万物简史 第125期:势不两立的科学(26)

Of the two, Cope's scientific legacy was much the more substantial. In a breathtakingly industrious career, he wrote some 1,400 learned papers and described almost 1,300 new species of fossil (of all types, not just dinosaurs)more than double Marsh's

万物简史 第126期:势不两立的科学(27)

As for the other players in this drama, Owen died in 1892, a few years before Cope or Marsh. Buckland ended up by losing his mind and finished his days a gibbering wreck in a lunatic asylum in Clapham, not far from where Mantell had suffered his crip

万物简史 第127期:势不两立的科学(28)

Of course dinosaur hunting didn't end with the deaths of the great nineteenth-century fossil hunters. Indeed, to a surprising extent it had only just begun. In 1898, the year that fell between the deaths of Cope and Marsh, a trove greater by far than

万物简史 第129期:基本物质(1)

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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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

万物简史 第131期:基本物质(3)

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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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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Someone of insight was needed to thrust chemistry into the modern age, and it was the French who provided him. His name was Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Born in 1743, Lavoisier was a member of the minor nobility (his father had purchased a title for th

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As a leading member of the Acadmie Royale des Sciences, he was also required to take an informed and active interest in whatever was topicalhypnotism, prison reform, the respiration of insects, the water supply of Paris. It was in such a capacity in

万物简史 第128期:势不两立的科学(29)

Other scientists besides Kelvin turned their minds to the problem and came up with results that only deepened the uncertainty. Samuel Haughton, a respected geologist at Trinity College in Dublin, announced an estimated age for the Earth of 2,300 mill

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Despite the occasional tidyings-up, chemistry by the second half of the nineteenth century was in something of a mess, which is why everybody was so pleased by the rise to prominence in 1869 of an odd and crazed-looking professor at the University of

万物简史 第149期:基本物质(21)

The nineteenth century held one last great surprise for chemists. It began in 1896 when Henri Becquerel in Paris carelessly left a packet of uranium salts on a wrapped photographic plate in a drawer. When he took theplate out some time later, he was

万物简史 第148期:基本物质(20)

For most of us, the periodic table is a thing of beauty in the abstract, but for chemists it established an immediate orderliness and clarity that can hardly be overstated. Without a doubt, the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements is the most eleg

万物简史 第147期:基本物质(19)

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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Mendeleyev used a slightly different approach, placing his elements into groups of seven, but employed fundamentally the same principle. Suddenly the idea seemed brilliant and wondrously perceptive. Because the properties repeated themselves periodic

万物简史 第145期:基本物质(17)

Mendeleyev dutifully completed his studies and eventually landed a position at the local university. There he was a competent but not terribly outstanding chemist, known more for his wild hair and beard, which he had trimmed just once a year, than fo

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In 1793, the Reign of Terror, already intense, ratcheted up to a higher gear. In October Marie Antoinette was sent to the guillotine. The following month, as Lavoisier and his wife were making tardy plans to slip away to Scotland, Lavoisier was arres

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In the early 1800s there arose in England a fashion for inhaling nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, after it was discovered that its use was attended by a highly pleasurable thrilling. For the next half century it would be the drug of choice for young p

万物简史 第138期:基本物质(10)

Things might have been worse had it not been for a splendidly improbable character named Count von Rumford, who, despite the grandeur of his title, began life in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1753 as plain Benjamin Thompson.Thompson was dashing and ambit

万物简史 第139期:基本物质(11)

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