万物简史 第613期:冰河时代(10)（在线收听）

Happily this was precisely the sort of repetitive toil that suited Milankovitch's temperament. For the next twenty years, even while on vacation, he worked ceaselessly with pencil and slide rule computing the tables of his cycles—work that now could be completed in a day or two with a computer. The calculations all had to be made in his spare time, but in 1914 Milankovitch suddenly got a great deal of that when World War I broke out and he was arrested owing to his position as a reservist in the Serbian army. He spent most of the next four years under loose house arrest in Budapest, required only to report to the police once a week. The rest of his time was spent working in the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was possibly the happiest prisoner of war in history.

令人高兴的是，这样一项繁复庞杂的工作恰好适合于米兰柯维契的脾性。在接下来的20年时间里，即使在度假的时候，凭借铅笔和计算尺，米兰柯维契从不间断地计算着他的周期表——这样一项工作现在用一台计算机一两天内就可以完成。计算都得在业余时间里进行，可是到了1914年，米兰柯维契突然有了许多空余的时间。第一次世界大战爆发了，他因为是塞尔维亚部队的后备役军人而被捕。在随后4年的大部分时间里他被软禁在布达佩斯，管理不严，只需每周向警察报到一次，其余时间都在匈牙利科学院的图书馆里辛勤工作。他也许是历史上最快乐的一名战俘。

The eventual outcome of his diligent scribblings was the 1930 book Mathematical Climatology and the Astronomical Theory of Climatic Changes. Milankovitch was right that there was a relationship between ice ages and planetary wobble, though like most people he assumed that it was a gradual increase in harsh winters that led to these long spells of coldness. It was a Russian-German meteorologist, Wladimir Koppen—father-in-law of our tectonic friend Alfred Wegener—who saw that the process was more subtle, and rather more unnerving, than that.

辛勤劳作的结晶是发表于1930年的著作：《数学气候学与气候变化的天文学原理》。米兰柯维契没错，冰川期和地球的摄动确实有关。虽然同大多数人一样，他认为严寒冬天逐渐加剧导致了漫长的寒冷时期。是俄罗斯裔德国气象学家克利切科·柯本——构造地质学家阿尔弗雷德·魏格纳的岳父——发现这个过程要比那更复杂，更可怕。