萬(wàn)物簡(jiǎn)史 第92期:敲石頭的人們(24)

He had really only one flaw and that was aninability to calculate the correct age of the Earth.The question occupied much of the second half ofhis career, but he never came anywhere near gettingit right. His first effort, in 1862 for an article in apopular magazine called Macmillan's, suggestedthat the Earth was 98 million years old, butcautiously allowed that the figure could be as low as20 million years or as high as 400 million. Withremarkable prudence he acknowledged that hiscalculations could be wrong if "sources nowunknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation"—but it was clear that hethought that unlikely.

他實(shí)際上只有一個(gè)瑕疵，那就是沒(méi)能計(jì)算出地球的年齡。這個(gè)問(wèn)題占去了他后半生的許多時(shí)間，但他從來(lái)沒(méi)有得出個(gè)比較正確的數(shù)字。1862年，在為一本名叫《麥克米倫》的通俗雜志寫(xiě)的一篇文章里，他第一次提出地球的年齡是9800萬(wàn)年，但謹(jǐn)慎地認(rèn)為這個(gè)數(shù)字最小可為2000萬(wàn)年，最大可達(dá)4億年。他還小心翼翼地承認(rèn)，他的計(jì)算可能是錯(cuò)的，要是"造物主的大倉(cāng)庫(kù)里備有我們目前沒(méi)有掌握的資料"的話(huà)--但是，他顯然認(rèn)為那是不可能的。

With the passage of time Kelvin would become more forthright in his assertions and lesscorrect. He continually revised his estimates downward, from a maximum of 400 million years,to 100 million years, to 50 million years, and finally, in 1897, to a mere 24 million years.

隨著時(shí)間的過(guò)去，開(kāi)爾文的結(jié)論變得越來(lái)越確切，越來(lái)越不正確。他不停地把自己的估計(jì)數(shù)字往下降，從最大的4億年降到1億年，然后又降到5000萬(wàn)年，最后在1897年降到了僅僅2400萬(wàn)年。

Kelvin wasn't being willful. It was simply that there was nothing in physics that could explainhow a body the size of the Sun could burn continuously for more than a few tens of millions ofyears at most without exhausting its fuel. Therefore it followed that the Sun and its planetswere relatively, but inescapably, youthful.

開(kāi)爾文并不是在隨心所欲，只是因?yàn)槲锢韺W(xué)無(wú)法解釋為什么像太陽(yáng)這么個(gè)龐然大物可以連續(xù)燃燒幾千萬(wàn)年以上，而又耗不盡其燃料。因此，他就想當(dāng)然地認(rèn)為，太陽(yáng)及其行星必然相對(duì)年輕。

The problem was that nearly all the fossil evidence contradicted this, and suddenly in thenineteenth century there was a lot of fossil evidence.

問(wèn)題在于，幾乎所有的化石都證明和這個(gè)結(jié)論相矛盾。而突然之間，19世紀(jì)發(fā)現(xiàn)了大量的化石。