星辰”早就模糊得不见踪影，而心中除了鸡毛蒜皮或横流的物欲，还哪在乎半点“正义”的影子。
猴年春节大年初五的凌晨，从噩梦中惊醒。随手打开枕边的手机，一条新闻让我在床上坐起来：美国科学家成功探测到引力波，爱因斯坦的“广义相对论”被最后证实。
我被这条新闻震撼，它提醒我，这个世界上，依然有一些人，既有聪明的大脑，更有持久的坚持，他们将目光投向浩繁的星辰，超越凡世种种鸡毛蒜皮和柴米油盐。
为了把我自己的激动和震撼传播给英国范儿的读者，从凌晨3点到5点，我看了Youtube上几乎全部的相关报道，我把其中一个将“空间扭曲”和“引力波”讲得最通俗易懂的一个视频下载下来，上传到腾讯，分享给大家。为了便于大家理解，我用一个小时听写出了视频的英文字幕。由于时间仓促加上英文水平有限，如果里面有错误，还请大家谅解。
附录：视频字幕
Tremendously exciting news: gravitational waves have finally been detected. Here is a brief explanation.
Back in 1915, Albert Einstein gave the world his new theory of gravity, the General Theory of Relativity, which is based on the beautiful idea that gravity is nothing but warps in curves in the fabric of space-time.
Barely a year later, Einstein push this idea one vital step further. You see, he realised that if space is flexible enough to warp, then it should also be able to ripple to vibrate to undulate and that would mean that if something were to jostle the fabric of space-time, it should send out ripples the fabric of space and it’s those ripples that we now call gravitational waves.
Of course, the source of gravitational waves would not be my hand jostling space. Instead, it would be some highly energetic astrophysical processes like rapidly orbiting neutron stars and black holes that would send out a steady rumble of gravitational waves or at least this is what the theory says should happen.
And how do you test this idea? Well, the map shows that, as a gravitational wave rolls by, it will squeeze and stretch anything in its path.
To see it happening here for the earth. But, of course, this is highly exaggerated seeking see the effect. We do the calculation, you find that the amount of squeezing and stretching will be tiny a mere fraction of anatomic diameter and that makes it pretty difficult to detect.
But that is what the LIGO team has now achieved and they did it with two detectors, one in Louisiana and the other in Washington State. And then these detectors, what they do is they fire laser beams along to 4 km long evacuated tunnels and when the light recombines, it creates an iconic pattern. It’s known as interference pattern, but the only thing that you need to gasp is that were a gravitational wave to roll by. It would squeeze and stretch the arms of the detector and that would have a measurable impact on that interference pattern causing it to shift.
And it’s just that kind of shift in the interference pattern that the LIGO team has now observed that first direct detection of gravitational waves. And this is big, this will go down in the history of science as a pivotal moment and now just because it’s another spectacular confirmation of Einstein’s ideas ,which it is, but rather because for millennia we have expired the universe using waves of light.
This discovery marks the opening a new era in which we will explore the universe using waves of gravity.
联系客服
