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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Not everyone was satisfied with the results, however. The shortcoming of the Schiehallion experiment was that it was not possible to get a truly accurate figure without knowing the actual density of the mountain. For convenience, Hutton had assumed t...
With Mason refusing to survey the mountain, the job fell to Maskelyne. So for four months in the summer of 1774, Maskelyne lived in a tent in a remote Scottish glen and spent his days directing a team of surveyors, who took hundreds of measurements f...
As for Mason and Dixon, they returned to England as scientific heroes and, for reasons unknown, dissolved their partnership. Considering the frequency with which they turn up at seminal events in eighteenth-century science, remarkably little is known...
Soon afterward, Maskelyne returned to England where he became astronomer royal, and Mason and Dixonnow evidently more seasonedset off for four long and often perilous years surveying their way through 244 miles of dangerous American wilderness to set...
