1. 荷蘭人漢斯·李博斯（Hans Lippershey）于1608年發明了望遠鏡，但有傳聞說在此三年前，當一群孩子在眼鏡制造商店鋪里玩透鏡的時候，望遠鏡就已經發明了。那種事情在微軟游戲機XBOX出現之前時常發生。（意指現在的孩子的創造力都被電子游戲扼殺了。）2. Early telescopes sold like mad to merchants, who used them to spot approaching trade ships in hopes of beating out competitors. 2. 早期的望遠鏡賣給商人都賣瘋了，他們藉此辨認駛來的商船并希望擊敗競爭對手。
3. Telescopes gave rise to the first high-speed telecommunications networks: spyglasses that were used to relay semaphore signals from miles away. 3. 望遠鏡導致了第一個高速電信網絡的出現：一些小望遠鏡用來中轉數英里外的旗語信號。
4. Galileo was the first to turn the telescope skyward, leading to the discovery of Jupiter’s satellites and craters on the moon. Less cleverly, he also pointed his telescope at the sun, which may have triggered his later blindness. 4. 伽利略第一個將望遠鏡用于天文觀測，這導致了木星衛星和月球隕石坑的發現。但不夠聰明的是，他也將望遠鏡指向了太陽，這可能是他后來眼盲的誘因。
5. Ireland’s “Leviathan of Parsonstown,” a 40-ton reflecting telescope built by the Earl of Rosse in 1845, was the world’s largest for seven decades. But wet weather kept it shut down most of the time. 5. 愛爾蘭的“帕森鎮巨獸”，一個由羅斯伯爵于1845年建成的40噸重的反射式天文望遠鏡，是過去七十年間最大的望遠鏡。但當地潮濕的天氣讓它沒用過多少次。
6. Almost every major observatory since then has been built in the clear, thin air of a remote mountaintop. 6. 從那時起，幾乎每個大天文臺都建在遠離城市并且空氣清澈稀薄的山巔。
7. To deliver the 100-inch mirror for the Hooker Telescope on Mount Wilson in California, nearly 200 men with ropes guided a truck along a tortuous, eight-hour drive to the top. 7. 為運輸加利福尼亞威爾遜山直徑100英寸的胡克天文望遠鏡，近200人用繩索拽著卡車沿著曲折的山路走了8小時才到達山頂。
8. But it was worth it. The Hooker Telescope proved that other galaxies exist and that the universe is expanding. 8. 但這很值。胡克天文望遠鏡證實了河外星系的存在，以及宇宙正在膨脹。
9. Today, using an Internet-based telescope such as the Seeing in the Dark scope at New Mexico Skies, any amateur can command a robotic observatory while lounging at home. 9. 今天我們使用基于互聯網的天文望遠鏡，比如新墨西哥的“觀察黑暗”望遠鏡，每個成年人都可以待在家里遙控機器人來觀測太空。
10. Most professional astronomers now work that way too, operating telescopes remotely with computers and rarely looking through an eyepiece. 10. 現在許多職業天文學家也這么做，通過計算機遠程操作天文望遠鏡，他們很少直接通過目鏡觀測太空。
11. Long time coming: NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, seven years late and $2 billion over budget. 11. 劃時代的標志：NASA（美國航空航天局）于1990年發射了哈勃太空望遠鏡，7年后超出預算20億美元。
12. Hubble’s eight-foot light-collecting mirror had to be polished continuously for a year to an accuracy of 10 nanometers, about 1/10,000 the width of a human hair. 12. 哈勃望遠鏡的8英尺聚光鏡的磨制耗時一年，精度要求10納米，大約是頭發直徑的萬分之一。
13. Unfortunately, the contractors polished the mirror precisely wrong, off by a painful 2,200 nanometers. 13. 不幸的是，承包商把精度弄錯了，精度變成了令人心痛的2200納米。
14. Since the problem was fixed in 1993 by installing corrective lenses, Hubble has become the source of roughly 25 percent of all published astronomy research papers. 14. 這個問題1993通過安裝矯正鏡組得以解決。哈勃望遠鏡成為近四分之一天文學研究所發表論文的數據源頭。
15. Telescopes that pick up radio waves, not visible light, got their start in 1932 when engineer Karl Janskynoticed that the static plaguing his equipment varied on a daily schedule. His antenna was picking up celestial radio sources rotating in and out of view. 15. 望遠鏡收集的是無線電波而非可見光信號。這得益于1932年，工程師卡爾·簡斯基注意到他的儀器受靜電困擾，每天狀態都有所變化，這是因為儀器天線收集了可見和不可見的宇宙射電源信號。
16. In 1965 engineers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were also bugged by micro wave static, this time from every part of the sky. After eliminating poop from roosting pigeons as the cause, they realized they’d discovered the cosmic microwave background, the Big Bang’s afterglow. 16. 1965年工程師阿諾·彭齊亞斯（Arno Penzias）和羅伯特·威爾遜（Robert Wilson）也受到微波靜電的干擾，而且檢測到整個天空都有。在消除了噪聲干擾的因素后，他們意識到他們發現了宇宙微波背景輻射，這是宇宙大爆炸的余輝。
17. See for yourself: Tune an old analog TV to an empty channel. Much of that “snow” is from the cosmic microwave background. 17. 自己看看：打開老式模擬電視，切換到一個空臺，許多“雪花”就是宇宙微波背景輻射。
18. Gamma ray telescopes can detect light from the most violent explosions in the universe, probably caused by stars collapsing into black holes. If a gamma ray burst occurred within 6,000 light-years of us, we’d all be fried. 18. 伽馬射線天文望遠鏡能探測到宇宙最猛烈的爆炸光線，比如由天體塌縮成黑洞的情況。如果地球周邊6000光年內有一處發生伽馬射線爆炸，我們就都成干兒了。
19. Weirdest telescope ever? In the 1960s physicist Raymond Davis Jr. used 100,000 gallons of dry-cleaning fluid to detect invisble neutrino particles as they stream from the sun. 19. 史上最神的天文望遠鏡，當屬20世紀60年代由物理學家雷蒙德·戴維斯（小）所建造的，他用十萬加侖干洗流體來探測太陽發出的不可見中微子粒子。
20. Davis’s bizarre telescope worked, revealing fundamental new physics and netting him a Nobel in 2002. 20. 戴維斯這臺神奇的天文望遠鏡還真管用，他不但靠這個揭示了新物理學的基礎，還收獲了2002年度的諾貝爾獎。 |
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