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UNIT 4 SCIENCE AND WORLD OUTLOOK
1. Read the text and give the synonyms to the adverbs in bold.
Natural Philosophy
Until the “scientific revolution” of the Renaissance, physics was merely (1) a branch of philosophy dealing with the natures of things, thus its other name – natural philosophy. The physics of heavens was, for instance, completely (2) separate (and often conflicted with) the descriptions of mathematical and positional astronomy. But from the time of Galileo, and particularly (3) through the efforts of Huygens and Newton, physics gradually (4) became identified with the rigorously (5) mathematical description of nature; occult qualities were eventually (6) banished from physical science.
Firm on its Newtonian foundation, classical physics gathered increasingly (7) more phenomena under its wing until, by the late 19th century, comparatively (8) few phenomena seemed to defy explanation. But the interpretation of these effects (notably (9) blackbody radiation and the photoelectric effect) in terms of new concepts due to Plank and Einstein involved thoroughgoing reformation of the most (10) fundamental principles of physical science.
2. Read the text and fill the gaps with the clauses listed below.
a) adding and subtracting numbers
b) Starting with what he believed to be irreducible and self-evident axioms
c) must have seemed a natural marriage at the dawn of the Enlightenment.
d) with Rene Descartes revitalizing the ancient Greek atomic theory and Isaac Newton soon to be admitted to Trinity College in Cambridge
e) upsetting about such an idea
f) including people
g) with secrets residing in nothing more than the extreme interconnectedness of its billions of biological switches
Mechanical World-View
Copernicus had been fortunate to develop his heliocentric theory in the early 16th century, manuscript, circulated around 1530, even received papal sanction. How Galileo fared against papal authority when he placed Copernicus’s ideas on firmer footing is the stuff of legend. The inquisition condemned him in 1616 and forced him to recant in 1633. But by the middle of the 17th century, _______ (1), the banishment of magic and superstition by mechanistic science seems in retrospect inevitable.
Hobbes’s masterwork, Leviathan, was an attempt to develop a political theory out of this mechanical world-view. The goal that sounds absurdly ambitious to-day,_______ (2) Hobbes wanted to deduce, by logic and reason, no less rigorous than that used by Galileo to understand the laws for motion, how humankind should govern itself.
In 1636, Hobbes traveled to Florence to meet the great man and became convinced that the law of inertia was the axiom he had been seeking. Constant motion was the natural state of all things – _____(3). He pictured a person as sophisticated mechanism acted upon by external forces.
Such machines were popular in the 17th century: the Scottish mathematician John Napier (1550-1617) devised one, as did the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). They were mechanical devices for______ (4). The body, meanwhile, is merely a system of jointed limbs moved by the strings and pulleys of muscles and nerves. Man is an automaton. To Hobbes there was nothing mysterious or______ (5). Others were less sanguine: the Spanish Inquisition imprisoned some makers of automata on the grounds that they were dabbling in witchcraft and black magic. If we shudder at this concept of humanity today, it is partly because we regard mechanical, clockwork devices as crude and clumsy.
There are now many materialist scientists who believe that the brain is a kind of vast and squishy computer, _____ (6). As a superior vision of our most advanced cultural artifact, this view of the brain is neither unusual nor eccentric. To the intellectuals of the 17th century the same was true of the clock, which was reliable timekeeper and a rather recent innovation. In that age there was nothing inelegant about a mechanical picture of humanity; on the contrary, it showed just how wonderfully wrought people were.
____(7), Hobbes aimed to develop a science of human interactions, politics and society. Hobbes aimed to apply the method of the theoretical scientist: to stipulate fundamental first principles and to see where they lead him.
WORD FORMATION
3. Form the appropriate words to fill the gaps.
Break-down of the Mechanical View of the Universe
The mechanical view of nature, beautifully (1 quantity) in Newton’s laws, is based on three precepts. The first is strict (2 cause): every effect results from a cause. The second is (3 precise): in principle, any physical process can be measured to an arbitrarily high degree of accuracy. The third is (4 object): each event can be described in one and only one entirely factual way, upon which all (observe 5) everywhere can agree.
 Quantum physics reveals that all three (6 suppose) fail when we interrogate nature on the subatomic scale. There, (7 part) because one cannot even in principle keep track of trillions of subatomic particles, strict causation is replaced by the statistics of (8 probable ). Moreover, owing to Werner Heisenberg’s (9 uncertain ) principle, all observations are seen to be afflicted with a small but (10 reduce) degree of imprecision. And classical objectivity gives way to the (11 realize) that the conduct of the (experiment 12) can affect the outcome of the experiment.
Sir Isaac Newton Perhaps because it was so strenuously resisted by Einstein, who was revered as both a scientist and a (13 philosophy), the fall of the Newtonian clockwork model of nature is sometimes described in terms of lamentation more (14 suit) to the end of the world. But Newtonian mechanics works on the small scale and general (15 relate) on the large scale. The task now facing science is to find an over-arching set of laws that embraces all three realms. What it will have to say about causation, precision and objectivity remains to be seen.
4. Read the text and d ecide whether the following statements are true or false.
1. Sadi Carnot is considered to be the founder of a new science.
2. Few people realize the significance of thermal dynamics for our world outlook.
3. The third law of thermal dynamics is one the most important generalizations.
4. Most well-educated people are aware of the second law of thermal dynamics.
5. People perceive time as a one-way process.
6. The greater the enthropy, the less ordered is the system.
7. Universal law of dissipation of energy implies global warming.
Thermodynamics (Engineering, Science, Philosophy)
In a short life terminated prematurely by cholera, a French scientist Nicholas Leonard Sadi Carnot (1796-1832) busied himself with the problem of optimizing the fuel efficiency of the steam engine. In a coal-fired gas turbine, heat produced by burning fuel is transferred from the burner to the gas. The steam engine, often referred to as the
 workhorse of the industrial revolution, likewise used the expansion of a hot gas: water vapor. To develop his Sadi Carnot argument, Carnot considered an engine in which heat flow allowed a gas to expand (when heated) and contract (when cooled), driving a piston in a cyclic process now known as the Carnot cycle. His analysis laid the cornerstone of a new discipline called thermodynamics, − literally, “heat movement”.
Thermodynamics is one of the most astonishing theories of science. It is a field of study initiated to help 19th century engineers make better engines, and it turns out to produce some of the grandest and most fundamental statements about the way the entire universe works. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger is probably right to point out that thermodynamics owes more to steam engine than steam engines to it.
The theory has practical implications, no doubt, but it soon leads us into discussions verging on the metaphysical. Thermodynamics, like Newtonian theory of motion has three laws. The third is hardly worth knowing unless you are a physicist; the first two should be engraved in the mind of anyone who wants to understand science. The First Law is the easiest: energy is never destroyed but only transformed. Photovoltaic panels gobble up the energy of sunlight and turn it − some of it, not all, with most of solar energy being, alas, wasted as heat − into electrical energy.
The Second Law is more remarkable, and some scientists think that we still don’t fully understand it. A testament to its importance is C.P. Snow’s famous complaint in his book “The Two Cultures”: “A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have been expressing their surprise at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked to and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: ”Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”
There are several ways of expressing it. When a German physicist Rudolph Claudius (1832-1888) first did so in 1850, he said something along the lines that heat always flows from hot to cold. What he really meant was that there are processes that go only one way, which are irreversible. This innocuous statement is really the secret of all change. If there are irreversible processes, then time has an arrow, − a singular direction defined by such processes. The Second Law connects to our perception that we are always moving forward in time, never back.
Claudius conceived the concept that enabled a mathematical theory of change and irreversibility: enthropy. Crudely speaking, enthropy is a measure of amount of disorder in a system. The Second Law reduces to the statement that in all processes of spontaneous change (such as heat flowing from hot to cold), enthropy increases.
In 1852 William Thomson (1824-1907), later Lord Kelvin, noticed that there is “a universal tendency in nature to dissipation of energy”. In 1854, German physicist Hermann von Helmholz (1821-1894) perceived the consequences of this inevitable dissipation: the universe will end up as a uniform, tepid reservoir of heat. No further change would then be possible because there was nowhere colder for the heat to flow. “Thus, he said, the universe would ultimately die a ”heat death”. In the behaviour of steam engines we can read the fate of all creation ultimately.
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