NARRATOR:Listen to part of a lecture in an astronomy class. You will not need to remember the numbers the professor mentions.
MALE PROFESSOR:OK. Let's get going. Today I'm going to talk about how the asteroid belt was discovered. And... I'm going to start by writing some numbers on the board.Here they are; We'll start with zero, then 3, ... 6, ... 12. Uh, tell me what I'm doing.
FEMALE STUDENT:Multiplying by 2?MALE PROFESSOR:Right, I'm doubling the numbers, so 2 times 12 is 24, and the next one I'm going to write after 24 would be...
MALE PROFESSOR:48 [slowly, as if just being calculated and written on the board]. Then 96 [slowly, as if just being calculated]. We'll stop there for now. Uh, now I'll write another row of numbers under that. Tell me what I'm doing.4, 7, 10... How am I getting the second row?
MALE STUDENT:Adding 4 to the numbers in the first row.
MALE PROFESSOR:I'm adding 4 to each number in the first row to give you a second row. So the last two will be 52, 100, and now tell me what I'm doing.
FEMALE STUDENT:Putting in a decimal?
MALE PROFESSOR:Yes, I divided all those numbers by 10 by putting in a decimal point.Now I'm going to write the names of the planets under the numbers. Mercury... Venus... Earth... Mars.So, what do the numbers mean? Do you remember from the reading?
MALE STUDENT:Is it the distance of the planets from the Sun?
MALE PROFESSOR:Right. In astronomical units - not perfect, but tantalizingly close.The value for Mars is off by... 6 or 7 percent or so. It's... but it's within 10 percent of the average distance to Mars from the Sun.But I kind of have to skip the one after Mars for now.Then Jupiter's right there at 5-point something, and then Saturn is about 10 astronomical units from the Sun.Um, well, this pattern is known as Bode's Law.
Um, it isn't really a scientific law, not in the sense of predicting gravitation mathematically or something, but it's attempting a pattern in the spacing of the planets, and it was noticed by Bode hundreds of years ago.Well, you can imagine that there was some interest in why the 2.8 spot in the pattern was skipped, and um... but there wasn't anything obvious there, in the early telescopes. Then what happened in the late 1700s? The discovery of...?
FEMALE STUDENT:Another planet?
MALE PROFESSOR:The next planet out, Uranus - after Saturn. And look, Uranus fits in the next spot in the pattern pretty nicely, um, not perfectly, but close.
And so then people got really excited about the validity of this thing and finding the missing object between Mars and Jupiter. And telescopes, remember, were getting better. So people went to work on finding objects that would be at that missing distance from the Sun, and then in 1801, the object Ceres [SI-reez] was discovered.
And Ceres was in the right place - the missing spot. Uh, but it was way too faint to be a planet. It looked like a little star. Uh, and because of its star-like appearance, um, it was called an "asteroid".OK? "Aster" is Greek for "star", as in "astronomy".Um, and so, Ceres was the first and is the largest of what became many objects discovered at that same distance. Not just one thing, but all the objects found at that distance form the asteroid belt.So the asteroid belt is the most famous success of this Bode's Law.That's how the asteroid belt was discovered.
学生：（所得值）乘以2？教授：不错。我在使这些数翻倍，所以2 乘以12 是24，24 之后我要写的数是……
教授：是的。用天文单位计算——不算完美，但极为接近了。就拿火星到太阳的距离来说可能偏差6%到7%。但……误差应该在10%以内。但我要暂时先跳过火星后的这颗行星。然后这边的木星到太阳有5 个天文单位左右的距离，之后土星到太阳的距离大概有10 个天文单位。这个规律就是众所周知的波德定律。
嗯，这不是一个真正意义上的科学定律，并不在预测重力数值之类的层面，而是在尝试测量星球之间的距离，它在几百年前被波德发现。你们可以设想一下，这里有点意思：为什么跳过了2.8 个点？嗯……但这在早期的望远镜中并不明显。那么在18 世纪末发生了什么？发现了……？
Then Jupiter’s right there at 5-point something, and then Saturn is about 10 astronomical units from the Sun. Um, well, this pattern is known as Bode’s Law.