标签：万物简史 相关文章
From the first there were a number of scientists who doubted the account that Steve Gould had presented, 从一开始，许多科学家就对斯蒂芬杰伊古尔德的陈说表示怀疑， however much they admired the manner of its delivery, Fortey
万物简史
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
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
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
Mendeleyev dutifully completed his studies and eventually landed a position at the local university. There he was a competent but not terribly outstanding chemist, known more for his wild hair and beard, which he had trimmed just once a year, than fo
万物简史
Mendeleyev used a slightly different approach, placing his elements into groups of seven, but employed fundamentally the same principle. Suddenly the idea seemed brilliant and wondrously perceptive. Because the properties repeated themselves periodic
万物简史
The nineteenth century held one last great surprise for chemists. It began in 1896 when Henri Becquerel in Paris carelessly left a packet of uranium salts on a wrapped photographic plate in a drawer. When he took theplate out some time later, he was
万物简史
As a leading member of the Acadmie Royale des Sciences, he was also required to take an informed and active interest in whatever was topicalhypnotism, prison reform, the respiration of insects, the water supply of Paris. It was in such a capacity in
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As for the other players in this drama, Owen died in 1892, a few years before Cope or Marsh. Buckland ended up by losing his mind and finished his days a gibbering wreck in a lunatic asylum in Clapham, not far from where Mantell had suffered his crip
万物简史
Of the two, Cope's scientific legacy was much the more substantial. In a breathtakingly industrious career, he wrote some 1,400 learned papers and described almost 1,300 new species of fossil (of all types, not just dinosaurs)more than double Marsh's
万物简史
Still, his altruism in general toward his fellow man did not deflect him from more personal rivalries. One of his last official acts was to lobby against a proposal to erect a statue in memory of Charles Darwin. In this he failedthough he did achieve
万物简史
Capitalizing on Mantell's enfeebled state, Owen set about systematically expunging Mantell's contributions from the record, renaming species that Mantell had named years before and claiming credit for their discovery for himself. Mantell continued to
万物简史
Owen was not an attractive person, in appearance or in temperament. A photograph from his late middle years shows him as gaunt and sinister, like the villain in a Victorian melodrama, with long, lank hair and bulging eyesa face to frighten babies. In
万物简史
In the district of Sydenham in south London, at a place called Crystal Palace Park, there stands a strange and forgotten sight: the world's first life-sized models of dinosaurs. Not many people travel there these days, but once this was one of the mo
万物简史
By this time, however, paleontological momentum had moved to England. In 1812, at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, an extraordinary child named Mary Anningaged eleven, twelve, or thirteen, depending on whose account you readfound a strange fossilized
万物简史
So by the early years of the nineteenth century, fossils had taken on a certain inescapable importance, which makes Wistar's failure to see the significance of his dinosaur bone all the more unfortunate. Suddenly, in any case, bones were turning up a
万物简史
In the same yearin fact, the same monththat the aristocratic and celebrated Cuvier was propounding his extinction theories in Paris, on the other side of the English Channel a rather more obscure Englishman was having an insight into the value of fos
万物简史
Moreover, all this applies only to units of time . Rocks are divided into quite separate units known as systems, series, and stages. A distinction is also made between late and early (referring to time) and upper and lower (referring to layers of roc
万物简史
Then come Lyell's epochsthe Pleistocene, Miocene, and so onwhich apply only to the most recent (but paleontologically busy) sixty-five million years, and finally we have a mass of finer subdivisions known as stages or ages. Most of these are named, n
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Inspired by the controversy, in 1796 Cuvier wrote a landmark paper, Note on the Species of Living and Fossil Elephants, in which he put forward for the first time a formal theory of extinctions. His belief was that from time to time the Earth experie
万物简史