万物简史 第483期:多灾多难的生命进程(3)

If you imagine the 4,500-million-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, 请你想像一下。把地球的45亿年历史压缩成普通的一天。 then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simpl

万物简史 第7期:引言(7)

I now know that there is a happy abundance of science writers who pen the most lucid and thrilling prose. 现在，我知道有好多好多科普作家，他们写出了通俗易懂而又激动人心的散文--Timothy Ferris, Richard Fortey, and Tim

万物简史 第1期:引言(1)

Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to creat

万物简史 第2期:引言(2)

The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting-fleeting indeed. 原子很脆弱，它们的献身时刻倏忽而过--简直是倏忽而过，这是个坏消息。 Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hour

万物简史 第5期:引言(5)

My own starting point, for what it's worth, was an illustrated science book that I had as a classroom text when I was in the fourth or fifth grade. 我写本书的最初灵感，不管其价值如何，来自我在念小学四、五年级时有过的一

万物简史 第8期:引言(8)

And ocean salinity of course represented only the merest sliver of my ignorance. 当然，海水的咸度只是我不知道的事情中的极小部分。 I didn't know what a proton was, or a protein, didn't know a quark from a quasar,我不知道什么

万物简史 第13期:如何营造一个宇宙(5)

Unknown to them, just thirty miles away at Princeton University, a team of scientists led by Robert Dicke was working on how to find the very thing they were trying so diligently to get rid of. The Princeton researchers were pursuing an idea that had

万物简史 第490期:多灾多难的生命进程(10)

Dinosaurs, whales, birds, humans, even fish all are tetrapods, which clearly suggests they come from a single common ancestor. 恐龙、鲸、鸟、人甚至鱼都是四足动物。这显然表明，它们出自一个共同的祖先。 The clue to th

万物简史 第472期:生命在前进(14)

Today some of Sprigg's original Ediacaran specimens, along with many of the other fifteen hundred specimens that have been found throughout the Flinders Range since that time, 今天，斯普里格的埃迪亚卡拉标本原件，与自那以后在整个

万物简史 第162期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(5)

What Michelson and Morley did, without actually intending to, was undermine a longstanding belief in something called the luminiferous ether, 迈克尔逊和莫雷所做的实际上是在无意之中所做的破坏了长期以来人们对一种所谓光

万物简史 第139期:基本物质(11)

In between these undertakings, he somehow found time to conduct a good deal of solid science. He became the worlds foremost authority on thermodynamics and the first to elucidate the principles of the convection offluids and the circulation of ocean

万物简史 第147期:基本物质(19)

The structure of atoms and the significance of protons will come in a following chapter, so for the moment all that is necessary is to appreciate the organizing principle: hydrogen has just one proton, and so it has an atomic number of one and comes

万物简史 第132期:基本物质(4)

Although chemistry had come a long way in the century that separated Newton and Boyle from Scheele and Priestley and Henry Cavendish, it still had a long way to go. Right up to the closing years of the eighteenth century (and in Priestley's case a li

万物简史 第131期:基本物质(3)

Scheele's one notable shortcoming was a curious insistence on tasting a little of everything he worked with, including such notoriously disagreeable substances as mercury, prussic acid (another of his discoveries), and hydrocyanic acida compound so f

万物简史 第130期:基本物质(2)

The commercial potential for the stuffwhich soon became known as phosphorus, from Greek and Latin roots meaning light bearingwas not lost on eager businesspeople, but the difficulties of manufacture made it too costly to exploit. An ounce of phosphor

万物简史 第129期:基本物质(1)

7 Elemental Matters 7 基本物质 Chemistry as an earnest and respectable science is often said to date from 1661, when Robert Boyle of Oxford published The Sceptical Chymistthe first work to distinguish between chemists and alchemistsbut it was a s

万物简史 第252期:大地在移动(6)

To be sure, Wegener made mistakes. He asserted that Greenland is drifting west by about a mile a year, which is clearly nonsense. (It's more like half an inch.) Above all, he could offer no convincing explanation for how the landmasses moved about. T

万物简史 第248期:大地在移动(2)

Taylor came from a wealthy family and had both the means and freedom from academic constraints to pursue unconventional lines of inquiry. He was one of those struck by the similarity in shape between the facing coastlines of Africa and South America,

万物简史 第516期:丰富多彩的生命(12)

The Linnaean system is so well established that we can hardly imagine an alternative, 林奈分类系统的地位已经牢固确立，我们很难想像还能有别的体系来取而代之。 but before Linnaeus, systems of classification were often

万物简史 第515期:丰富多彩的生命(11)

The flowers' leaves serve as a bridal bed, which the Creator has so gloriously arranged, 花儿的叶子当做新婚之床，这一切造物主已经作好了极好的安排， adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scen