介绍： 【最牛英文书单NO. 8】 万物简史—颠覆人生观的科普经典书

书 名：A Short History of Nearly Everything
作 者：Bill Bryson
译 者：严维明 / 陈邕
豆瓣评分：8.8
朗 读：Richard Matthews

简介：

这是一本迷人的科普书。对，迷人。

作者以一贯的幽默和宛如侦探小说一般悬念迭起的笔法描述了地球往事，回溯了科学史上那些伟大...

介绍： 【最牛英文书单NO. 8】 万物简史—颠覆人生观的科普经典书

书 名：A Short History of Nearly Everything
作 者：Bill Bryson
译 者：严维明 / 陈邕
豆瓣评分：8.8
朗 读：Richard Matthews

简介：

这是一本迷人的科普书。对，迷人。

作者以一贯的幽默和宛如侦探小说一般悬念迭起的笔法描述了地球往事，回溯了科学史上那些伟大而奇妙的时刻，揭示了那些显而易见我们却习以为常的秘密，八卦了那些有着千奇百怪癖好的科学家们。

这不止是一本科普书。远不止。

本书从科学发展史的角度对“我们从哪里来？我们是谁？我们到哪里去？”这一终极哲学命题作了精彩的阐释。很可能您也会像小编一样，读完后对人生有了不同的思考。

比尔·布莱森，在英国居住20年之久的美国作家，兼具英国式的睿智幽默与美国式的通俗易懂，文风尖刻、智慧，可读性极强。作者代表作有：《“小不列颠”札记》、《失落的大陆：美国小城之旅》、《布莱森英语简史》、《人在故乡为异客：二十年后返乡手记》等。小编均强推。

《万物简史》节选

If you imagine the 4,500 million odd year of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day then life begins very early, about 4 a.m., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next 16 hours.
试想象一下，把地球的45亿年奇异历史压缩成普通的一天。那么，生命起始时间很早，大概在凌晨4点钟就出现首批最简单的单细胞生物，但是接下来的16个小时内，事情并没有什么进展。

Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has the Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes.
差不多一直到晚上8：30，在这一天已经过去六分之五的时候，地球才向宇宙拿出来一点成绩，但也就是不过一层不停蠕动的微生物而已。
Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed 20 minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 p.m., trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale.
然后，终于出现了第一批海生植物。20分钟以后，又出现了第一批水母，以及雷金纳德· 斯普里格最先在澳大利亚看到的那个神秘的艾迪亚卡拉动物群。晚上9:04，三叶虫登场了；布尔吉斯页岩那些形状美观的动物差不多紧随其后出现了。

Just before 10 p.m., plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.
快到10点钟的时候，植物开始出现在大地上。没过多久，在这一天还剩下不到两个小时的时候，第一批陆生动物也紧接着出现了。

Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident.
适宜的天气持续了大约10分钟，到了10:24，地球上已经覆盖上着石炭纪的大森林；它们的残留物变成了后来的煤。而第一批有翼的昆虫也亮了相。

Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 p.m. and hold sway for about three quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins.
晚上11点刚过，恐龙迈着缓慢的脚步登上了舞台，支配了世界三刻钟左右。在午夜前20分钟时，它们消失了。哺乳动物的时代开始了。

Humans emerge 1 minute and 17 seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds. A single human lifetime? Barely an instant.
人类在午夜前1分17秒出现。按照这个比例，全部有历史记载的人类史也只是几秒钟；而一个人的一生，不过刹那光阴。

Throughout this greatly speeded-up day, continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw.
在这加速快进的一天中，大陆四处移动，以不顾一切的速度地彼此撞击。大山隆起了又复平，海洋盆地形成了又消失，冰原前进了又后退。
And throughout the whole, about three times every minutes, somewhere on the planet there is a flashbulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor, or one even larger.
在整个这段时间内，大约每分钟三次，在我们这颗星球的某个地方会亮起一道闪光，那是由于一颗曼森陨石坑大小的陨石撞击了地球，而有时撞来的陨石远大于此。

It’s a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.
在不断遭受陨石撞击的这种极不稳定的环境里，竟然有东西能够存活下来，不得不说是个奇迹。不过其实，能挺得过很长时间的东西确实不多。

Perhaps an even more effective way of grasping our extreme recentness as a part of this 4.5-billion-year-old picture is to stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of the Earth.
要了解在这部45亿年长的电影里，人类的登场时间是多么微不足道，还有一种方式：你把自己的两条手臂伸展到最长，然后想象一下这个长度就是整部地球史的长度。

On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, “and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.”

根据约翰· 迈克菲在《海洋和山脉》书中所讲，按照这个比例，从一只手的指尖到另一只手的手腕之间的距离代表了寒武纪之前历史长度。全部复杂生命存在的时间，仅存在一只手的长度里，书里说，“你拿起一把中度粒面的指甲锉，一下子就可以锉掉整部人类史。”

Fortunately, that moment hasn’t happened, but the chances are good that it will. I don’t wish to interject a note of gloom just at this point, but the fact is that there is one other extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth: it goes extinct. Quite regularly.
好在这一刻暂未到来，但它很可能在将来的某一时间。我无意在这时散布悲观论调，但其实，地球生命还有一个非常类似的特点：生命在灭绝。而且极为定期地发生。

For all the trouble they take to assemble and preserve themselves, species crumple and die remarkably routinely. And the more complex they get, the more quickly they appear to go extinct. Which is perhaps one reason why so much of life isn’t terribly ambitious.
尽管这些物种历经九九八十一难才得以形成和存活，它们还是不可思议地时常崩溃、灭绝。而且，似乎是，物种越是进化得复杂，灭绝得越是快速。所以说，很多生命没有进化得很出息，也许，这是个原因。