検索キーワード： ナレーター "Peter Clapperton" すべてのカテゴリー

James Hutton made his fortune out of soot. He and a friend worked out how to cook the black residue scraped from Edinburgh's chimneys into a pale crystalline salt that dyers and metalworkers would pay for, and which had until then come by ship from Egypt. It was a good business. It left him free to spend the rest of his life doing what he actually wanted to do, which was to climb into ditches and look at rocks. Everyone agreed the world was about six thousand years old. This was not superstition. It was arithmetic, done carefully, from the only continuous historical document anyone had.

In 1965 Vera Rubin became the first woman formally permitted to observe at Palomar, a mountain whose administrators explained that her time there would have to be short because the building had no ladies' room. She cut a small skirt out of paper, taped it onto the stick figure on the men's room door, announced that the facility was now compliant, and went to work. She then spent fifteen years producing one of the most durable measurements in the history of astronomy. The measurement is simple enough to explain at a bus stop.