We have seen in this chapter how, in less than half a century, man’s view of the universe formed over millennia has been transformed. Hubble’s discovery that the universe was expanding, and the realization of the insignificance of our own planet in the vastness of the universe, were just the starting point. As experimental and theoretical evidence mounted, it became more and more clear that the universe must have had a beginning in time, until in 1970 this was finally proved by Penrose and myself, on the basis of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. That proof showed that general relativity is only an incomplete theory: it cannot tell us how the universe started off, because it predicts that all physical theories, including itself, break down at the beginning of the universe. However, general relativity claims to be only a partial theory, so what the singularity theorems really show is that there must have been a time in the very early universe when the universe was so small that one could no longer ignore the small-scale effects of the other great partial theory of the twentieth century, quantum mechanics. At the start of the 1970s, then, we were forced to turn our search for an understanding of the universe from our theory of the extraordinarily vast to our theory of the extraordinarily tiny. That theory, quantum mechanics, will be described next, before we turn to the efforts to combine the two partial theories into a single quantum theory of gravity.
Mount 積累
Partial 部分的
從這一章我們看到，在不到半個世紀的時間裡，人們幾千年來形成的關於宇宙的觀點被改變了。哈勃關於宇宙膨脹的發現，並意識到我們的行星在茫茫的宇宙中的微不足道，只不過是起點而已。隨著實驗和理論證據的積累，人們越來越清楚地認識到，宇宙在時間上必須有個開端。直到1970年，在愛因斯坦的廣義相對論的基礎上，這才被彭羅斯和我所證明。這個證明顯示，廣義相對論只是一個不完全的理論，它不能告訴我們宇宙是如何開始的。因為它預言，所有包括它自己在內的物理理論都在宇宙的開端失效。然而，廣義相對論宣稱自己只是一個部分理論，所以點定理真正所顯示的是，在極早期宇宙中有過一個時刻，那時宇宙是如此之小，以至於人們不能再不管20世紀另一個偉大的部分理論——量子力學的小尺度效應。20世紀70年代初期，我們被迫從對極其巨大範圍的理論研究轉到對極其微小範圍的理論研究。下面在我們進而努力將這兩個部分理論結合成一個單獨的量子引力論之前，首先描述量子力學這個理論。
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