万物简史 第383期:浩瀚的海洋(2)

Almost nothing about it can be used to make reliable predictions about the properties of other liquids and vice versa. 它的身上几乎没有哪一点可以用来对别的液体的性质进行可靠的推测，反之亦然。 If you knew nothing of

万物简史 第382期:浩瀚的海洋(1)

18 The Bounding Main 第十八章 浩瀚的海洋 Imagine trying to live in a world dominated by dihydrogen oxide, 请你想像一下，你能不能生活在一个由一氧化二氢主宰的世界里。 a compound that has no taste or smell and is so

万物简史 第381期:进入对流层(22)

By 1958, when people in lab coats started to pay attention to it, it had risen to 315 parts per million. 到1958年实验室人员开始重视这个问题的时候，那个数字已经上升到百万分之三百一十五。 Today it is over 360 parts

万物简史 第380期:进入对流层(21)

Altogether there is about twenty thousand times as much carbon locked away in the Earth's rocks as in the atmosphere. 总的来说，被关在地球岩石里的碳，大约相当于大气里的2000倍。 Eventually much of that limestone will end up

万物简史 第379期:进入对流层(20)

One of the oddities of our solar system is that the Sun burns about 25 percent more brightly now than when the solar system was young. 现在太阳燃烧的旺度，要比太阳系形成之初强了大约25%，这是我们太阳系的怪事之一。

万物简史 第512期:丰富多彩的生命(8)

But Banks's grand cache was only part of the total haul in what was an almost absurdly acquisitive age. 但是，在一个渴求知识几乎到了荒唐程度的时代，班克斯的巨大收获只是总收获的组成部分。 Plant collecting in th

万物简史 第513期:丰富多彩的生命(9)

And that was just plants. 那只是植物部分。 There was also all the fauna of the new worlds kangaroos, kiwis, raccoons, bobcats, mosquitoes, and other curious forms beyond imagining. 还有新世界的全部动物群袋鼠呀，鹬鸵呀，浣熊

万物简史 第511期:丰富多彩的生命(7)

This was an amazing disclosure. 这句话里包含着丰富的历史内容。 Joseph Banks was England's greatest botanist, and the Endeavour voyage that is the one on which Captain Cook charted the 1769 transit of Venus 约瑟夫班克斯是英国最伟

万物简史 第510期:丰富多彩的生命(6)

When a new moss is found it must be compared with all other mosses to make sure that it hasn't been recorded already. 要是发现了一种新的苔藓，就要把它和所有别的苔藓进行比较，看看是不是已经有过记录。 Then a form

万物简史 第509期:丰富多彩的生命(5)

You might not think there would be that many people in the world prepared to devote lifetimes to the study of something so inescapably low key, 你或许会认为，世界上不会有多少人愿意花毕生的心血来研究那个不起眼儿的东西

万物简史 第393期:浩瀚的海洋(12)

In 1958, they did a deal with the U.S. Navy, which gave the Navy ownership but left them in control. 1958年，他们与美国海军达成一桩交易，把探海艇的所有权交给海军，但他们仍保留使用权。 Now flush with funds, the P

万物简史 第175期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(18)

Howeverand heres the thingpeople on the train would have no sense of these distortions. 然而问题就在这里车上的人并不觉得自己变了形。 To them, everything on the train would seem quite normal. 在他们看来，车上的一切似乎

万物简史 第183期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(26)

We now know that Cepheids throb as they do because they are elderly stars that have moved past their main sequence phase, in the parlance of astronomers, and become red giants. The chemistry of red giants is a little weighty for our purposes here (it

万物简史 第182期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(25)

Hubble's luck was to come along soon after an ingenious woman named Henrietta Swan Leavitt had figured out a way to do so. Leavitt worked at the Harvard College Observatory as a computer, as they were known. Computers spent their lives studying photo

万物简史 第181期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(24)

In 1919, now aged thirty, he moved to California and took up a position at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles. Swiftly, and more than a little unexpectedly, he became the most outstanding astronomer of the twentieth century. 1919年，他已

万物简史 第180期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(23)

This was more than a little odd, for Hubbles life was filled from an early age with a level of distinction that was at times almost ludicrously golden. At a single high school track meet in 1906, he won the pole vault, shot put, discus, hammer throw,

万物简史 第179期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(22)

Slipher was the first to notice this effect with light and to realize its potential importance for understanding the motions of the cosmos. Unfortunately no one much noticed him. The Lowell Observatory, as you will recall, was a bit of an oddity than

万物简史 第178期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(21)

Coincidentally, at about the time that Einstein was affixing a cosmological constant to his theory, at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, an astronomer with the cheerily intergalactic name of Vesto Slipher (who was in fact from Indiana) was taking sp

万物简史 第177期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(20)

Every object that has mass creates a little depression in the fabric of the cosmos. 凡有质量的物体在宇宙的底垫上都能造成一个小小的凹坑。 Thus the universe, as Dennis Overbye has put it, is the ultimate sagging mattress. 因此

万物简史 第176期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(19)

The most challenging and nonintuitive of all the concepts in the general theory of relativity is the idea that time is part of space. Our instinct is to regard time as eternal, absolute, immutablenothing can disturb its steady tick. In fact, accordin