10/07/01 21:40:38
長文不可でなく、ここでは長文も訳してくれるというので、できればお願いします。
A great physicist of the Victorian era,Lord Kelvin,proclaimed that the Sun could not be more than
100 million years old-a correct deduction based on the sources of energy known at that time.
Geologists and biologists had strong reasons to believe that the Earth was much older,and in 1903 Rutherford
pointed out the apparently continuous energy flowing out of radioactive nuclei showed"the maintenance of
solar energy no longer presented a fundamental problem."
finally,the nuclear physics pioneer,George Gamow,believed all the elements were produced in the Big Bang.
This was a sensible deduction based on scientific knowledge of the 1940s,but Nature is an inexhaustible source of
surprises and one of these was the discovery of tschnetium in certain red giant stars.
This shortlived element could not have been made in the Big Bang so some elements,at least,must be producted in stars.
There is now a great deal of evidence that this is so.