万物简史 第150期:基本物质(22)

At McGill University in Montreal the young New Zealandborn Ernest Rutherford became interested in the new radioactive materials. With a colleague named Frederick Soddy he discovered that immense reserves of energy were bound up in these small amounts

万物简史 第145期:基本物质(17)

Mendeleyev dutifully completed his studies and eventually landed a position at the local university. There he was a competent but not terribly outstanding chemist, known more for his wild hair and beard, which he had trimmed just once a year, than fo

万物简史 第146期:基本物质(18)

Mendeleyev used a slightly different approach, placing his elements into groups of seven, but employed fundamentally the same principle. Suddenly the idea seemed brilliant and wondrously perceptive. Because the properties repeated themselves periodic

万物简史 第149期:基本物质(21)

The nineteenth century held one last great surprise for chemists. It began in 1896 when Henri Becquerel in Paris carelessly left a packet of uranium salts on a wrapped photographic plate in a drawer. When he took theplate out some time later, he was

万物简史 第138期:基本物质(6)

As a leading member of the Acadmie Royale des Sciences, he was also required to take an informed and active interest in whatever was topicalhypnotism, prison reform, the respiration of insects, the water supply of Paris. It was in such a capacity in

万物简史 第126期:势不两立的科学(27)

As for the other players in this drama, Owen died in 1892, a few years before Cope or Marsh. Buckland ended up by losing his mind and finished his days a gibbering wreck in a lunatic asylum in Clapham, not far from where Mantell had suffered his crip

万物简史 第125期:势不两立的科学(26)

Of the two, Cope's scientific legacy was much the more substantial. In a breathtakingly industrious career, he wrote some 1,400 learned papers and described almost 1,300 new species of fossil (of all types, not just dinosaurs)more than double Marsh's

万物简史 第121期:势不两立的科学(22)

Still, his altruism in general toward his fellow man did not deflect him from more personal rivalries. One of his last official acts was to lobby against a proposal to erect a statue in memory of Charles Darwin. In this he failedthough he did achieve

万物简史 第118期:势不两立的科学(19)

Capitalizing on Mantell's enfeebled state, Owen set about systematically expunging Mantell's contributions from the record, renaming species that Mantell had named years before and claiming credit for their discovery for himself. Mantell continued to

万物简史 第116期:势不两立的科学(17)

Owen was not an attractive person, in appearance or in temperament. A photograph from his late middle years shows him as gaunt and sinister, like the villain in a Victorian melodrama, with long, lank hair and bulging eyesa face to frighten babies. In

万物简史 第113期:势不两立的科学(14)

In the district of Sydenham in south London, at a place called Crystal Palace Park, there stands a strange and forgotten sight: the world's first life-sized models of dinosaurs. Not many people travel there these days, but once this was one of the mo

万物简史 第108期:势不两立的科学(9)

By this time, however, paleontological momentum had moved to England. In 1812, at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, an extraordinary child named Mary Anningaged eleven, twelve, or thirteen, depending on whose account you readfound a strange fossilized

万物简史 第107期:势不两立的科学(8)

So by the early years of the nineteenth century, fossils had taken on a certain inescapable importance, which makes Wistar's failure to see the significance of his dinosaur bone all the more unfortunate. Suddenly, in any case, bones were turning up a

万物简史 第105期:势不两立的科学(6)

In the same yearin fact, the same monththat the aristocratic and celebrated Cuvier was propounding his extinction theories in Paris, on the other side of the English Channel a rather more obscure Englishman was having an insight into the value of fos

万物简史 第93期:敲石头的人们(18)

Moreover, all this applies only to units of time . Rocks are divided into quite separate units known as systems, series, and stages. A distinction is also made between late and early (referring to time) and upper and lower (referring to layers of roc

万物简史 第92期:敲石头的人们(17)

Then come Lyell's epochsthe Pleistocene, Miocene, and so onwhich apply only to the most recent (but paleontologically busy) sixty-five million years, and finally we have a mass of finer subdivisions known as stages or ages. Most of these are named, n

万物简史 第104期:势不两立的科学(5)

Inspired by the controversy, in 1796 Cuvier wrote a landmark paper, Note on the Species of Living and Fossil Elephants, in which he put forward for the first time a formal theory of extinctions. His belief was that from time to time the Earth experie

万物简史 第86期:敲石头的人们(8)

Throughout the modern, thinking world, but especially in Britain, men of learning ventured into the countryside to do a little stone-breaking, as they called it. It was a pursuit taken seriously, and they tended to dress with appropriate gravity, in

万物简史 第82期:敲石头的人们(4)

It was while puzzling over these matters that Hutton had a series of exceptional insights. From looking at his own farmland, he could see that soil was created by the erosion of rocks and that particles of this soil were continually washed away and c

万物简史 第74期:事物的测定(22)

In 1781 Herschel became the first person in the modern era to discover a planet. He wanted to call it George, after the British monarch, but was overruled. Instead it became Uranus. 1781年，赫歇尔成为现代行星发现者的先驱。他曾想把