万物简史 第96期:敲石头的人们(21)

By the middle of the nineteenth century most learned people thought the Earth was at least a few million years old, perhaps even some tens of millions of years old, but probably not more than that. So it came as a surprise when, in 1859 in On the Ori

万物简史 第87期:敲石头的人们(9)

Then there was Dr. James Parkinson, who was also an early socialist and author of many provocative pamphlets with titles like Revolution without Bloodshed. In 1794, he was implicated in a faintly lunatic-sounding conspiracy called the Pop-gun Plot, i

万物简史 第83期:敲石头的人们(5)

In 1785, Hutton worked his ideas up into a long paper, which was read at consecutive meetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. It attracted almost no notice at all. It's not hard to see why. Here, in part, is how he presented it to his audience: 17

万物简史 第73期:事物的测定(21)

Not everyone was satisfied with the results, however. The shortcoming of the Schiehallion experiment was that it was not possible to get a truly accurate figure without knowing the actual density of the mountain. For convenience, Hutton had assumed t

万物简史 第72期:事物的测定(20)

With Mason refusing to survey the mountain, the job fell to Maskelyne. So for four months in the summer of 1774, Maskelyne lived in a tent in a remote Scottish glen and spent his days directing a team of surveyors, who took hundreds of measurements f

万物简史 第71期:事物的测定(19)

As for Mason and Dixon, they returned to England as scientific heroes and, for reasons unknown, dissolved their partnership. Considering the frequency with which they turn up at seminal events in eighteenth-century science, remarkably little is known

万物简史 第69期:事物的测定(17)

In comparison, the disappointments experienced by Britain's eighteen scattered observers were mild. Mason found himself paired with a young surveyor named Jeremiah Dixon and apparently they got along well, for they formed a lasting partnership. 比较而

万物简史 第62期:事物的测定(9)

Principia's production was not without drama. To Halley's horror, just as work was nearing completion Newton and Hooke fell into dispute over the priority for the inverse square law and Newton refused to release the crucial third volume, without whic

万物简史 第67期:事物的测定(15)

At his urging, the Royal Society agreed to engage a reliable figure to tour the British Isles to see if such a mountain could be found. Maskelyne knew just such a personthe astronomer and surveyor Charles Mason. Maskelyne and Mason had become friends

万物简史 第58期:事物的测定(5)

For all his brilliance, real science accounted for only a part of his interests. At least half his working life was given over to alchemy and wayward religious pursuits. These were not mere dabblings but wholehearted devotions. He was a secret adhere

万物简史 第55期:事物的测定(2)

At one point the group had to suspend work for eight months while La Condamine rode off to Lima to sort out a problem with their permits. Eventually he and Bouguer stopped speaking and refused to work together. Everywhere the dwindling party went it

万物简史 第32期:走进太阳系(10)

Of course we have no prospect of such a journey. A trip of 240,000 miles to the Moon still represents a very big undertaking for us. A manned mission to Mars, called for by the first President Bush in a moment of passing giddiness, was quietly droppe

万物简史 第45期:埃文斯牧师的宇宙(9)

So when a hopeful and softspoken minister got in touch to ask if they had any usable field charts for hunting supernovae, the astronomical community thought he was out of his mind. At the time Evans had a ten-inch telescopea very respectable size for

万物简史 第42期:埃文斯牧师的宇宙(6)

On January 15, 1934, the journal Physical Review published a very concise abstract of a presentation that had been conducted by Zwicky and Baade the previous month at Stanford University. 1934年1月15日，《物理学评论》杂志刊登了一篇论

万物简史 第28期:走进太阳系(6)

So if Pluto really is a planet, it is certainly an odd one. It is very tiny: just one-quarter of 1 percent as massive as Earth. If you set it down on top of the United States, it would cover not quite half the lower forty-eight states. 因此，如果冥

万物简史 第27期:走进太阳系(5)

As for Pluto itself, nobody is quite sure how big it is, or what it is made of, what kind of atmosphere it has, or even what it really is. A lot of astronomers believe it isn't a planet at all, but merely the largest object so far found in a zone of

万物简史 第25期:走进太阳系(3)

One nice touch about Christy's discovery was that it happened in Flagstaff, for it was there in 1930 that Pluto had been found in the first place. That seminal event in astronomy was largely to the credit of the astronomer Percival Lowell. 克里斯蒂

万物简史 第24期:走进太阳系(2)

This was actually something of a blow to Pluto's status as a planet, which had never been terribly robust anyway. Since previously the space occupied by the moon and the space occupied by Pluto were thought to be one and the same, it meant that Pluto

万物简史 第17期:如何营造一个宇宙(9)

The eventual result was the inflation theory, which holds that a fraction of a moment after the dawn of creation, the universe underwent a sudden dramatic expansion. It inflatedin effect ran away with itself, doubling in size every 10-34seconds. The

万物简史 第405期:浩瀚的海洋(24)

Nothing, however, compares with the fate of cod. 然而，命运最惨的要算是鳕鱼。 In the late fifteenth century, the explorer John Cabot found cod in incredible numbers on the eastern banks of North America, 15世纪末，探险家约翰卡伯