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0Do eggs contain the secrets of the universe? | BBC Ideas
This is an egg. But then, you already knew that. You know because eggs have been central to human existence for thousands of years. In fact, you probably take it for granted, after all, it's only an egg. But if you're prepared to look closer - to see through its calcium carbonate shell - you'll find a microcosm of the universe. Don't believe me? Let's start at the beginning. The very beginning.
这是一个蛋。不过，你已经知道了。因为几千年来，蛋一直是人类生存的核心。事实上，你可能认为它是理所当然的，毕竟它只是一个蛋。但是，如果你愿意仔细观察，透过它的碳酸钙外壳，你就会发现宇宙的缩影。不信？让我们从头开始。从最初开始。
Several religions, multiple traditions, the Ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Incas all have eggs at the heart of their creation stories. In southern California, the origin story of the Cahuilla people likens the creation of the entire universe to the cracking of an egg. A little further east, the Omaha tribe of Nebraska and Iowa spoke of an egg being dropped into the world's oceans. Protected by a bird serpent, inside this egg lay sleeping all of the mothers and all of the fathers of everyone yet to be born.
几种宗教，多种传统，古埃及人，希腊人，罗马人，印加人都把蛋作为他们创世故事的核心。在南加州，卡胡拉人的起源故事把整个宇宙的创造比作蛋的破裂。再往东一点，内布拉斯加州和衣阿华州的奥马哈部落讲述了一个蛋被扔进世界海洋的故事。在一条鸟蛇的保护下，在这个蛋里，沉睡着所有的母亲和所有尚未出生的人的父亲。
But these are stories. Where's the science? In 2006, data gathered by Nasa's Wilkinson satellite suggested that the Universe itself may be an ellipsoid - an oval. Egg shaped. The science community remain unable to categorically prove or disprove this theory but it remains possible we're all living inside a massive, ever-expanding egg. In 1609, Johannes Kepler confirmed that the planets, including our own, go around the sun, not in a perfect circle but in an elliptical orbit. The moon's elliptical orbit makes it appear to regularly change size in the night sky. Without this egg-shaped dance our moon may seem far less interesting.
但这些都是故事。科学在哪里？2006年，美国宇航局的威尔金森卫星收集的数据表明，宇宙本身可能是一个椭球体——即椭圆形物，也就是蛋形物。科学界仍然无法明确证明或否定这一理论，但我们仍然有可能生活在一个巨大的、不断膨胀的鸡蛋里。1609年，约翰尼斯·开普勒证实了包括我们自己在内的行星围绕太阳运行，不是正圆而是椭圆轨道。月亮的椭圆形轨道使它在夜空中看起来有规律地改变大小。如果没有这种蛋形的轨道运动，我们的月亮可能看起来就不那么有趣了。
Far from being smooth, an egg's shell is more like the surface of the moon. Bumpy and grainy in texture, a single eggshell is covered in up to 17,000 tiny craters. But it's also semi-permeable, allowing air and moisture to pass through it. This remarkable shape, not only is it possibly the shape of the actual universe, it's also the pinnacle of architectural design. Here is a structure with no internal solid support and yet it's strong enough to protect and nurture life itself inside. If one point of the shell is put under external force, the stress is distributed evenly across the entire dome. Which is why you can't crush an egg with the palm of your hand.
蛋的外壳并不光滑，它更像是月球的表面。一个蛋壳上布满了多达 17,000 个小坑，质地凹凸不平，颗粒状。但它也是半透明的，允许空气和水分通过。这种非凡的形状，不仅可能是真实宇宙的形状，也是建筑设计的顶峰。这是一个没有内部固体支撑的结构，但它却足够坚固，可以在内部保护和孕育生命。
But how to replicate nature's perfect aerodynamic design? An egg has no obvious beginning or end so where do you even start? It wasn't until the 20th Century that human architects started to get the hang of building egg-like structures on a grand scale. 'The Egg' in Beijing seats 5,452 people in three halls and is more than 1,000 square metres in size. That's one seriously big egg.
Eggs have inspired artists from Dali to Faberge and made memorable movie cameos - Sigourney Weaver's haunted 12-pack in Ghostbusters, Paul Newman eating 50 in Cool Hand Luke, and John Hurt falling foul of a particularly nasty one in Alien. In Gulliver's Travels, when the people of Lilliput went to war with their neighbours, it was over which way round to eat a boiled egg.
On Instagram, we liked this egg, in greater numbers than we'd liked anything else ever before. Mr Strong ate nothing but eggs, which actually was not a bad idea. An egg's protein has the perfect mix of amino acids required to build human tissue, second only to our mother's milk.
Eggs have also whisked their way into our everyday lexicon. I'm not yolking. Let me eggsplain - people can be 'good eggs' or 'bad eggs'. If you're particularly smart - an eggspert in your chosen field perhaps - you might be called an 'egghead'.
We send our kids on egg hunts. We scramble, we poach, we bake. If you want to make an omelette, we all know what to do. Not knowing how to boil an egg is considered shorthand for someone who can't cook. And yet, when searching 'how to boil an egg', Google will offer up more than a billion results. Perhaps it's not as simple as we thought. Much like the egg itself.
People have been welcoming spring by decorating eggs with bright colours since the Middle Ages. But John Cadbury didn't make his first chocolate egg until 1875. Eighty million chocolate eggs are now sold every year in the UK alone. The average child eats eight. At Easter, it seems, the egg will always come first. But then of course, you already knew that.
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