科学家曾一度认为宇宙的膨胀在引力的作用下会减速，但对遥远的爆炸星（超新星）的观测表明宇宙正在加速膨胀。这是一个惊人的发现！取得该项发现的研究团组负责人因此获得了2011年诺贝尔物理学奖，整个团队还获得了2015年基础物理研究突破奖。在最大的尺度上，宇宙看起来主要由神秘的、起排斥力作用的“暗能量”组成。“暗能量”这一概念由爱因斯坦于1917年提出，但在1929年被爱因斯坦视为他这一生中犯过的最大错误而被抛弃。然而，近几年的观测和研究表明，爱因斯坦有可能一开始就是对的！占宇宙组成70%的暗能量越来越快地拉伸着宇宙空间，但其物理起源和本质还不清楚。暗能量可能是物理和天文领域未解决的最重要的问题，它可能为统一的引力量子理论提供关键线索。
【主讲人简介】
阿莱克谢·菲利潘科，美国科学院院士，加州伯克利大学教授，是世界上论文引用最多的天文学家之一，因其出色的科学研究工作而获得了大量的奖励和荣誉。在发现宇宙加速膨胀的两个科学团队中，菲利潘科是唯一一名同属两个团队的重要成员。菲利潘科曾9次获得加州伯克利大学投票选出的“最佳教授”称号，并于2006年获得美国“国家教授”称号。他录制了5部非常受欢迎的天文录像课程。在2004年，他因出色的科学普及工作而获得卡尔萨根奖。
About the Speaker
Alex Filippenko, an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, is one of the world's most highly cited astronomers. He is the recipient of numerous prizes for his scientific research, and was the only person to have been a member of both teams that revealed the accelerating expansion of the Universe. This discovery was honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to the teams’ leaders and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics to all team members. Winner of the most prestigious teaching awards at UC Berkeley and voted the “Best Professor” on campus a record 9 times, he was named the National Professor of the Year in 2006. He has produced 5 astronomy video courses with The Great Courses, coauthored an award-winning astronomy textbook, and appears in more than 100 television documentaries. In 2004, he was awarded the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization.
About the Speech
We expected the attractive force of gravity to slow down the rate at which the Universe is expanding. But observations of very distant exploding stars (supernovae) show that the expansion rate is actually speeding up, an amazing discovery that was honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to the teams’ leaders and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics to all team members. Over the largest distances, the Universe seems to be dominated by a mysterious, repulsive “dark energy” – an idea Albert Einstein had suggested in 1917 but abandoned in 1929 as his “biggest blunder.” It stretches space itself faster and faster with time. But the physical origin and nature of dark energy, which makes up about 70% of the contents of the Universe, is probably the most important unsolved problem in all of physics; it may provide clues to a unified quantum theory of gravity.
