Chapter 42: Returning Home (Part II)
Village. When he woke up, he immediately wrote down the idea behind the design of the watch: the properties of the elements change regularly with increasing atomic numbers.
Mendeleev left a gap in his table for unknown elements, which were soon filled with new elements, all of which surprisingly matched his predictions.
[3] On the night before Easter Sunday in 1921, the Austrian biologist Loy woke up from a dream, grabbed a piece of paper and wrote something in a daze, collapsed and fell asleep again. At six o'clock in the morning, it occurred to him that he had written down something extremely important the previous night, but he could not understand what he had written. Luckily, at 3 a.m. the next day, the new idea of escape returned, an experimental design method that could be used to test the validity of a hypothesis proposed by Roy 17 years earlier.
Roy quickly got up, ran to the laboratory, killed two frogs, and took out the frog hearts and soaked them in saline, one of which had vagus nerve, and No. 2 without. Stimulating the vagus nerve of heart No. 1 with electrodes slows the heart's beat, and after a few minutes, the saline water soaked in it is moved to the container where heart No. 2 is located, and the beating of heart No. 2 slows down.
This experiment showed that nerves do not act directly on muscles, but rather by releasing chemicals, and that the vagus nerve of heart 1 is stimulated to produce substances that dissolve in saline and act on heart 2.
The discovery of the chemical transmission of nerve impulses opened up a whole new field of research and earned Loy the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
[4] Before the advent of industrial garment production, the concept of sewing needles was the same: the threading hole was at the opposite end of the needle tip, so that when the needle passed through the fabric, the thread passed last. This is fine for hand sewing, but industrial sewing machines need to allow the thread to pass through the fabric first. Inventors at the time used double-ended or multi-needle methods, but none of them were efficient.
In the 40s of the 19th century, the American Elias? Howe falls asleep in the annoyance of not being able to solve the problem, dreaming that a gang of barbarians are going to cut off his head or cook him to eat. There are different theories about this detail, but in short, it is a very bad situation, and Howe desperately tries to climb out of the pot or dodge the machete, but is intimidated by the students with a spear, and at this point he sees a hole in the tip of the spear.
This dream led him to abandon the principle of hand sewing and design a curved needle with a pinhole at one end of the needle, and a shuttle to lock the thread. In 1845, his first model was introduced, capable of sewing 250 stitches per minute, faster than several skilled workers, and the truly practical principles of industrial sewing finally appeared.
In the history of civilization in the ancient world, the Mayan civilization seems to have fallen from the sky, and at its most glorious and prosperous, it came to an abrupt end. Before Columbus discovered the American continent, this great and mysterious people had long since disappeared en masse. Their extraordinarily brilliant culture was also abruptly interrupted, leaving the world with great confusion. Since 1839 the American John? Since Stephens first discovered the ruins of the ancient Mayan civilization in the tropical jungles of Honduras, archaeologists from all over the world have found more than 170 abandoned ruins of ancient Mayan cities in the jungles and wastelands of Central America, and found that from 1000 BC to the 8th century AD, the Mayan civilization footprint from the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico in the north, to Guatemala and Honduras in the south, and directly to the Andes. This mysterious people has built massive structures of astonishing scale in the tropical jungles of South America. When the computer recreation of the majestic Tikal City appeared in front of people, many modern city designers were amazed. Built in the 7th century, the Palenque Palace is 100 meters long and 80 meters wide. The Governor's Palace in Uxmar is made up of 22,500 stone carvings in an elaborate pattern. Chiqin? Although the roof of the samurai temple in Itza has disappeared, the 1,000 stone pillars that stand majestically still remind you of the spirit of the past. All this makes people feel that this is an extraordinary nation.
With the further investigation of the Mayan culture, people are surprised to find that the Maya thousands of years ago had unparalleled mathematical attainments and unique enigmatic writing. And Chiqin? The megastructures of Itza, Tikal, Palenque and other places were not built according to the actual needs of the Mayans, but were built strictly according to the magical Mayan calendar cycle. How accurate was the Mayan calendar and astronomical knowledge? They divided the year into 18 months, and they calculated the earth year to be 365.2420 days, and modern people calculated it to be 365.2422 days, with an error of only 0.0002 days, that is, the error of the month 000 years is only one day. Their estimate of the Venus year is 584 days, an error of only 7 seconds from the 50-year period of modern man's calculation. What an unbelievable number! How could the Mayans thousands of years ago have such accurate calculations, they still maintain a special religious chronology, the year is divided into 13 months, 20 days per month, called the 'Zorgin year'. It is incomprehensible where this calendar came from.
This is because this dating method is not based on the movements of any of the celestial bodies observed on Earth. So much so that the 'Zorgin year' calendar was developed by the ancestors of the Mayans on another planet that we do not know about yet.
The Maya mastered the concept of the number '0' at least in the 4th century BC, 800 to 1000 years before both the Chinese and Europeans. They also created the 20-digit notation method, and their numerical calculus can be used after 4 million years of karma. Such a large astronomical figure is only used in modern interstellar navigation and in calculating the distance of the starry sky. And thousands of years ago, the Mayans slash-and-burn farming, using leaves to cover their bodies, and using cocoa beans as a medium to barter, can they use such numbers?
The Maya calendar could last until 400 million years, and the difference between the solar year and the Venus year could be accurate to four decimal places, and they had their own script, a hieroglyph composed of 800 symbols and figures, and a vocabulary of up to 30,000. They have exquisite carvings, paintings, and bronze art. However, before the birth of this peak high civilization, the Mayans nested in tree holes and gathered for a living, how could such a primitive tribe suddenly produce such a high level of civilization? Even in the 16th century, the Indians that the Spanish saw on the Yucatan Peninsula, which was full of monuments, lived in muddy huts and gathered and hunted to make ends meet. Obviously, the precise astronomical calendar and mathematics, the civilization and art that the whole world admired, far exceeded the practical needs of the almost primitive life of the local Indians.