万物简史 第52期:埃文斯牧师的宇宙(16)

About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 15 billion miles across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it99.9 percent of the mass of the solar systemwent to make the Sun. Out of the floa

万物简史 第67期:事物的测定(15)

At his urging, the Royal Society agreed to engage a reliable figure to tour the British Isles to see if such a mountain could be found. Maskelyne knew just such a personthe astronomer and surveyor Charles Mason. Maskelyne and Mason had become friends

万物简史(MP3+中英字幕) 第61期:事物的测定(8)

At Principia's heart were Newton's three laws of motion (which state, very baldly, that a thing moves in the direction in which it is pushed; that it will keep moving in a straight line until some other force acts to slow or deflect it; and that ever

万物简史 第62期:事物的测定(9)

Principia's production was not without drama. To Halley's horror, just as work was nearing completion Newton and Hooke fell into dispute over the priority for the inverse square law and Newton refused to release the crucial third volume, without whic

万物简史 第64期:事物的测定(11)

Starting with his back against the Tower of London, Norwood spent two devoted years marching 208 miles north to York, repeatedly stretching and measuring a length of chain as he went, all the while making the most meticulous adjustments for the rise

万物简史 第64期:事物的测定(12)

Norwood's two daughters brought their father additional pain by making poor marriages. One of the husbands, possibly incited by the vicar, continually laid small charges against Norwood in court, causing him much exasperation and necessitating repeat

万物简史 第65期:事物的测定(13)

To complicate matters, after Picard's death the father-and-son team of Giovanni and Jacques Cassini repeated Picard's experiments over a larger area and came up with results that suggested that the Earth was fatter not at the equator but at the poles

万物简史 第66期:事物的测定(14)

Bouguer and La Condamine thus had spent nearly a decade working toward a result they didn't wish to find only to learn now that they weren't even the first to find it. Listlessly, they completed their survey, which confirmed that the first French tea

万物简史 第68期:事物的测定(16)

It was history's first cooperative international scientific venture, and almost everywhere it ran into problems. Many observers were waylaid by war, sickness, or shipwreck. Others made their destinations but opened their crates to find equipment brok

万物简史 第69期:事物的测定(17)

In comparison, the disappointments experienced by Britain's eighteen scattered observers were mild. Mason found himself paired with a young surveyor named Jeremiah Dixon and apparently they got along well, for they formed a lasting partnership. 比较而

万物简史 第70期:事物的测定(18)

Soon afterward, Maskelyne returned to England where he became astronomer royal, and Mason and Dixonnow evidently more seasonedset off for four long and often perilous years surveying their way through 244 miles of dangerous American wilderness to set

万物简史 第71期:事物的测定(19)

As for Mason and Dixon, they returned to England as scientific heroes and, for reasons unknown, dissolved their partnership. Considering the frequency with which they turn up at seminal events in eighteenth-century science, remarkably little is known

万物简史 第72期:事物的测定(20)

With Mason refusing to survey the mountain, the job fell to Maskelyne. So for four months in the summer of 1774, Maskelyne lived in a tent in a remote Scottish glen and spent his days directing a team of surveyors, who took hundreds of measurements f

万物简史 第73期:事物的测定(21)

Not everyone was satisfied with the results, however. The shortcoming of the Schiehallion experiment was that it was not possible to get a truly accurate figure without knowing the actual density of the mountain. For convenience, Hutton had assumed t

万物简史 第74期:事物的测定(22)

In 1781 Herschel became the first person in the modern era to discover a planet. He wanted to call it George, after the British monarch, but was overruled. Instead it became Uranus. 1781年，赫歇尔成为现代行星发现者的先驱。他曾想把

万物简史 第76期:事物的测定(24)

In the course of a long life Cavendish made a string of signal discoveriesamong much else he was the first person to isolate hydrogen and the first to combine hydrogen and oxygen to form waterbut almost nothing he did was entirely divorced from stran

万物简史 第77期:事物的测定(25)

When assembled, Michell's apparatus looked like nothing so much as an eighteenth-century version of a Nautilus weight-training machine. It incorporated weights, counterweights, pendulums, shafts, and torsion wires. 装配完毕以后，米歇尔的仪器

万物简史 第78期:事物的测定(26)

Delicacy was the key word. Not a whisper of disturbance could be allowed into the room containing the apparatus, so Cavendish took up a position in an adjoining room and made his observations with a telescope aimed through a peephole. The work was in

万物简史 第79期:敲石头的人们(1)

5 THE STONE-BREAKERS 5 敲石头的人们 At just the time that Henry Cavendish was completing his experiments in London, four hundred miles away in Edinburgh another kind of concluding moment was about to take place with the death of James Hutton. T

万物简史 第80期:敲石头的人们(2)

Yet almost singlehandedly, and quite brilliantly, he created the science of geology and transformed our understanding of the Earth. Hutton was born in 1726 into a prosperous Scottish family, and enjoyed the sort of material comfort that allowed him t