标签：简史 相关文章
Still less could we send up a shipload of space cowboys to do the job for us, as in the movie Armageddon; 我们更不可能发射一飞船警察去为我们干这个活儿，就像电影《善恶大决战》里的场面那样； we no longer possess
万物简史
As one commentator has put it, fleeing would mean selecting a slow death over a quick one. 有一位评论家说，逃跑意味着在慢死和快死之中选择慢死。 The death toll would be very little affected by any plausible relocation effort,
万物简史
As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, 使用过打气筒的人都知道，受到压缩的空气马上会变热， and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperatur
万物简史
One fragment, known as Nucleus G, struck with the force of about six million megatonsseventy-five times more than all the nuclear weaponry in existence. 有个名叫核G的碎块，其撞击威力高达6亿吨级──相当于现有核武器的总威力
万物简史
The first Anderson or Witzke learned of this setback to their careers was when they arrived at a conference in South Dakota 这对他们的事业是个挫折。安德森和威策克最初听到这个消息是在他们出席南达科他州的一次会议
万物简史
Suddenly we were at the center of things, Anderson told me, 突然之间，我们来到一大堆东西中间。安德森想起当年的情景， gleaming at the memory of it, when I met him and Witzke in their offices on a dismal, rainy morning in Ju
万物简史
I'm not mocking this at allit's vital and enlightened work; it keeps Iowa's water cleanbut with the best will in the world it's not exactly dodging lava bombs on Mount Pinatubo or scrabbling over crevasses on the Greenland ice sheet in search of anci
万物简史
He insisted that the iridium had been deposited by volcanic action, 他坚持认为，铱是由火山活动沉积的， even while conceding in a newspaper interview that he had no actual evidence of it. 即使他在一次记者采访中承认，他拿
万物简史
The results were so unexpected, in fact, that the three scientists at first thought they had to be wrong. 实际上，结果完全出人意料，三位科学家起先以为自己错了。 The amount of iridium in the Alvarez sample was more than thre
万物简史
But the thinness of the clay layer clearly suggested that in Umbria, if nowhere else, something rather more abrupt had happened. 但是，这层薄薄的黏土显然表明，在翁布里亚，如果不是在别处的话，事情发生得非常突然。
万物简史
One geologist later described it as probably the most significant paper in the earth sciences ever to be denied publication. 有一位地质学家后来把它描述成很可能是有史以来被拒绝发表的最有意义的地球科学论文。 At a
万物简史
Earth is alone among the rocky planets in having tectonics, and why this should be is a bit of a mystery. It is not simply a matter of size or densityVenus is nearly a twin of Earth in these respects and yet has no tectonic activity. It is thoughttho
万物简史
No one can say what causes the oceans' chemistry to change so dramatically from time to time, but the opening and shutting of ocean ridges would be an obvious possible culprit. 谁也说不清什么原因导致了海洋化学成分不时发生戏剧性
万物简史
In a sense it hardly matters. 在某种意义上，这项工作并不很重要。 Identifying an asteroid doesn't make it safe. 确认一颗小行星不会使它安全一点。 Even if every asteroid in the solar system had a name and known orbit, 即使
万物简史
Australia, meanwhile, has been tilting and sinking. Over the past 100 million years as it has drifted north toward Asia, its leading edge has sunk by some six hundred feet. It appears that Indonesia is very slowly drowning, and dragging Australia dow
万物简史
but in the 1950s Patrick Blackett of the University of London and S. K. Runcorn of the University of Newcastle studied the ancient magnetic patterns frozen in British rocks and were startled, to say the very least, to find them indicating that at som
万物简史
That explained where all the sediment went. It was being returned to the bowels of the Earth. It also explained why ocean floors everywhere were so comparatively youthful. None had ever been found to be older than about 175 million years, which was a
万物简史
A very little of this had been known for some time. People laying ocean-floor cables in the nineteenth century had realized that there was some kind of mountainous intrusion in the mid-Atlantic from the way the cables ran, but the continuous nature a
万物简史
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
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