万物简史 第3期:引言(3)

So thank goodness for atoms. 所以，谢天谢地，有了原子。 But the fact that you have atoms and that they assemble in such a willing manner is only part of what got you here. 不过，有了原子，它们心甘情愿地聚集在一起，这只

万物简史 第11期:如何营造一个宇宙(3)

In a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception. In the first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to

万物简史 第471期:生命在前进(13)

Sprigg submitted a paper to Nature, but it was turned down. 斯普里格给《自然》杂志写了一篇论文，但是没有被采用。 He read it instead at the next annual meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement

万物简史 第470期:生命在前进(12)

Gould's book was published in 1989 to general critical acclaim and was a great commercial success. 古尔德的《奇异的生命》于1989年出版，旋即引起议论纷纷，在商业上是个巨大的成功。 What wasn't generally known was tha

万物简史 第156期:基本物质(24)

Kelvin died in 1907. That year also saw the death of Dmitri Mendeleyev. Like Kelvin, his productive work was far behind him, but his declining years were notably less serene. As he aged, Mendeleyev became increasingly eccentriche refused to acknowled

万物简史第164期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(7)

Michelson talked Alexander Graham Bell, newly enriched inventor of the telephone, into providing the funds to build an ingenious and sensitive instrument of Michelson's own devising called an interferometer, which could measure the velocity of light

万物简史 第142期:基本物质(14)

No one knew about his principle, because Avogadro himself was a retiring fellow, he worked alone, corresponded very little with fellow scientists, published few papers, and attended no meetings but also it was because there were no meetings to attend

万物简史 第141期:基本物质(13)

Fortunately more sober types were at work elsewhere. In 1808, a dour Quaker named John Dalton became the first person to intimate the nature of an atom (progress that will be discussed more completely a little further on), and in 1811 an Italian with

万物简史 第137期:基本物质(9)

In the early 1800s there arose in England a fashion for inhaling nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, after it was discovered that its use was attended by a highly pleasurable thrilling. For the next half century it would be the drug of choice for young p

万物简史 第148期:基本物质(20)

For most of us, the periodic table is a thing of beauty in the abstract, but for chemists it established an immediate orderliness and clarity that can hardly be overstated. Without a doubt, the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements is the most eleg

万物简史 第144期:基本物质(16)

Despite the occasional tidyings-up, chemistry by the second half of the nineteenth century was in something of a mess, which is why everybody was so pleased by the rise to prominence in 1869 of an odd and crazed-looking professor at the University of

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57期:事物的测定(4)

Newton was a decidedly odd figurebrilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the

万物简史 第54期:事物的测定(1)

PART II THE SIZE OF THE EARTH 第二部分 地球的大小 Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night; 大自然和大自然的法则藏匿于黑夜之中； God said, Let Newton be! And all was light. 上帝说，让牛顿出世吧！于是世界一片

万物简史 第507期:丰富多彩的生命(3)

We wandered through a confusion of departments where people sat at large tables doing intent, 我们漫步穿过一个又一个部门，只见人们坐在大桌子跟前， investigative things with arthropods and palm fronds and boxes of yellowed bo

万物简史 第456期:小生物的世界(27)

Much about the 1918 flu is understood poorly or not at all. 对于1918年的那场流感，人们了解甚少，或者根本不了解。 One mystery is how it erupted suddenly, all over, in places separated by oceans, mountain ranges, and other earth

万物简史 第454期:小生物的世界(25)

Some went on in this manner for months before dying. 有的几个月处于那种状态，然后死去。 A very few survived and regained consciousness but not their former liveliness. 极少的人幸免于难，恢复了知觉，但不再像以往那样

万物简史 第437期:小生物的世界(8)

In 2001, a team from Tel Aviv University argued that B. permians were almost identical to a strain of modern bacteria, Bacillus marismortui, found in the Dead Sea. 2001年，以色列特拉维夫大学的一个小组认为，二叠纪芽孢杆菌与一