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You Traveled Far Last Year

Happy New Year! And if you’ve been away from work for a few days, you deserve some time off. After all, you’ve traveled far. Even if you just stayed at home. According to NASA, just by being on the planet Earth in the last year, you’ve zipped about 584 million miles around the sun. At an average speed of about 67,000 miles per hour. [Siren sound.] Hey, I wasn’t speeding—in my inertial reference frame.

新年快乐!如果你休息几天了，的确你应该休息一下。毕竟，你已经走了很远的路。即使你只是呆在家里。根据美国国家航空航天局的说法，就在去年，你在地球上以平均每小时67000英里的速度，绕着太阳转了5.84亿英里。 [警笛的声音。嘿，我没有加速——只是惯性参考]。

Of course, the trip was not a perfect circle. As Kepler showed, the Earth’s orbit is an ellipse, with the sun at one of the two focal points. He also figured out the planet goes faster when it’s at perihelion, nearer the sun, than when it’s at aphelion¹, its farthest distance.

当然，这次旅行并不是一个完整的圆形。正如开普勒所指出的，地球的轨道是一个椭圆，太阳位于两个焦点的位置。他还发现，在近日点，靠近太阳时，地球的速度比在远日点时要快，远日点是地球距离太阳最遥远的距离。

Which would explain why summer seems to zip by, except that the seasons are a function of the tilt² of the Earth’s axis³, not its different distances from the sun. And the Earth rotated 365 and a quarter times during its sweep around the sun. The trip took 8,766 hours. Or 525,960 minutes. Or 31,557,600 seconds. Tick tock

这就解释了为什么夏天似乎很短，除了季节是地球轴倾斜所造成以外，而并不是它与太阳的不同距离。地球绕着太阳旋转365又1 / 4次。这次旅行耗时8766个小时。或者说525960分钟。31557600秒。时间风暴!