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...
Evans's is a talent so exceptional that Oliver Sacks, in An Anthropologist on Mars, devotes a passage to him in a chapter on autistic savantsquickly adding that there is no suggestion that he is autistic. Evans, who has not met Sacks, laughs at the s...
Supernovae occur when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time brighter than all the stars in its galaxy. It's like a t...
3 THE REVEREND EVANS'S UNIVERSE 3.埃文斯牧师的宇宙 When the skies are clear and the Moon is not too bright, the Reverend Robert Evans, a quiet and cheerful man, lugs a bulky telescope onto the back deck of his home in the Blue Mountains of Au...
What an interesting and exciting thought. We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, w...
Still, statistically the probability that there are other thinking beings out there is good. Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Wayestimates range from 100 billion or so to perhaps 400 billionand the Milky Way is just one of 140 billi...
So that's your solar system. And what else is out there, beyond the solar system? Well, nothing and a great deal, depending on how you look at it. 这就是你所在的太阳系。太阳系之外还有别的什么？哎呀，也许什么也没有，也...
But let's pretend again that we have made it to the Oort cloud. The first thing you might notice is how very peaceful it is out here. We're a long way from anywhere nowso far from our own Sun that it's not even the brightest star in the sky. It is a...
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...
So the solar system is really quite enormous. By the time we reach Pluto, we have come so far that the Sunour dear, warm, skin-tanning, life-giving Sunhas shrunk to the size of a pinhead. It is little more than a bright star. 所以，太阳系确实是...
