萬物簡史 第69期:敲石頭的人們(1)

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5 敲石頭的人們

At just the time that Henry Cavendish wascompleting his experiments in London, four hundredmiles away in Edinburgh another kind of concludingmoment was about to take place with the death ofJames Hutton. This was bad news for Hutton, ofcourse, but good news for science as it cleared theway for a man named John Playfair to rewriteHutton's work without fear of embarrassment.

正當(dāng)亨利·卡文迪許在倫敦完成試驗(yàn)的時(shí)候，在650公里之外的愛丁堡，另一個(gè)重大時(shí)刻隨著詹姆斯·赫頓的去世而即將到來。這對赫頓來說當(dāng)然是壞消息，但對科學(xué)界來說卻是個(gè)好消息，因?yàn)樗鼮橐粋€(gè)名叫約翰·普萊費(fèi)爾的人無愧地改寫赫頓的作品鋪平了道路。

Hutton was by all accounts a man of the keenest insights and liveliest conversation, a delightin company, and without rival when it came to understanding the mysterious slow processesthat shaped the Earth. Unfortunately, it was beyond him to set down his notions in a form thatanyone could begin to understand. He was, as one biographer observed with an all butaudible sigh, "almost entirely innocent of rhetorical accomplishments." Nearly every line hepenned was an invitation to slumber. Here he is in his 1795 masterwork, A Theory of theEarth with Proofs and Illustrations , discussing . . . something:

赫頓毫無疑問是個(gè)目光敏銳、非常健談的人，一個(gè)愉快的伙伴。他在了解地球那神秘而又緩慢的形成過程方面是無與倫比的。不幸的是，他不會以人人都能基本理解的形式寫下他的見解。有一位傳記作家長嘆一聲，說，他"幾乎完全不懂得怎么使用語言"。他差不多每次寫一行字就要想睡覺。在他1795年的杰作《地球論以及證據(jù)與說明》中，他是這樣討論......某個(gè)問題的：

The world which we inhabit is composed of the materials, not of the earth which was theimmediate predecessor of the present, but of the earth which, in ascending from the present,we consider as the third, and which had preceded the land that was above the surface of thesea, while our present land was yet beneath the water of the ocean.

我們居住的世界不是由組成當(dāng)時(shí)地球的直接前身的物質(zhì)所構(gòu)成的，而是從當(dāng)今往前追溯，由我們認(rèn)為是第三代的地球的物質(zhì)所構(gòu)成的，那個(gè)地球出現(xiàn)在陸地露出海面之前，而我們現(xiàn)今的陸地當(dāng)時(shí)還在海水底下。