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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Not surprisingly, such aspersions were indignantly met in America. Thomas Jefferson incorporated a furious (and, unless the context is understood, quite bewildering) rebuttal in his Notes on the State of Virginia, and induced his New Hampshire friend

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6 SCIENCE RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW 第六章 势不两立的科学 IN 1787, SOMEONE in New Jerseyexactly who now seems to be forgottenfound an enormous thighbone sticking out of a stream bank at a place called Woodbury Creek. The bone clearly didn't bel

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He had really only one flaw and that was an inability to calculate the correct age of the Earth. The question occupied much of the second half of his career, but he never came anywhere near getting it right. His first effort, in 1862 for an article i

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In the course of a long career (he lived till 1907 and the age of eighty-three), he wrote 661 papers, accumulated 69 patents (from which he grew abundantly wealthy), and gained renown in nearly every branch of the physical sciences. 在漫长的生涯里

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Unfortunately for Darwin, and for progress, the question came to the attention of the great Lord Kelvin (who, though indubitably great, was then still just plain William Thomson; he wouldn't be elevated to the peerage until 1892, when he was sixty-ei

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One of the better early attempts at dating the planet came from the ever-reliable Edmond Halley, who in 1715 suggested that if you divided the total amount of salt in the world's seas by the amount added each year, you would get the number of years t

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Lyell's oversights were not inconsiderable. He failed to explain convincingly how mountain ranges were formed and overlooked glaciers as an agent of change. He refused to accept Louis Agassiz's idea of ice agesthe refrigeration of the globe, as he di

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Among the questions that attracted interest in that fanatically inquisitive age was one that had puzzled people for a very long timenamely, why ancient clamshells and other marine fossils were so often found on mountaintops. How on earth did they get

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It was history's first cooperative international scientific venture, and almost everywhere it ran into problems. Many observers were waylaid by war, sickness, or shipwreck. Others made their destinations but opened their crates to find equipment brok

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Starting with his back against the Tower of London, Norwood spent two devoted years marching 208 miles north to York, repeatedly stretching and measuring a length of chain as he went, all the while making the most meticulous adjustments for the rise

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Quite what Halley expected to get from him when he made his unannounced visit in August 1684 we can only guess. But thanks to the later account of a Newton confidant, Abraham DeMoivre, we do have a record of one of science's most historic encounters:

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The term supernova was coined in the 1930s by a memorably odd astrophysicist named Fritz Zwicky. Born in Bulgaria and raised in Switzerland, Zwicky came to the California Institute of Technology in the 1920s and there at once distinguished himself by

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For a long time the Big Bang theory had one gaping hole that troubled a lot of peoplenamely that it couldn't begin to explain how we got here. Although 98 percent of all the matter that exists was created with the Big Bang, that matter consisted excl