这是一部有关现代科学发展史的既通俗易懂又引人入胜的书，作者用清晰明了、幽默风趣的笔法，将宇宙大爆炸到人类文明发展进程中所发生的繁多妙趣横生的故事一一收入笔下。惊奇和感叹组成了本书，历历在目的天下万物组成了本书，益于人们了解大千世界的无穷奥妙，掌握万事万物的发展脉络。
收获英语 收获一本好书~！

书本的朗读语音很charming的磁性英音~~~大家可以好好学着模仿哦~~~！！
因为原著为美国人所写,单词采用美式拼法,不抄全文,然后听写句子。请边听写边理解文意，根据上下文注意各句标号，这样有助于提高正确率。



[---1---] It was, rather, a vast, sudden expansion on a whopping scale. So what caused it?

One notion is that perhaps the singularity was the relic of an earlier, collapsed universe—that we're just one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes, like the bladder on an oxygen machine. Others attribute the Big Bang to what they call "a false vacuum" or "a scalar field' or "vacuum energy"—some quality or thing, at any rate, that introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness that was. [---2---] [---3---] Or it may be that space and time had some other forms altogether before the Big Bang—forms too alien for us to imagine—[---4---] "These are very close to religious questions," Dr. Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford, told the New York Times in 2001.

Although everyone calls it the Big Bang, many books caution us not to think of it as an explosion in the conventional sense. It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can. It may be that our universe is merely part of many larger universes, some in different dimensions, and that Big Bangs are going on all the time all over the place. and that the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase, where the universe went from a form we can't understand to one we almost can.
虽然人人都称其为大爆炸，但许多书上都提醒我们，不要把它看做是普通意义上的爆炸，而是一次范围和规模都极其大的突然爆炸。那么，它的原因是什么？ 　　有人认为，那个奇点也许是早年业已毁灭的宇宙的残余--我们的宇宙只是一系列宇宙中的一个。这些宇宙周而复始，不停地扩大和毁灭，就像一台制氧机上的气囊。有的人把大爆炸归因于所谓的"伪真空"，或"标量场"，或"真空能"--反正是某种物质或东西，将一定量的不稳定性带进了当时的不存在。从不存在获得某种存在，这似乎不大可能，但过去什么也不存在，现在有了个宇宙，事实证明这显然是可能的。情况也许是，我们的宇宙只是众多更大的、大小不等的宇宙的部分，大爆炸到处不停地发生。要不然也许是，在那次大爆炸之前，时间和空间具有某种完全不同的形式--那些形式我们非常不熟悉，因此无法想像--大爆炸代表某个过渡阶段，宇宙从一种我们无法理解的形式过渡到一种我们几乎可以理解的形式。"这与宗教问题很相似。"斯坦福大学的宇宙学家安德烈•林德博士2001年对《纽约时报》的记者说。