万物简史 第60期:事物的测定(18)

Soon afterward, Maskelyne returned to Englandwhere he became astronomer royal, and Mason andDixon—now evidently more seasoned—set off for fourlong and often perilous years surveying their waythrough 244 miles of dangerous Americanwilderness to settle a boundary dispute betweenthe estates of William Penn and Lord Baltimore andtheir respective colonies of Pennsylvania andMaryland.

此后不久，马斯基林回到英国，成为皇家天文学家，而梅森和狄克逊--这时候显然更加成熟--启程前往美洲，度过漫长而时常是险象环生的4年。他们穿越393公里危险的荒原，一路上搞测量工作，以解决威廉·佩恩和巴尔的摩勋爵两人地产之间的以及他们各自殖民地--宾夕法尼亚和马里兰--之间的边界纠纷。

The result was the famous Mason and Dixon line, which later took on symbolic importance asthe dividing line between the slave and free states. (Although the line was their principal task,they also contributed several astronomical surveys, including one of the century's mostaccurate measurements of a degree

of meridian—an achievement that brought them far more acclaim in England than thesettling of a boundary dispute between spoiled aristocrats.)

结果就是那条著名的梅森-狄克逊线。后来，这条线象征性地被看做是美国奴隶州和自由州之间的分界线。(这条线是他们的主要任务，但他们还进行了几次天文观测。其中有一次，他们对1度经线的长度作了当时那个世纪最精确的测量。由于这项成就，他们在英国赢得了比解决两位被宠坏了的贵族之间的边界纠纷高得多的赞扬。)

Back in Europe, Maskelyne and his counterparts in Germany and France were forced to theconclusion that the transit measurements of 1761 were essentially a failure. One of theproblems, ironically, was that there were too many observations, which when brought togetheroften proved contradictory and impossible to resolve.

回到欧洲以后，马斯基林与他的德国和法国同行不得不下结论，1761年的凌日观测工作基本失败。具有讽刺意味的是，问题之一在于观测的次数太多。把观测结果放在一起，往往证明互相矛盾，无法统一。

The successful charting of a Venusian transit fell instead to a little-known Yorkshire-born seacaptain named James Cook, who watched the 1769 transit from a sunny hilltop in Tahiti, andthen went on to chart and claim Australia for the British crown. Upon his return there was nowenough information for the French astronomer Joseph Lalande to calculate that the meandistance from the Earth to the Sun was a little over 150 million kilometers. (Two further transitsin the nineteenth century allowed astronomers to put the figure at 149.59 million kilometers,where it has remained ever since. The precise distance, we now know, is 149.597870691million kilometers.) The Earth at last had a position in space.

成功绘制金星凌日图的却是一位不知名的约克郡出生的船长，名叫詹姆斯·库克。他在塔希提岛一个阳光普照的山顶上观看了1769年的凌日现象，接着又绘制了澳大利亚的地图，宣布它为英国皇家殖民地。他一回到国内，就听说法国天文学家约瑟夫·拉朗德已经计算出，地球到太阳的平均距离略略超过1.5亿公里。(19世纪又发生两次凌日现象，天文学由此得出的距离是1.4959亿公里，这个数字一直保持到现在。我们现在知道，确切的距离应该是1.495 978 706 91亿公里。)地球在太空中终于有了个方位。