万物简史 第102期:势不两立的科学(3)

Not surprisingly, such aspersions were indignantly met in America. Thomas Jefferson incorporated a furious (and, unless the context is understood, quite bewildering) rebuttal in his Notes on the State of Virginia, and induced his New Hampshire friend

万物简史 第100期:势不两立的科学(1)

6 SCIENCE RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW 第六章 势不两立的科学 IN 1787, SOMEONE in New Jerseyexactly who now seems to be forgottenfound an enormous thighbone sticking out of a stream bank at a place called Woodbury Creek. The bone clearly didn't bel

万物简史 第99期:敲石头的人们(24)

He had really only one flaw and that was an inability to calculate the correct age of the Earth. The question occupied much of the second half of his career, but he never came anywhere near getting it right. His first effort, in 1862 for an article i

万物简史 第98期:敲石头的人们(23)

In the course of a long career (he lived till 1907 and the age of eighty-three), he wrote 661 papers, accumulated 69 patents (from which he grew abundantly wealthy), and gained renown in nearly every branch of the physical sciences. 在漫长的生涯里

万物简史 第97期:敲石头的人们(22)

Unfortunately for Darwin, and for progress, the question came to the attention of the great Lord Kelvin (who, though indubitably great, was then still just plain William Thomson; he wouldn't be elevated to the peerage until 1892, when he was sixty-ei

万物简史 第95期:敲石头的人们(20)

One of the better early attempts at dating the planet came from the ever-reliable Edmond Halley, who in 1715 suggested that if you divided the total amount of salt in the world's seas by the amount added each year, you would get the number of years t

万物简史 第88期:敲石头的人们(13)

Lyell's oversights were not inconsiderable. He failed to explain convincingly how mountain ranges were formed and overlooked glaciers as an agent of change. He refused to accept Louis Agassiz's idea of ice agesthe refrigeration of the globe, as he di

万物简史 第81期:敲石头的人们(3)

Among the questions that attracted interest in that fanatically inquisitive age was one that had puzzled people for a very long timenamely, why ancient clamshells and other marine fossils were so often found on mountaintops. How on earth did they get

万物简史 第68期:事物的测定(16)

It was history's first cooperative international scientific venture, and almost everywhere it ran into problems. Many observers were waylaid by war, sickness, or shipwreck. Others made their destinations but opened their crates to find equipment brok

万物简史 第64期:事物的测定(11)

Starting with his back against the Tower of London, Norwood spent two devoted years marching 208 miles north to York, repeatedly stretching and measuring a length of chain as he went, all the while making the most meticulous adjustments for the rise

万物简史 第59期:事物的测定(6)

Quite what Halley expected to get from him when he made his unannounced visit in August 1684 we can only guess. But thanks to the later account of a Newton confidant, Abraham DeMoivre, we do have a record of one of science's most historic encounters:

万物简史 第40期:埃文斯牧师的宇宙(4)

The term supernova was coined in the 1930s by a memorably odd astrophysicist named Fritz Zwicky. Born in Bulgaria and raised in Switzerland, Zwicky came to the California Institute of Technology in the 1920s and there at once distinguished himself by

万物简史 第22期:如何营造一个宇宙(14)

For a long time the Big Bang theory had one gaping hole that troubled a lot of peoplenamely that it couldn't begin to explain how we got here. Although 98 percent of all the matter that exists was created with the Big Bang, that matter consisted excl

万物简史 第506期:丰富多彩的生命(2)

Back here are specimens collected by Joseph Banks in Australia, 这里放着约瑟夫班克斯在澳大利亚采集的标本， Alexander von Humboldt in Amazonia, Darwin on the Beagle voyage, and much else that is either very rare or historically im

万物简史 第467期:生命在前进(9)

The Burgess Shale included a range of disparity in anatomical designs never again equaled, 布尔吉斯页岩化石所包含的横剖面的花色范围是独一无一的， and not matched today by all the creatures in the world's oceans, Gould wrote

万物简史 第466期:生命在前进(8)

If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, 要是你能以每秒钟一年的速度飞回到过去， it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the

万物简史 第463期:生命在前进(5)

Even now, as Fortey says, it can be startling to go to the right formation of rocks 福泰说，即使现在，要是你来到合适的岩石结构， and to work your way upward through the eons finding no visible life at all, 一个又一个漫长的

万物简史 第440期:小生物的世界(11)

In 1969, in an attempt to bring some order to the growing inadequacies of classification, 1969年，为了整理一下越来越显得不足的分类法， an ecologist from Cornell University named R. H. Whittaker unveiled in the journal Science a pr

万物简史 第430期:小生物的世界(1)

20 Small World 第二十章 小生物的世界 It's probably not a good idea to take too personal an interest in your microbes. 要是你对身边的微生物过于在意，这很可能不是个好习惯。 Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist and

万物简史 第415期:生命的起源(9)

Life emerged so swiftly, in fact, that some authorities think it must have had helpperhaps a good deal of help. 实际上，生命出现得太快，有的权威人士认为肯定有什么东西帮了忙也许是帮了大忙。 The idea that earthly l