北宋嘉佑年间，眉州苏洵带着自己的两个儿子——苏轼、小苏苏辙出蜀进京赶考，高榜得中，深得仁宗宠爱。苏洵的《六国论》也轰动京师，“三苏”从此扬名天下。然而，抱负不凡、具有天纵之才、且被王安石称为“不知更几百年才出如此人物”的苏东坡，一个纵横于儒、释、道，诗词书画皆为另辟新界开山人物的苏东坡，一个在慈善事业和公立医院领域首开世界先河的苏东坡，一个政绩卓著、爱民如子、文韬武略兼备的苏东坡，却历尽坎坷，万劫不死。岁月失于道路，命运困于党争，生活寄于风雨，襟怀奉于苍生。才大遭嫉，挥之不去；虽为文雄，言祸偏来；真话虽贵，当权难容。在精神沙漠中特立独行的苏东坡，怀揣着小莲给予他的那份女神般的爱情，带着他的红颜知己王朝云，背负着政敌和亲朋好友的是是非非、恩恩怨怨及悲欢离合，先后与王弗、王润之搀扶着走过了大宋的山山水水、十湖九州。晚年被贬海南孤岛，走向天涯，走向中国的历史长河，走向炎黄子孙的心目中。
本剧以风云变换的北宋大舞台为历史背景，通过落榜举子闹风波、王安石变法、徐州抗洪、乌台诗案等一系列历史事件，再现苏东坡大悲大喜的人生历程。 隐藏详情
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Sunday, May 25, 2014
The Universe Within by Neil Shubin – review
We come trailing not Wordsworth's clouds of glory but clouds of primal hydrogen and remnants of a galactic nebula, a fabric of cold stardust and droplets of water more than 4bn years old. We arrive with billions of years of accumulated baggage: with, for instance, an internal waste disposal system first developed in a jawless fish more than 500m years ago; and a body clock determined by the planet's spin as it orbits the sun. Spring fades into summer not because that is the natural order of things, but because the same cosmic collision that chipped off the moon and made it our companion also tilted the coalescing planet off its axis of spin by 23.5 degrees, shifting any fixed spot on Earth towards or away from the sun in its annual orbit.
The Universe Within: A Scientific Adventure
by Neil Shubin
Buy the book
Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book
We see red, and marvel at the rainbow, because 40m years ago – in a suddenly cooler, more demanding world – a genetic mutation delivered in some mammalian ancestors the ability to distinguish colours, and with colour, the presence of more nutritious foods and fruits. At every scale, we are creatures of the universe we find ourselves in, the incidental product of a whole series of cosmic accidents that opened the way for us as arbitrarily as it ended the apparently inexorable careers of the trilobites or the dinosaurs, and the whole story is recorded, sometimes enigmatically, in our bodies and the landscape around us.
Neil Shubin laid out a focused version of this thesis in 2008, in his splendid book Your Inner Fish. A palaeontologist who discovered the first fossil of Tiktaalik, a perambulating fish, a creature that 375m years ago dragged itself on to land, Shubin used his find as a marvellous demonstration of the subtleties of evolution through natural selection, that preserved and redeployed the fishy inheritance to form skin rather than scales, lungs rather than gills, and hands and feet rather than fins.
The Universe Within is more ambitious: he wants to use the testimony of living things now to tell a story of everything that ever was, starting with the first trillionth of a second of creation, the making of hydrogen, helium and lithium, the arrival of gravity, the gathering of the galaxies, the forging of 89 new elements, and the supernova scattering of fabric that will eventually become stars, planetary systems, oceans, continents and people.
This should surprise no one. We evolved, so we evolved from the materials available. Even if we were created, we were fashioned – it quite bluntly says so in the Book of Genesis – from common clay: dust we were, and to dust we return. That said, this is a daring book: much of the evidence is still debated and some of it may never be unearthed. Physics has compiled a convincing history of the universe, except for the first second or so. But we cannot explain why the universe is as it is or even why it happened at all. Biology and palaeontology have outlined a convincing chronicle of life's development and colonisation, but the opening chapters are obscure and the beginning a mystery. Primate evolution is an exciting story with missing chapters, but we have no real idea why one species can ask abstract questions, compose poems and write books about the history of the universe.
But even though the direct connections between the wider cosmos and the details of physiology are sometimes difficult to make, this book offers a new, fresh way of telling the story of life, the universe and everything. There are delights in every chapter. At the beginning of the 20th century the exasperated director of the Harvard College Observatory told his staff that he could hire his maid to do their work at half the cost. He liked his threat so much that he actually employed the maid, Williamina Fleming, to examine pictures of the heavens, and catalogue and codify the stars and nebulae. Fleming was joined by other women: the group became known as the Harvard Computers (a reminder that the word is much older than the mainframe) and one of the women, Henrietta Leavitt, in 1912 spotted the link between luminosity and periodicity in a class of stars called the Cepheid Variables.
These became astronomy's first reliable long-range yardstick, with which astronomers could calculate the distances to the furthest stars. These distances turned out to be breathtaking. The same discovery led to the realisation, a few years later, that the Andromeda Nebula wasn't a nebula at all, it was another, faraway galaxy: the Milky Way was just one of what would turn out to be billions of galaxies, receding from each other at ever increasing speed.
As Shubin points out, every astronomer is a palaeontologist of sorts: the light from a distant star is direct evidence of conditions billions of years in the past. Stargazing had become a way of exploring our own ultimate beginnings. Henrietta Leavitt was employed at 30 cents an hour. There could hardly have been a richer return.
Some of Shubin's most enjoyable stories come from Harvard: another concerns the zoologist who cheerfully hurled a whole bucketful of live frogs one at a time from a five storey-building, to see whether they could survive the impact (they did). This experiment – which would not get past any modern ethics committee – is a reminder that size matters in biology: being small helps in some ways, and being big in others. It helps explain why species can migrate, can find new niches, can survive or fail to survive cataclysms. There's solid thinking on the revelation of the impact of cataclysm, and of continental drift and its role in the precipitation of the ice ages; on the discovery of the strange properties of light; on the exploration of the solar system, and on the odd, almost forgotten adventures of science.
One of these was the construction, during the cold war, of Camp Century, part of Project Iceworm: a nuclear-powered city deep in the glaciers of northern Greenland. Alas, glaciers flow, the tunnels were crushed and the camp was abandoned. But the excavation delivered the first cores of ancient Greenland ice, and these preserved a subtle record of seasonal, annual and decadal climate changes first used to trace the story of the last few million years.
The Universe Within may not quite deliver on the promise of its opening pages, but digressions such as these illuminate the story of discovery in unexpected and hugely enjoyable ways. Best of all, they hint at more to discover, and more to be told. The adventure is not over yet.
• Tim Radford's The Address Book is published by Fourth Estate.
The Universe Within: A Scientific Adventure
by Neil Shubin
Buy the book
Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book
We see red, and marvel at the rainbow, because 40m years ago – in a suddenly cooler, more demanding world – a genetic mutation delivered in some mammalian ancestors the ability to distinguish colours, and with colour, the presence of more nutritious foods and fruits. At every scale, we are creatures of the universe we find ourselves in, the incidental product of a whole series of cosmic accidents that opened the way for us as arbitrarily as it ended the apparently inexorable careers of the trilobites or the dinosaurs, and the whole story is recorded, sometimes enigmatically, in our bodies and the landscape around us.
Neil Shubin laid out a focused version of this thesis in 2008, in his splendid book Your Inner Fish. A palaeontologist who discovered the first fossil of Tiktaalik, a perambulating fish, a creature that 375m years ago dragged itself on to land, Shubin used his find as a marvellous demonstration of the subtleties of evolution through natural selection, that preserved and redeployed the fishy inheritance to form skin rather than scales, lungs rather than gills, and hands and feet rather than fins.
The Universe Within is more ambitious: he wants to use the testimony of living things now to tell a story of everything that ever was, starting with the first trillionth of a second of creation, the making of hydrogen, helium and lithium, the arrival of gravity, the gathering of the galaxies, the forging of 89 new elements, and the supernova scattering of fabric that will eventually become stars, planetary systems, oceans, continents and people.
This should surprise no one. We evolved, so we evolved from the materials available. Even if we were created, we were fashioned – it quite bluntly says so in the Book of Genesis – from common clay: dust we were, and to dust we return. That said, this is a daring book: much of the evidence is still debated and some of it may never be unearthed. Physics has compiled a convincing history of the universe, except for the first second or so. But we cannot explain why the universe is as it is or even why it happened at all. Biology and palaeontology have outlined a convincing chronicle of life's development and colonisation, but the opening chapters are obscure and the beginning a mystery. Primate evolution is an exciting story with missing chapters, but we have no real idea why one species can ask abstract questions, compose poems and write books about the history of the universe.
But even though the direct connections between the wider cosmos and the details of physiology are sometimes difficult to make, this book offers a new, fresh way of telling the story of life, the universe and everything. There are delights in every chapter. At the beginning of the 20th century the exasperated director of the Harvard College Observatory told his staff that he could hire his maid to do their work at half the cost. He liked his threat so much that he actually employed the maid, Williamina Fleming, to examine pictures of the heavens, and catalogue and codify the stars and nebulae. Fleming was joined by other women: the group became known as the Harvard Computers (a reminder that the word is much older than the mainframe) and one of the women, Henrietta Leavitt, in 1912 spotted the link between luminosity and periodicity in a class of stars called the Cepheid Variables.
These became astronomy's first reliable long-range yardstick, with which astronomers could calculate the distances to the furthest stars. These distances turned out to be breathtaking. The same discovery led to the realisation, a few years later, that the Andromeda Nebula wasn't a nebula at all, it was another, faraway galaxy: the Milky Way was just one of what would turn out to be billions of galaxies, receding from each other at ever increasing speed.
As Shubin points out, every astronomer is a palaeontologist of sorts: the light from a distant star is direct evidence of conditions billions of years in the past. Stargazing had become a way of exploring our own ultimate beginnings. Henrietta Leavitt was employed at 30 cents an hour. There could hardly have been a richer return.
Some of Shubin's most enjoyable stories come from Harvard: another concerns the zoologist who cheerfully hurled a whole bucketful of live frogs one at a time from a five storey-building, to see whether they could survive the impact (they did). This experiment – which would not get past any modern ethics committee – is a reminder that size matters in biology: being small helps in some ways, and being big in others. It helps explain why species can migrate, can find new niches, can survive or fail to survive cataclysms. There's solid thinking on the revelation of the impact of cataclysm, and of continental drift and its role in the precipitation of the ice ages; on the discovery of the strange properties of light; on the exploration of the solar system, and on the odd, almost forgotten adventures of science.
One of these was the construction, during the cold war, of Camp Century, part of Project Iceworm: a nuclear-powered city deep in the glaciers of northern Greenland. Alas, glaciers flow, the tunnels were crushed and the camp was abandoned. But the excavation delivered the first cores of ancient Greenland ice, and these preserved a subtle record of seasonal, annual and decadal climate changes first used to trace the story of the last few million years.
The Universe Within may not quite deliver on the promise of its opening pages, but digressions such as these illuminate the story of discovery in unexpected and hugely enjoyable ways. Best of all, they hint at more to discover, and more to be told. The adventure is not over yet.
• Tim Radford's The Address Book is published by Fourth Estate.
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Editorial Reviews
Library Journal
Rocks (which reside firmly in the camp of the inanimate) are unlikely to be the first things that come to mind when thinking about the history of humanity or the evolution of living creatures. Yet rocks, namely fossils, provide the evidence necessary to understand, and sometimes bridge, missing links in science. Shubin (The Universe Within) studies here the emerging interdisciplinary fields of expeditionary paleontology and developmental genetics. His work connects the dots between important fossil discoveries and what they tell scientists about the evolution of life through the ages. His book is part travelog—describing his experiences gathering fossils in remote areas across the globe, and part scientific exposition—skillfully tying together seemingly disparate facts. VERDICT The author's enthusiasm for his profession, especially the more harrowing aspects of fieldwork, is infectious, and he does an excellent job of showing the heart-pounding excitement of making new scientific discoveries. Readers will never think about rocks the same way again.—Marianne Stowell Bracke, Purdue Univ. Lib., West Lafayette, INPublishers Weekly
University of Chicago paleontologist Shubin wrote about the fishy origins of humanity in 2009’s Your Inner Fish. In his new book, he goes farther back and further out, explaining how humans bear the markings of cosmic phenomena; as he puts it, “Written inside us is the birth of the stars.” Here, the author surveys everything from glints in “Greenlandic rocks” to the spreading signs of supernovae to reveal “deep ties to the forces that shaped our bodies.” He demonstrates how mammals owe their “high-energy lifestyle” to oxygen released hundreds of millions of years ago as continents spread apart, and how color vision arose after continental drift cooled the planet, diversified flora, and resulted in biological competition that favored those organisms who could identify nutritious plants according to hue (“Every time you admire a richly colorful view, you can thank India for slamming into Asia”). Shubin is a leading proponent of the fusion of paleontology, developmental genetics, and genomics, and the result of his efforts is a volume of truly inspired science writing. Appropriately vast in scope, Shubin deftly balances breadth and depth in his search for a “sublimely beautiful truth.” Photos & illus. Agent: Katinka Matson, John Brockman, Max Brockman, and Russell Weinberger, Brockman Inc. (Jan.)From the Publisher
—Oliver Sacks, author of Hallucinations
“What is special about the book is its sweep, its scope, its panorama—how physics, biology, geology, chemistry, and seemingly every other science are brought to bear on the most intricate details of human life. . . . Shubin makes it all seem rather glorious.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“An illuminating account of how life on earth is shaped by the rhythms of the cosmos. . . . [A] dazzling excursion into life, the universe, and everything.”
—Times Literary Supplement
—The Guardian (London)
“Shubin shows that all creation, from the big bang on, is packed in [the human body]. . . . In short, universal history made us what we are. Wow.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Shubin illuminates, with a Carl Sagan–like clarity and elegance, the specifics behind the Joni Mitchell lyric ‘We are stardust.’”
—Time Out Chicago
“Even those familiar with the basic underpinnings of how we evolved will find The Universe Within engaging. It is laced with Shubin’s own fossil-hunting adventures and filled with colorful tales of historical figures.”
—Scientific American
“The Universe Within gives us an appreciation of how we are just small specks and small moments in time. But it also challenges us to take steps to protect our environment so our world can last a little longer.”
—BookPage
“Shubin shares the findings of some of the great scientific specialists —as well as those of a few unsung heroes. But he also explains how a generalist’s appreciation of their work is still possible, simply by looking inside the human body.”
—New Scientist
“An exhilarating ride through the workings of science and . . . a fascinating glimpse into the vast universe’s many constituents . . . To read The Universe Within is to arrive at all sorts of wonders.”
—Book Browse
“Wonderful . . . We need writers [like Shubin] who can make deeper connections between people and the natural world around them, as well as showing how that interrelatedness has played out over the deep time of geology.”
—The Seattle Times
“A volume of truly inspired science writing . . . Shubin deftly balances breadth and depth in his search for a ‘sublimely beautiful truth.’”
—Publishers Weekly
“Engrossing . . . An intelligent, eloquent account of our relations with the inanimate universe.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Kirkus Reviews
In a follow-up to Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body(2008), Shubin (Biological Sciences/Univ. of Chicago) delivers an equally engrossing history of life's connections to everything else. The author begins with the most common element in the human body, hydrogen, which also makes up 90 percent of the universe. All hydrogen existed along with helium and a trace of lithium when everything began 13.7 billion years ago. Heavier elements were made later inside stars, some of which end their lives violently. Cosmic dust that condensed to form the sun 5 billion years ago also made the planets. Microorganisms appeared soon after the Earth cooled enough to support liquid water--so soon that many scientists believe that life is not a rare accident, but inevitable under the right circumstances. Shubin recounts the subsequent 4 billion years of changes in both life and its surroundings. Oxygen, absent at first, slowly accumulated as photosynthetic plants multiplied. The Earth's rocky crust shifted, eroded and cracked, leaking volcanic gases from the interior. Continents formed and split, expanding and shrinking the oceans; the resulting mountains, shifting ocean currents and migrating landmasses carried life across the planet, forcing it to adapt to the changing environment or nearly wiping it out. The sun is 30 percent hotter than when life began; in another billion years, it will make the Earth too warm to support life. An intelligent, eloquent account of our relations with the inanimate universe.