万物简史 第226期:把铅撵出去(15)

Absurdly, he was excluded from a 1971 National Research Council panel appointed to investigate the dangers of atmospheric lead poisoning even though he was by now unquestionably the leading expert on atmospheric lead. 荒唐的是，一个美国研究委

万物简史 第223期:把铅撵出去(12)

As always, however, nothing was quite as straightforward as such a breezy description makes it sound. Meteorites are not abundant and meteoritic samples not especially easy to get hold of. Moreover, Brown's measurement technique proved finicky in the

万物简史 第218期:把铅撵出去(7)

Rather than restate every one, scientists decided to keep the inaccurate constant. Thus, Tim Flannery notes, every raw radiocarbon date you read today is given as too young by around 3 percent. The problems didn't quite stop there. It was also quickl

万物简史 第215期:把铅撵出去(4)

Buoyed by the success of leaded gasoline, Midgley now turned to another technological problem of the age. Refrigerators in the 1920s were often appallingly risky because they used dangerous gases that sometimes leaked. One leak from a refrigerator at

万物简史 第214期:把铅撵出去(3)

As Sharon Bertsch McGrayne notes in her absorbing history of industrial chemistry, Prometheans in the Lab, when employees at one plant developed irreversible delusions, a spokesman blandly informed reporters: These men probably went insane because th

万物简史 第221期:把铅撵出去(10)

But there were many technical difficulties to overcome. Holmes also neededor at least would very much have appreciatedsophisticated gadgetry of a sort that could make very fine measurements from tiny samples, and as we have seen it was all he could d

万物简史 第213期:把铅撵出去(2)

Lead is a neurotoxin. Get too much of it and you can irreparably damage the brain and central nervous system. Among the many symptoms associated with overexposure are blindness, insomnia, kidney failure, hearing loss, cancer, palsies, and convulsions

万物简史 第212期:把铅撵出去(1)

10 Getting The Lead Out 第十章 把铅撵出去 In the late 1940s, a graduate student at the University of Chicago named Clair Patterson (who was, first name notwithstanding, an Iowa farm boy by origin) was using a new method of lead isotope measur

万物简史 第208期:威力巨大的原子(22)

Remarkably, the phenomenon was proved in 1997 when physicists at the University of Geneva sent photons seven miles in opposite directions and demonstrated that interfering with one provoked an instantaneous response in the other. 令人惊叹的是，这

万物简史 第200期:威力巨大的原子(14)

Neutrons and protons occupy the atom's nucleus. The nucleus of an atom is tinyonly one millionth of a billionth of the full volume of the atombut fantastically dense, since it contains virtually all the atom's mass. As Cropper has put it, if an atom

万物简史 第172期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(15)

In 1907, or so it has sometimes been written, Albert Einstein saw a workman fall off a roof and began to think about gravity. 1907年，反正有时候书上是这么写的，有个工人从房顶上掉了下来，爱因斯坦就开始考虑引力的问

万物简史 第181期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(24)

In 1919, now aged thirty, he moved to California and took up a position at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles. Swiftly, and more than a little unexpectedly, he became the most outstanding astronomer of the twentieth century. 1919年，他已

万物简史 第175期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(18)

Howeverand heres the thingpeople on the train would have no sense of these distortions. 然而问题就在这里车上的人并不觉得自己变了形。 To them, everything on the train would seem quite normal. 在他们看来，车上的一切似乎

万物简史 第509期:丰富多彩的生命(5)

You might not think there would be that many people in the world prepared to devote lifetimes to the study of something so inescapably low key, 你或许会认为，世界上不会有多少人愿意花毕生的心血来研究那个不起眼儿的东西

万物简史 第510期:丰富多彩的生命(6)

When a new moss is found it must be compared with all other mosses to make sure that it hasn't been recorded already. 要是发现了一种新的苔藓，就要把它和所有别的苔藓进行比较，看看是不是已经有过记录。 Then a form

万物简史 第379期:进入对流层(20)

One of the oddities of our solar system is that the Sun burns about 25 percent more brightly now than when the solar system was young. 现在太阳燃烧的旺度，要比太阳系形成之初强了大约25%，这是我们太阳系的怪事之一。

万物简史 第388期:浩瀚的海洋(7)

In the 1830s, the British naturalist Edward Forbes surveyed ocean beds throughout the Atlantic and Mediterranean 19世纪30年代，英国博物学家爱德华福布斯勘察了大西佯和地中海各处的海床， and declared that there was no li

万物简史 第389期:浩瀚的海洋(8)

They also discovered, by means of depth measurements, that there appeared to be submerged mountains in the mid-Atlantic, 通过测量深度，他们还发现大西洋中部的水底下似乎有山脉。 prompting some excited observers to speculate t

万物简史 第391期:浩瀚的海洋(10)

At 3,000 feet, their little porthole was subjected to nineteen tons of pressure per square inch. 到了900米，小舷窗受到的压力高达每平方厘米2.95吨。 Death at such a depth would have been instantaneous, as Beebe never failed to obse

万物简史 第364期:进入对流层(5)

In The Other Side of Everest, the British mountaineer and filmmaker Matt Dickinson records how Howard Somervell, 在《珠穆朗玛峰的另一侧》中，英国登山家兼电影制片人马特迪金森记录下了霍华德萨默维尔的情况。 o