Read the text. Find the sentences justifying the following statements.

1. Inflation theory deals with the early universe.

2. The emergence of elementary particles was followed by appearance of various forces, namely gravity and electromagnetism.

3. Some scientists argue that there might have been several big bangs.

4. There is no reasonable explanation why space developed the way it is to eventually enable living beings to appear on Earth.

5. Cosmologists compare the fact that the universe is so perfectly suited for man to Goldilocks, fairy tale character, the pretty girl, whose appearance is perfect.

6. The theory of relativity postulates that the universe is infinite.

 

                                       Big Bang

The Big Bang theory isn’t about the bang itself but about what happened after the bang. By doing a lot of math and watching carefully what goes on in particle accelerators, scientists believe they can look back to 10^-43 seconds after the moment of creation, when the universe was still so small that you would have needed a microscope to find it. Most of what we know about the early moments of the universe is thanks to an idea called inflation theory first propounded in 1979 by a junior particle physicist, then at Stanford named Alan Guth. He would probably never have had his great theory except that he happened to attend a lecture on the Big Bang given by Robert Dicke. The lecture inspired Guth to take an interest in cosmology, and in particular in the birth of the universe.

  The eventual result was the inflation theory, which holds that a fraction of a moment after the dawn of creation, the universe underwent a sudden dramatic expansion. It inflated − in effect ran away with itself, doubling in size every

10 ^-34 seconds. Inflation theory explains the ripples and eddies that make our universe possible. Without it, there would be no clumps of matter and thus no stars, just drifting gas and everlasting darkness.

  According to Guth’s theory, at one ten-millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, gravity emerged. After another ludicrously brief interval it was joined by electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. These were joined an instant later by swarms of elementary particles. From nothing at all, suddenly there were swarms of photons, protons, electrons, neutrons, and much else − between 10⁷⁹ and 10⁸⁹ of each. In a single instant there was a vast universe − at least a hundred billion light-years across and perfectly arrayed for the creation of stars, galaxies, and other complex systems. What is extraordinary is how well it turned out for us.

  This is one reason that some experts believe there may have been many other big bangs, perhaps trillions and trillions of them, spread through the mighty span of eternity, and that the reason we exist in this particular one is that this is one we could exist in.

In the long term, gravity may turn out to be a little too strong, and one day it may halt the expansion of the universe and bring it collapsing in upon itself, till it crushes itself down into another singularity, possibly to start the whole process over again. On the other hand it may be too weak and the universe will keep racing away forever until everything is so far apart that there is no chance of material interactions, so that the universe becomes a place that is inert and dead, but very keep racing away. The third option is that gravity is just right − “critical density” is the cosmologists’ term for it  −  and that it will hold the universe together at just the right dimensions to allow things to go on indefinitely. Cosmologists in their lighter moments sometimes call this the Goldilocks effect − that everything is just right.

  You can never get to the edge of the universe. That’s not because it would take too long to get there − though of course it would − but because even if you traveled outward and outward in a straight line, indefinitely and pugnaciously, you would never arrive at an outer boundary. Instead, you would come back to where you began (at which point, presumably, you would rather lose heart in the exercise and give up). The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can’t adequately imagine, in conformance with Einstein’s theory of relativity.

   For a long time the Big Bang theory had one gaping hole that troubled a lot of people − namely, that it couldn’t explain how we got here. Although 98 percent of all the matter that exists was created with the Big Bang, that matter consisted exclusively of light gases: the helium, hydrogen, and lithium. Not one particle of the heavy stuff so vital to our own being − carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the rest − emerged from the gaseous brew of creation. But − and here’s the troubling point − to forge these heavy elements, you need the kind of heat and energy of a Big Bang. Yet there has been only one Big Bang and it didn’t produce them.

 

2. In the text find equivalents to the following words and phrases:

- случайно оказатьcя

- заинтересоваться

- начало мира

-   претерпеть внезапное колоссальное расширение

- вечная тьма

- ещё один смехотворно короткий интервал

- оказаться, сложиться

- продолжать разбегаться

-  просторный

- находясь в  шутливом настроении

 

3. Read the text and choose the correct word:

Singularity

In a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive/expensive (1) for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception. In the first second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer wafers) gravity and the other forces that control/govern (2) physics were produced. In less than a minute the universe became a million billion miles across and was growing fast. In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be was manufactured/produced (3). And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.

  When this moment happened/occurred (4) is a matter of some debate. Cosmologists have long argued over whether the moment of creation was 10 billion years ago or twice that or something in between. The consensus seems to be heading for a figure of about 13.7 billion years, but these things are famously/notoriously (5) difficult to measure. All that can really be said is that at some indefinite/indeterminate (6) point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0.

  The notation/notion (7) of the Big Bang is quite a recent one. The idea had been around since the 1920s, when Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest-scholar, first tentatively/preliminarily (8) proposed it, but it didn’t really become an active notion in cosmology until the mid-1960s when two young radio astronomers made an extraordinary and inadvertent discovery. In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were trying to make use of a large communications antenna owed/owned (9) by Bell Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey, but they were troubled by a persistent/resistant (10) background noise — a steady, steamy hiss that made any experimental work impossible. The noise was unrelenting and unfocused. It came from every point in the sky, day and night, through every season. For a year the young astronomers did everything they could think of to track down and destroy/eliminate (11) the noise: they tested every electrical system, they rebuilt instruments, checked circuits, thoroughly cleaned the antenna. Nothing they tried functioned/worked (12).

  Unknown to them, just thirty miles away at Princeton University, a team of scientists led by Robert Dicke were working on how to find the very thing they were trying so deliberately/diligently (13) to get rid of. The Princeton researchers were persisting/pursuing (14) an idea that had been suggested in the 1940s by the Russian-born astrophysicist George Gamow that if you looked deep enough into space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Gamow calculated that by the time it crossed the vastness of the cosmos, the radiation would reach Earth in the form of microwaves. In a more recent paper he had even proposed/suggested (15) an instrument that might do the job: the Bell antenna at Holmdel. Unfortunately, neither Penzias and Wilson, nor any of the Princeton team, had read Gamow’s paper.

  The noise that Penzias and Wilson were hearing was the noise that Gamow had postulated. They had found the edge of the universe, or at least the obvious/visible (16) part of it, 90 billion trillion miles away. They were “seeing” the first photons − the most ancient light in the universe − though time and distance had converted/conveyed (17) them to microwaves, just as Gamow had predicted. Still unaware of what caused the noise, Wilson and Penzias phoned Dicke at Princeton and described their problem to him in the hope that he might suggest a solution. Dicke realized/released (18) at once what the two young men had found.

  Soon afterward the Astrophysical Journal published two articles: one by Penzias and Wilson describing their experience/experiment (19) with the hiss, the other by Dicke’s team explaining its nature. Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn’t know what it was when they had found it, and hadn’t described or interpreted its character in any paper, they obtained/received (20) the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. Neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the New York Times. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy.

 

4. Fill the gaps with suitable adverbs:

a) convincingly       b) correctly          c) incomprehensively    d) improbably e) interestingly     f) literally          g) memorably               h) nearly i) recently             j) spectacularly k) unfortunately            l) unimaginably

Supernovae

  Supernovae occur when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then … (1) explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time brighter than all the stars in its galaxy. In fact, most are so … (2) distant that their light reaches us as no more than the faintest twinkle. For the month or so that they are visible, all that distinguishes them from the other stars in the sky is that they occupy a point of space that wasn’t filled before.

The term supernova was coined in the 1930s by a … (3) odd astrophysicist named Fritz Zwicky. Born in Bulgaria and raised in Switzerland, Zwicky came to the California Institute of Technology in the 1920s and there at once distinguished himself by his abrasive personality and erratic talents. But Zwicky was also capable of insights of the most startling brilliance.

  In the early 1930s, he turned his attention to a question that had long troubled astronomers: the appearance in the sky of occasional unexplained points of light, new stars. … (4) he wondered if the neutron — the subatomic particle that had just been discovered in England by James Chadwick, and was thus both novel and rather fashionable − might be at the heart of things. It occurred to him that if a star collapsed to the sort of densities found in the core of atoms, the result would be an …(5) compacted core. Atoms would … (6) be crushed together, their electrons forced into the nucleus, forming neutrons and a neutron star. After the collapse of such a star there would be a huge amount of energy left over − enough to make the biggest bang in the universe. He called these resultant explosions supernovae. They would be − they are  − the biggest events in creation.

   On January 15, 1934, the journal Physical Review published a very concise abstract of a presentation that had been conducted by Zwicky and Baade at Stanford University. Despite its extreme brevity − one paragraph of twenty-four lines − the abstract contained an enormous amount of new science: it provided the first reference to supernovae and to neutron stars; … (7) explained their method of formation; … (8) calculated the scale of their explosiveness; and, as a kind of concluding bonus, connected supernova explosions to the production of a mysterious new phenomenon called cosmic rays, which had … (9) been found swarming through the universe.

  These ideas were revolutionary, to say the least. Neutron stars wouldn’t be confirmed for thirty-four years. The cosmic rays notion, though considered plausible, hasn’t been verified yet. Altogether, the abstract was, in the words of Caltech astrophysicist Kip S. Thorne, “one of the most prescient documents in the history of physics and astronomy.”

    … (10), Zwicky had almost no understanding of why any of this would happen. According to Thorne, “he did not understand the laws of physics well enough to be able to substantiate his ideas.” Zwicky’s talent was for big ideas. Others − Baade mostly −  were left to do the mathematical sweeping up. Zwicky also was the first to recognize that there wasn’t … (11) enough visible mass in the universe to hold galaxies together and that there must be some other gravitational influence − what we now call dark matter. One thing he failed to see was that if a neutron star shrank enough it would become so dense that even light couldn’t escape its immense gravitational pull. You would have a black hole.

   … (12), Zwicky was held in such disdain by most of his colleagues that his ideas attracted almost no notice. When, five years later, the great Robert Oppenheimer turned his attention to neutron stars in a landmark paper, he made not a single reference to any of Zwicky’s work even though Zwicky had been working for years on the same problem in an office just down the hall. Zwicky’s deductions concerning dark matter wouldn’t attract serious attention for nearly four decades.

GRAMMAR PRACTICE: Linking Words-I (conjunctions and prepositions)

              Contrast (however nevertheless, still, yet)

   Concession (though, although,  despite/in spite of /regardless of )

             Consequence ( thus, therefore, so, that’s why)

             Purpose ( so that, lest, in order, so as ) GR-21 p.207

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