万物简史 第120期:势不两立的科学(21)
Owen would never again do important research, but the latter half of his career was devoted to one unexceptionable pursuit for which we can all be grateful. In 1856 he became head of the natural history section of the British Museum, in which capacit
万物简史 第121期:势不两立的科学(22)
Still, his altruism in general toward his fellow man did not deflect him from more personal rivalries. One of his last official acts was to lobby against a proposal to erect a statue in memory of Charles Darwin. In this he failedthough he did achieve
万物简史 第122期:势不两立的科学(23)
They began as mutual friends and admirers, even naming fossil species after each other, and spent a pleasant week together in 1868. However, something then went wrong between themnobody is quite sure whatand by the following year they had developed a
万物简史 第123期:势不两立的科学(24)
Cope was born more directly into privilegehis father was a rich Philadelphia businessmanand was by far the more adventurous of the two. In the summer of 1876 in Montana while George Armstrong Custer and his troops were being cut down at Little Big Ho
万物简史 第124期:势不两立的科学(25)
It also marked the start of a war between the two that became increasingly bitter, underhand, and often ridiculous. They sometimes stooped to one team's diggers throwing rocks at the other team's. Cope was caught at one point jimmying open crates tha
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
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
万物简史 第130期:基本物质(2)
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
万物简史 第132期:基本物质(4)
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
万物简史 第133期:基本物质(5)
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
万物简史 第138期:基本物质(6)
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
