14 Translate the following paragraph into Russian.

Kepler’s laws are about the motion of the planets around the Sun, while Newton’s laws more generally are about the motion of point particles attracting each other by force of gravitation. In special case where there are only two particles, and one of them is much lighter particle moves around the heavy particle as a planet around the Sun according to Kepler’s laws. Newton’s laws however also admit other solutions, where the trajectory of the lighter particle is a parabola or a hyperbola. These solutions show that there is a limitation to the applicability of Kepler’s law, which states that the trajectory will always be an ellipse. In any two-body system, the objects always orbit around their common center of mass (barycenter). When one object is very heavy compared to the other, the common center of mass is simply assumed to be the same as the center of mass of the heavy object. However, Kepler’s laws can be used even in the case of two objects of similar mass, by decomposing the motion of each body as an ellipse around barycenter.

15. Translate the following paragraph into English.

Историческое значение первого закона Кеплера трудно переоценить. До него астрономы считали, что планеты движутся исключительно по круговым орбитам, а если это не укладывалось в рамки наблюдений - главное круговое движение дополнялось малыми кругами, которые планеты описывали вокруг точек основной круговой орбиты. Философы утверждали, что небесное устройство, в отличие от земного, совершенно по своей гармонии, а поскольку совершеннейшими из геометрических фигур являются окружность и сфера, значит планеты движутся по окружности. Главное, что, получив доступ к обширным данным наблюдений Тихо Браге, Иоганн Кеплер сумел перешагнуть через этот философский предрассудок, увидев, что он не соответствует фактам – подобно тому как Коперник осмелился убрать Землю из центра мироздания, столкнувшись с противоречащими стойким геометрическим представлениям аргументами, которые также состояли в «неправильном поведении» планет на орбитах.

16 Translate the paragraph into Russian.

There are several real-world applications of these phenomena. One example is the use of air bags in cars. Air bags are used in automobiles because they are able to minimize the effect of the force on an object involved in a collision. Air bags accomplish this by extending the time required to stop the momentum of the driver and passenger. When encountering a car collision, the driver and passenger tend to keep moving in accord with Newton’s first law. Their motion carries them towards a windshield that results in a large force exerted over a short time in order to stop their momentum. If instead of hitting the windshield, the driver and passenger hit an air bag, then the time duration of the impact is increased. When hitting an object with something such as an air bag, the time duration might be increased by a factor of 100. Increasing the time by a factor of 100 will result in a decrease in force by a factor of 100.

17 Translate the paragraph into English.

Что же происходит с механической энергией, если в системе действует сила трения?

В реальных процессах, где действуют силы трения, наблюдаются отклонение от закона сохранения механической энергии. Например, при падении тела на Землю сначала кинетическая энергия тела возрастает, поскольку увеличивается скорость. Возрастает и сила сопротивления, которая увеличивается с возрастанием скорости. Со временем она будет компенсировать силу тяжести, и в дальнейшем при уменьшении потенциальной энергии относительно Земли кинетическая энергия возрастает. Это явление выходит за рамки механики, поскольку работа сил сопротивления приводит к изменению температуры тела. Нагревание тел при действии трения легко обнаружить, потерев ладони друг о друга. Таким образом, в механике закон сохранения энергии имеет довольно жесткие границы.

1 C The Theory of Relativity

Reading activities

1. Read the text in order to confirm your expectations and answer the questions given above.

Person of the Century

1. In a century that will be remembered foremost for its science and technology - in particular for our ability to understand and then harness the forces of the atom and the universe - one person stands out as both the greatest mind and paramount icon of our age: the kindly, absent-minded professor, whose wild halo of hair, piercing eyes, engaging humanity and extraordinary brilliance made his face a symbol and his name a synonym for genius: Albert Einstein.

2. Slow in learning to talk as a child, expelled by one headmaster and proclaimed by another unlikely to amount to anything, Einstein has become the patron saint of distracted school kids. But even at the age five, he later recalled, he was puzzling over a toy compass and the mysteries of nature's forces.

3. During his spare time as a young technical officer in a Swiss patent office in 1903, he produced three papers that changed science forever. The first, for which he was later to win the Nobel Prize, described how light could behave not only like a wave, but also like a stream of particles, called quanta or photons. This wave-particle quality became the foundation of what is known as quantum physics. It also provided theoretical underpinnings for such 20th century advances as television, lasers and semiconductors.

4. The second paper confirmed the existence of molecules and atoms by statistically showing how their random collisions explained the jerky motion of tiny particles in water. Important as both these were, it was his third paper that truly upended the universe.

5. It was based, like much of Einstein's work, on a thought experiment- if you could travel at the speed of light, what would a light wave look like? If you were in a train that neared the speed of light, would you perceive time and space differently?

6. Einstein's conclusions became known as the special theory of relativity. No matter how fast one is moving toward or away from the source of light, the speed of that light beam will appear the same, a constant 186,000 miles per second. But space and time will appear relative. As a train accelerates to near the speed of light, time on the train will slow down from the perspective of a stationary observer, and the train will get shorter and heavier. O.K., it's not obvious, but that's why we are no Einsteins and he was.

7. Einstein went on to show the energy and matter were merely different faces of the same thing, their relationship described by the most famous equation in all physics: energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, E = me2. Although not exactly a recipe for an atomic bomb, it explained why one was possible. He also helped resolve smaller mysteries, such as why the sky is blue (it has to do with how the molecules of air diffuse sunlight).

8. His crowning glory, perhaps the most beautiful theory in all science, was the general theory of relativity, published in 1916. Like the special theory, it was based on a thought experiment: imagine being in an enclosed lab accelerating through space. The effects you'd feel would be no different from the experience of gravity. Gravity, he figured, is a warping of space-time. Just as Einstein's earlier work paved the way to harnessing the smallest subatomic forces: the general theory opened up an understanding of the largest of all things, from the formative Big Bang of the universe to its mysterious black holes.

9. It took three years for astronomers to test this theory by measuring how the sun shifted light coming from a star. The results were announced at a meeting of the Royal Society in London.

10. Einstein also continued his .contributions to quantum physics .raising questions that are still playing a pivotal role in the modern development of the theory. Shortly after devising general relativity he showed that photons have momentum, and he came up with a quantum theory of radiation explaining that all subatomic particles, including electrons ex­hibit characteristics of both wave and particle.

11. He spent his later years in a failed quest for a unified (hew that would explain what appeared to be random or uncertain. And his belief in the existence of a unified theory could well be proved right in the new century.

12. More important, he serves as a symbol of all the scientists who built upon his work to decipher and harness the forces of the cosmos. The scientific touchstones of our age - the Bomb, space travel, and electronics - all bear his fingerprints. Or, to quote a Time cover story from 1946 (produced by Whittaker Chambers): ".Among 20th-Century men, he blends to an extraordinary degree those highly distilled powers of intel­lect, intuition and imagination which are rarely combined in one mind, but which, when they do occur together, men call genius. It was all but inevitable that this genius should appear in the field of science, for 20th-Century civilization is first and foremost technological".