萬物簡史 第57期:事物的測定(15)

At his urging, the Royal Society agreed to engage areliable figure to tour the British Isles to see if sucha mountain could be found. Maskelyne knew justsuch a person—the astronomer and surveyorCharles Mason. Maskelyne and Mason had becomefriends eleven years earlier while engaged in aproject to measure an astronomical event of greatimportance: the passage of the planet Venus acrossthe face of the Sun. The tireless Edmond Halley hadsuggested years before that if you measured one ofthese passages from selected points on the Earth,you could use the principles of triangulation to work out the distance to the Sun, and from thatcalibrate the distances to all the other bodies in the solar system.

在他的敦促之下，英國皇家學(xué)會同意聘請一位可靠的人去考察英倫三島，看看能否找到這樣的一座山。馬斯基林恰好認識這樣的一個人--天文學(xué)家和測量學(xué)家查爾斯·梅森。馬斯基林和梅森11年前已經(jīng)成為朋友，他們曾一塊兒承擔(dān)一個測量一起重大天文事件的項目：金星凌日現(xiàn)象。不知疲倦的埃德蒙·哈雷幾年前已經(jīng)建議，要是在地球上選定幾個位置測量一次這種現(xiàn)象，你就可用三角測繪法的定律來計算地球到太陽的距離，并由此計算出到太陽系所有其他天體的距離。

Unfortunately, transits of Venus, as they are known, are an irregular occurrence. They comein pairs eight years apart, but then are absent for a century or more, and there were none inHalley's lifetime. The next transit will be on June 8, 2004, with a second in 2012. There werenone in the twentieth century. But the idea simmered and when the next transit came due in1761, nearly two decades after Halley's death, the scientific world was ready—indeed, moreready than it had been for an astronomical event before.

不幸的是，所謂的金星凌日是一件不規(guī)則的事。這一現(xiàn)象結(jié)對而來，相隔8年，然后一個世紀(jì)甚至更長時間都不發(fā)生一次。在哈雷的生命期里不會發(fā)生這種現(xiàn)象。下一次將會是在2004年的6月8號，2012年也將持續(xù)幾秒。可是20世紀(jì)里不會出現(xiàn)那種現(xiàn)象。但是，這個想法一直存在。1761年，在哈雷去世將近20年以后，當(dāng)下一次凌日準(zhǔn)時來到的時候，科學(xué)界已經(jīng)作好準(zhǔn)備工作--準(zhǔn)備得比觀測以往任何一次天文現(xiàn)象都要充分。

With the instinct for ordeal that characterized the age, scientists set off for more than ahundred locations around the globe—to Siberia, China, South Africa, Indonesia, and the woodsof Wisconsin, among many others. France dispatched thirty-two observers, Britain eighteenmore, and still others set out from Sweden, Russia, Italy, Germany, Ireland, and elsewhere.

憑著吃苦的本能--這是那個時代的特點--科學(xué)家們奔赴全球100多個地點--其中有俄羅斯西伯利亞、中國、南非、印度尼西亞以及美國威斯康星州的叢林。法國派出了32名觀測人員，英國18名，還有來自瑞典、俄羅斯、意大利、德國、冰島等國的觀測人員。