万物简史 第140期:基本物质(12)

Soon after taking up his position, Davy began to bang out new elements one after anotherpotassium, sodium,magnesium, calcium, strontium, and aluminum or aluminium, depending on which branch of English you favor. 上任不久，戴维开始宣布发现一

万物简史 第141期:基本物质(13)

Fortunately more sober types were at work elsewhere. In 1808, a dour Quaker named John Dalton became the first person to intimate the nature of an atom (progress that will be discussed more completely a little further on), and in 1811 an Italian with

万物简史 第142期:基本物质(14)

No one knew about his principle, because Avogadro himself was a retiring fellow, he worked alone, corresponded very little with fellow scientists, published few papers, and attended no meetings but also it was because there were no meetings to attend

万物简史 第143期:基本物质(15)

Because chemists for so long worked in isolation, conventions were slow to emerge. Until well into the second half of the century, the formula H2O2 might mean water to one chemist but hydrogen peroxide to another. C2H4 could signify ethylene or marsh

万物简史 第135期:基本物质(7)

And his fancy equipment did in fact come in very handy. For years, he and Madame Lavoisier occupied themselves with extremely exacting studies requiring the finest measurements. They determined, for instance, that a rusting object doesn't lose weight

万物简史第164期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(7)

Michelson talked Alexander Graham Bell, newly enriched inventor of the telephone, into providing the funds to build an ingenious and sensitive instrument of Michelson's own devising called an interferometer, which could measure the velocity of light

万物简史 第150期:基本物质(22)

At McGill University in Montreal the young New Zealandborn Ernest Rutherford became interested in the new radioactive materials. With a colleague named Frederick Soddy he discovered that immense reserves of energy were bound up in these small amounts

万物简史 第151期:基本物质(23)

In the spring of 1904, Rutherford traveled to London to give a lecture at the Royal Institutionthe august organization founded by Count von Rumford only 105 years before, though that powdery and periwigged age now seemed a distant eon compared with t

万物简史 第156期:基本物质(24)

Kelvin died in 1907. That year also saw the death of Dmitri Mendeleyev. Like Kelvin, his productive work was far behind him, but his declining years were notably less serene. As he aged, Mendeleyev became increasingly eccentriche refused to acknowled

万物简史 第159期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(2)

In 1875, when a young German in Kiel named Max Planck was deciding whether to devote his life to mathematics or to physics, he was urged most heartily not to choose physics because the breakthroughs had all been made there. The coming century, he was

万物简史 第160期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(3)

Gibbs is perhaps the most brilliant person that most people have never heard of. Modest to the point of near invisibility, he passed virtually the whole of his life, apart from three years spent studying in Europe, within a three-block area bounded b

万物简史 第161期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(4)

Undauntedwell, perhaps mildly dauntedPlanck turned to other matters. 普朗克没有泄气哎呀，也许稍稍有点胆怯，开始把注意力转向别的问题。 Planck was often unlucky in life. 生活中，普朗克屡遭不幸， His beloved f

万物简史 第162期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(5)

What Michelson and Morley did, without actually intending to, was undermine a longstanding belief in something called the luminiferous ether, 迈克尔逊和莫雷所做的实际上是在无意之中所做的破坏了长期以来人们对一种所谓光

万物简史 第163期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(6)

If you needed to illustrate the idea of nineteenth-century America as a land of opportunity, you could hardly improve on the life of Albert Michelson. 如果你需要说明19世纪的美国是个机会之乡的理念，那么你很难再找到像阿尔

万物简史 第165期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(8)

Remarkably, and despite his findings, when the twentieth century dawned Michelson counted himself among those who believed that the work of science was nearly at an end, with only a few turrets and pinnacles to be added, a few roof bosses to be carve

万物简史 第166期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(9)

But the landmark eventthe dawn of a new agecame in 1905, when there appeared in the German physics journal Annalen der Physik a series of papers by a young Swiss bureaucrat who had no university affiliation, no access to a laboratory, and the regular

万物简史 第167期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(10)

Einstein was born in Ulm, in southern Germany, in 1879, but grew up in Munich. Little in his early life suggested the greatness to come. Famously he didnt learn to speak until he was three. In the 1890s, his fathers electrical business failing, the f

万物简史 第168期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(11)

At the same time he had fallen in love with a fellow student, a Hungarian named Mileva Maric. In 1901 they had a child out of wedlock, a daughter, who was discreetly put up for adoption. Einstein never saw his child. Two years later, he and Maric wer

万物简史 第158期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(1)

Part III A New Age Dawns 第三部 一个新时代的黎明 A Physicist is the atoms way of thinking about atoms. -Anonymous 物理学家就是以原子的方式来考虑原子的人。无名氏 8 Einsteins Universe 第八章 爱因斯坦的宇宙 As

万物简史 第470期:生命在前进(12)

Gould's book was published in 1989 to general critical acclaim and was a great commercial success. 古尔德的《奇异的生命》于1989年出版，旋即引起议论纷纷，在商业上是个巨大的成功。 What wasn't generally known was tha