万物简史 第75期:事物的测定(23)
Although he did sometimes venture into societyhe was particularly devoted to the weekly scientific soires of the great naturalist Sir Joseph Banksit was always made clear to the other guests that Cavendish was on no account to be approached or even l
万物简史 第76期:事物的测定(24)
In the course of a long life Cavendish made a string of signal discoveriesamong much else he was the first person to isolate hydrogen and the first to combine hydrogen and oxygen to form waterbut almost nothing he did was entirely divorced from stran
万物简史 第77期:事物的测定(25)
When assembled, Michell's apparatus looked like nothing so much as an eighteenth-century version of a Nautilus weight-training machine. It incorporated weights, counterweights, pendulums, shafts, and torsion wires. 装配完毕以后，米歇尔的仪器
万物简史 第78期:事物的测定(26)
Delicacy was the key word. Not a whisper of disturbance could be allowed into the room containing the apparatus, so Cavendish took up a position in an adjoining room and made his observations with a telescope aimed through a peephole. The work was in
万物简史 第79期:敲石头的人们(1)
5 THE STONE-BREAKERS 5 敲石头的人们 At just the time that Henry Cavendish was completing his experiments in London, four hundred miles away in Edinburgh another kind of concluding moment was about to take place with the death of James Hutton. T
万物简史 第80期:敲石头的人们(2)
Yet almost singlehandedly, and quite brilliantly, he created the science of geology and transformed our understanding of the Earth. Hutton was born in 1726 into a prosperous Scottish family, and enjoyed the sort of material comfort that allowed him t
万物简史 第81期:敲石头的人们(3)
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
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84期:敲石头的人们(6)
Luckily Hutton had a Boswell in the form of John Playfair, a professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh and a close friend, who could not only write silken prose butthanks to many years at Hutton's elbowactually understood what Hutton wa
万物简史 第85期:敲石头的人们(7)
The members met twice a month from November until June, when virtually all of them went off to spend the summer doing fieldwork. These weren't people with a pecuniary interest in minerals, you understand, or even academics for the most part, but simp
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88期:敲石头的人们(13)
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
万物简史 第89期:敲石头的人们(14)
Meanwhile, geology had a great deal of sorting out to do, and not all of it went smoothly. From the outset geologists tried to categorize rocks by the periods in which they were laid down, but there were often bitter disagreements about where to put
