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

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