万物简史 第138期:基本物质(10)

Things might have been worse had it not been for a splendidly improbable character named Count von Rumford, who, despite the grandeur of his title, began life in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1753 as plain Benjamin Thompson.Thompson was dashing and ambit

万物简史 第133期:基本物质(5)

Someone of insight was needed to thrust chemistry into the modern age, and it was the French who provided him. His name was Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Born in 1743, Lavoisier was a member of the minor nobility (his father had purchased a title for th

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16期:如何营造一个宇宙(8)

The Big Bang theory isn't about the bang itself but about what happened after the bang. Not long after, mind you. By doing a lot of math and watching carefully what goes on in particle accelerators, scientists believe they can look back to 10-43secon

万物简史 第461期:生命在前进(3)

I mention all this to explain why on a gray day in February I went to the Natural History Museum in London to meet a cheerful, vaguely rumpled, very likeable paleontologist named Richard Fortey. 我提这一切，是为了解释为什么我在阴沉沉

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386期:浩瀚的海洋(5)

There are 320 million cubic miles of water on Earth and that is all we're ever going to get. 地球上有13亿立方公里水，这是全部。 The system is closed: practically speaking, nothing can be added or subtracted. 系统已经关闭，说得明

万物简史 第366期:进入对流层(7)

Air is deceptive stuff. Even at sea level, we tend to think of the air as being ethereal and all but weightless. In fact, it has plenty of bulk, and that bulk often exerts itself. As a marine scientist named Wyville Thomson wrote more than a century

万物简史 第367期:进入对流层(8)

Certainly there is no shortage of energy in the world above our heads. One thunderstorm, it has been calculated, can contain an amount of energy equivalent to four days' use of electricity for the whole United States. In the right conditions, storm c

万物简史 第375期:进入对流层(16)

Any water molecule that strays beyond the edge of the cloud is immediately zapped by the dry air beyond, allowing the cloud to keep its fine edge. 要是水分子越出该云边缘，外面干燥的空气马上会把它除掉，从而使积云的边缘

万物简史 第301期:地下的烈火(9)

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, for comparison, measured an estimated 7.8 on the Richter scale and lasted less than thirty seconds. 相比之下，1906年的旧金山地震只有里氏7.8级，持续了不到30秒。 Earthquakes are fairly comm

万物简史 第296期:地下的烈火(4)

Voorhies sent samples to colleagues all over the western United States asking if there was anything about it that they recognized. 沃里斯把样品寄给美国西部各地的同事们，问他们是否认得出这是什么东西。 Several months l

万物简史 第272期:砰!(7)

By the early 1900s, it had often become impossible to know whether an asteroid that popped into view was new 到20世纪初，往往分不清哪颗小行星是刚刚出现的， or simply one that had been noted earlier and then lost track of. 哪颗小

万物简史 第266期:砰!(1)

Part IV Dangerous Planet 第四部 处境危险的行星 The history of any one part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror.British geologist Derek V. Ager 地球的任何一部分历史

万物简史 第253期:大地在移动(7)

Elsewhere, however, the new theory drew steady if cautious support. In 1950, a vote at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science showed that about half of those present now embraced the idea of continental drift. (H

万物简史 第249期:大地在移动(3)

Wegener developed the theory that the world's continents had once come together in a single landmass he called Pangaea, where flora and fauna had been able to mingle, before the continents had split apart and floated off to their present positions. A

万物简史 第521期:丰富多彩的生命(17)

Yet there is surprisingly little agreement on how many phyla there are or ought to be. 然而，令人吃惊的是，在关于有多少门或诙有多少门的问题上，人们的看法大相径庭。 Most biologists fix the total at about thirty, b