万物简史 第403期:浩瀚的海洋(22)

In the 1970s, fishermen from Australia and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand 20世纪70年代，澳大利亚渔民，在较小范围内还有新西兰渔民， discovered shoals of a little-known fish living at a depth of about half a mile on their co

万物简史 第399期:浩瀚的海洋(18)

It was all quite extraordinarily sloppy. 这种事于得真是马虎。 Most of the drums were exactly the sort you see rusting behind gas stations or standing outside factories, with no protective linings of any type. 大多数的桶就是我们堆放

万物简史 第479期:生命在前进(21)

Once again it was trilobites that provided the clue, 又是三叶虫提供了线索， in particular that seemingly mystifying appearance of different types of trilobite in widely scattered locations around the globe, all at more or less the same tim

万物简史 第477期:生命在前进(19)

The Burgess creatures, they believed, weren't as strange and various as they appeared at first sight. 他们认为，布尔吉斯动物群并不像初看起来那么古怪，那么多种多样。 They were often no stranger than trilobites, Fortey sa

万物简史 第476期:生命在前进(18)

I have never encountered such s in a book by a professional, Fortey wrote later. 一位专业人员在书里竟然如此怒气冲冲，我可从来没有碰到过，福泰后来写道， The casual reader of The Crucible of Creation, unaware of the h

万物简史 第6期:引言(6)

Excited, I took the book home that night and opened it before dinner,那天晚上，我很兴奋，把这本书抱回了家，晚饭之前就把书打开--我想，an action that I expect prompted my mother to feel my forehead and ask if I was all ri

万物简史 第9期:如何营造一个宇宙(1)

Part I Lost in the cosmos 第一章 如何营造一个宇宙 They're all in the same plane.They're all going around in the same direction. . . . 它们都处于同一平面。 它们都在沿同一方向转动...... It's perfect,you know. It's gorgeo

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128期:势不两立的科学(29)

Other scientists besides Kelvin turned their minds to the problem and came up with results that only deepened the uncertainty. Samuel Haughton, a respected geologist at Trinity College in Dublin, announced an estimated age for the Earth of 2,300 mill

万物简史 第109期:势不两立的科学(10)

It would be hard to think of a more overlooked person in the history of paleontology than Mary Anning, but in fact there was one who came painfully close. His name was Gideon Algernon Mantell and he was a country doctor in Sussex. 在古生物学史上

万物简史 第117期:势不两立的科学(18)

He did not hesitate to persecute those whom he disliked. Early in his career Owen used his influence at the Zoological Society to blackball a young man named Robert Grant whose only crime was to have shown promise as a fellow anatomist. Grant was ast