Holmes was heroic as much for the obstacles he overcame as for the results he achieved. By the 1920s, when Holmes was in the prime of his career, geology had slipped out of fashion—physics was the new excitement of the age—and had become severely underfunded, particularly in Britain, its spiritual birthplace. At Durham University, Holmes was for many years the entire geology department. Often he had to borrow or patch together equipment in order to pursue his radiometric dating of rocks. At one point, his calculations were effectively held up for a year while he waited for the university to provide him with a simple adding machine.
無論在克服困難方面，還是在取得的成就方面，霍姆斯都很有英雄氣概。20世紀20年代，正當他的事業進入全盛期的時候，地質學已經不再吃香──物理學是那個時代的熱門科學，資金嚴重缺乏，尤其在它的精神誕生地英國。多少年來，他是達勒姆大學地質系的惟一人員。為了進行測定巖石年代的工作，他常常不得不借用或拼湊設備。有一次，為了等校方為他提供一臺簡單的加法機，他的計算工作竟然耽擱了1年時間。
Occasionally, he had to drop out of academic life altogether to earn enough to support his family—for a time he ran a curio shop in Newcastle upon Tyne—and sometimes he could not even afford the £5 annual membership fee for the Geological Society.
有時候，他不得不完全停止學術工作，以便掙錢來養家糊口──一度在紐卡斯爾開了個古董店，有時候他連地質學會每年5英鎊的會費也繳不起。
The technique Holmes used in his work was theoretically straightforward and arose directly from the process, first observed by Ernest Rutherford in 1904, in which some atoms decay from one element into another at a rate predictable enough that you can use them as clocks. If you know how long it takes for potassium-40 to become argon-40, and you measure the amounts of each in a sample, you can work out how old a material is. Holmes's contribution was to measure the decay rate of uranium into lead to calculate the age of rocks, and thus—he hoped—of the Earth.
霍姆斯在研究工作中使用的方法，在理論上其實并不復雜，直接產生于歐內斯特·盧瑟福于1904年最初發現的那個過程，即，有的原子以一種可以預測的比率從一種元素衰變成另一種元素，因此這個過程可以用來當時鐘。要是你知道鉀－40要經過多長時間才變成氬－40，并且測定樣品里這兩種元素的量，你就可以得出那種物質的年代。霍姆斯的貢獻在于，以測定鈾衰變成鉛的比率來測定巖石的年代，從而──他希望──能測定地球的年齡。
來源:可可英語 http://www.ccdyzl.cn/Article/201703/496063.shtml
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