万物简史 第81期:敲石头的人们(3)

Among the questions that attracted interest in that fanatically inquisitive age was one that had puzzled people for a very long timenamely, why ancient clamshells and other marine fossils were so often found on mountaintops. How on earth did they get

万物简史 第82期:敲石头的人们(4)

It was while puzzling over these matters that Hutton had a series of exceptional insights. From looking at his own farmland, he could see that soil was created by the erosion of rocks and that particles of this soil were continually washed away and c

万物简史 第83期:敲石头的人们(5)

In 1785, Hutton worked his ideas up into a long paper, which was read at consecutive meetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. It attracted almost no notice at all. It's not hard to see why. Here, in part, is how he presented it to his audience: 17

万物简史 第84期:敲石头的人们(6)

Luckily Hutton had a Boswell in the form of John Playfair, a professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh and a close friend, who could not only write silken prose butthanks to many years at Hutton's elbowactually understood what Hutton wa

万物简史 第85期:敲石头的人们(7)

The members met twice a month from November until June, when virtually all of them went off to spend the summer doing fieldwork. These weren't people with a pecuniary interest in minerals, you understand, or even academics for the most part, but simp

万物简史 第86期:敲石头的人们(8)

Throughout the modern, thinking world, but especially in Britain, men of learning ventured into the countryside to do a little stone-breaking, as they called it. It was a pursuit taken seriously, and they tended to dress with appropriate gravity, in

万物简史 第87期:敲石头的人们(9)

Then there was Dr. James Parkinson, who was also an early socialist and author of many provocative pamphlets with titles like Revolution without Bloodshed. In 1794, he was implicated in a faintly lunatic-sounding conspiracy called the Pop-gun Plot, i

万物简史 第88期:敲石头的人们(13)

Lyell's oversights were not inconsiderable. He failed to explain convincingly how mountain ranges were formed and overlooked glaciers as an agent of change. He refused to accept Louis Agassiz's idea of ice agesthe refrigeration of the globe, as he di

万物简史 第89期:敲石头的人们(14)

Meanwhile, geology had a great deal of sorting out to do, and not all of it went smoothly. From the outset geologists tried to categorize rocks by the periods in which they were laid down, but there were often bitter disagreements about where to put

万物简史 第75期:事物的测定(23)

Although he did sometimes venture into societyhe was particularly devoted to the weekly scientific soires of the great naturalist Sir Joseph Banksit was always made clear to the other guests that Cavendish was on no account to be approached or even l

万物简史 第104期:势不两立的科学(5)

Inspired by the controversy, in 1796 Cuvier wrote a landmark paper, Note on the Species of Living and Fossil Elephants, in which he put forward for the first time a formal theory of extinctions. His belief was that from time to time the Earth experie

万物简史 第90期:敲石头的人们(15)

Because the British were the most active in the early years, British names are predominant in the geological lexicon. Devonian is of course from the English county of Devon. Cambrian comes from the Roman name for Wales, while Ordovician and Silurian

万物简史 第91期:敲石头的人们(16)

Lyell, in his Principles, introduced additional units known as epochs or series to cover the period since the age of the dinosaurs, among them Pleistocene (most recent), Pliocene (more recent), Miocene (moderately recent), and the rather endearingly

万物简史 第92期:敲石头的人们(17)

Then come Lyell's epochsthe Pleistocene, Miocene, and so onwhich apply only to the most recent (but paleontologically busy) sixty-five million years, and finally we have a mass of finer subdivisions known as stages or ages. Most of these are named, n

万物简史 第93期:敲石头的人们(18)

Moreover, all this applies only to units of time . Rocks are divided into quite separate units known as systems, series, and stages. A distinction is also made between late and early (referring to time) and upper and lower (referring to layers of roc

万物简史 第95期:敲石头的人们(20)

One of the better early attempts at dating the planet came from the ever-reliable Edmond Halley, who in 1715 suggested that if you divided the total amount of salt in the world's seas by the amount added each year, you would get the number of years t

万物简史 第96期:敲石头的人们(21)

By the middle of the nineteenth century most learned people thought the Earth was at least a few million years old, perhaps even some tens of millions of years old, but probably not more than that. So it came as a surprise when, in 1859 in On the Ori

万物简史 第97期:敲石头的人们(22)

Unfortunately for Darwin, and for progress, the question came to the attention of the great Lord Kelvin (who, though indubitably great, was then still just plain William Thomson; he wouldn't be elevated to the peerage until 1892, when he was sixty-ei

万物简史 第98期:敲石头的人们(23)

In the course of a long career (he lived till 1907 and the age of eighty-three), he wrote 661 papers, accumulated 69 patents (from which he grew abundantly wealthy), and gained renown in nearly every branch of the physical sciences. 在漫长的生涯里

万物简史 第99期:敲石头的人们(24)

He had really only one flaw and that was an inability to calculate the correct age of the Earth. The question occupied much of the second half of his career, but he never came anywhere near getting it right. His first effort, in 1862 for an article i