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What is at the center of the universe?
宇宙的中心是什么？
It's an essential question that humans have been wondering about for centuries.
這是個很重要的問題，幾百年來，人們一直在探索。
But the journey toward an answer has been a strange one.
但這段探索之旅的結(jié)果卻十分奇怪。
If you wanted to know the answer to this question in third century B.C.E. Greece, you might look up at the night sky and trust what you see, that's what Aristotle, THE guy to ask back then, did.
如果你想知道公元三世紀(jì)希臘人給出的答案，你就要問亞里士多德了，他的回答是仰望星空，相信自己的所見。
He thought that since we're on Earth, looking up, it must be the center, right?
他想：既然我們從地球向天上看，那么地球一定就是宇宙的中心，不是嗎？
For him, the sphere of the world was made up of four elements: Earth, water, air, and fire.
他認(rèn)為，宇宙是由四種元素組成的：土，水，空氣和火。
These elements shifted around a nested set of solid crystalline spheres.
這些元素在一套嵌套的固體球核周圍流動。
Each of the wandering stars, the planets, had their own crystal sphere.
每個浮于夜空的恒星和行星都有它們自己的球核。
The rest of the universe and all of its stars were on the last crystal sphere.
宇宙剩下的部分和所有星星在最后的球核上。
If you watch the sky change over time, you could see that this idea worked fine at explaining the motion you saw.
如果你觀察天空隨時間的變化，就可以發(fā)現(xiàn)這個理論很好得解釋了你所看到的變化。
For centuries, this was central to how Europe and the Islamic world saw the universe.
幾個世紀(jì)以來 ，它就是歐洲和伊斯蘭世界的宇宙觀核心。
But in 1543, a guy named Copernicus proposed a different model.
但是在1543年，一位名叫哥白尼的人提出了一個不同的模型。
He believed that the sun was at the center of the universe.
他認(rèn)為太陽才是宇宙的中心。
This radically new idea was hard for a lot of people to accept.
這個十分激進(jìn)的新思想讓大多數(shù)人難以接受。
After all, Aristotle's ideas made sense with what they could see, and they were pretty flattering to humans.
畢竟亞里士多德的理論在人們眼中才符合事實，它對人類更有吸引力。
But a series of subsequent discoveries made the sun-centric model hard to ignore.
但是隨后的一系列發(fā)現(xiàn)讓日心說無法被忽視。
First, Johannes Kepler pointed out that orbits aren't perfect circles or spheres.
首先，約翰尼斯·開普勒指出行星運動的軌道并不是完美的圓弧或者球型。
Then, Galileo's telescope caught Jupiter's moons orbiting around Jupiter, totally ignoring Earth.
其次，伽利略的望遠(yuǎn)鏡發(fā)現(xiàn)木星也有圍繞自己的衛(wèi)星，完全與地球無關(guān)。
And then, Newton proposed the theory of universal gravitation, demonstrating that all objects are pulling on each other.
接著牛頓提出了萬有引力定律，說明所有的物體都互相吸引。
Eventually, we had to let go of the idea that we were at the center of the universe.
最終， 我們不得不放棄地球是宇宙中心的想法。
