Гвоздева Пхысицс фор адванцед студентс 2011
.pdfWe use Ving when we express our feelings about the action. We often use Ving as the subject of a sentence.
Study the sentences.
1.Killing a living being is horrible.
2.Predicting the future is very difficult.
3.Going through a black hole is unlikely to be a popular and reliable method of space travel.
4.Falling into a black hole has become one of the horrors of science fiction.
IV. We use must, have to, should, be to (is to, was to) to say that it is necessary to do something. There is a difference between must and have to. With must the speaker is giving his own feelings, saying what he thinks is necessary. With have to he is giving facts.
We use is to V to say that we are planning to do something.
Study the sentences.
1.We have to use statistical methods.
2.We have to resort to approximations.
3.We must find out what happens at these energies if we are to understand how we and the universe began.
4.We are not to change life, we are to change ourselves.
V. Emphatic sentences
To make the sentence emphatic we usually change the word order. To understand the emphatic sentence, restore the usual word order: S + V + what + where + when
Study the sentence.
1. Ramsey discovered that mixed in with nitrogen made from the air were the now famous gases: neon, xenon and krypton.
VI. The participle |
|
|
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The verb changes in four forms. |
|
||
V1 |
V2 |
V3 |
V4 |
to make --- made ---- made (сделанный) ---- making (делаю-
щий)
V3 is a passive participle; V4 is an active participle
N + Ving … and N + Ved … the participle put together with other words characterizes the noun it follows (Russian – который ……)
Study the sentences.
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1.One can draw a graph showing the amount of light elements vertically and the amount of normal matter in the universe along the horizontal axis.
2.The Dirac equation was the basis of ‘most of physics and all chemistry.’ However, we have been able to solve the equation only for the very simplest system, the hydrogen atom, consisting of one proton and one electron.
3.The present age of the universe is one followed by ten zeroes.
VII. Question tags = mini-questions, which we put on the end of the sentence.
In question tags we use the helping verbs: are you? doesn’t he? did he? have you? wasn’t it? etc.
We use a positive question tag with a negative sentence. We use a negative question tag with a positive sentence.
The meaning of a question tag depends on how you say it. If the voice goes down, you aren’t really asking a question; you are only asking the other person to agree with you.
But if the voice goes up, it is a real question.
Study the sentences.
1.Creativity can solve almost any problem, can’t it?
2.Curiosity is a drug from boredom, isn’t it?
3.We obtained an unexpected result, didn’t we?
4.Einstein never came to his discoveries through the process of rational thinking, did he?
5.Life didn’t originate with a DNA molecule, did it?
Give Russian correspondence:
hence (therefore), nearly (almost), either (any of the two), neither of the two (neither this nor that), although (though), it turns out (оказывается), a way (a method), to give rise to (to lead to, to result in), a way (a method)
THINGS ARE MUCH MORE COMPLICATED THAN THEY
SEEM TO BE
FYI
1. If two or more things are complementary, they are different but together they form a complete or better whole.
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Study the quotation and the comment. Mind the underlined grammar points.
This is what Niels Bohr says:
“But what is light really? Is it a wave or a shower of photons? There seems to be no probability for forming a consistent description of the phenomenon of light by choosing only one of the languages. There seems to be a situation when we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, but at times we may use either. There seem to be two contradictory pictures of reality, separately neither of them fully explains the phenomenon of light, but together they do.”
Comment
This is how Victor Weisskopf, a theoretical physicist at MIT, who considers Bohr his spiritual father, comments upon Bohr’s theory:
Bohr’s principle of complementarity states that looking at any phenomenon at one angle is not enough. The principle of complementarity is based on the so-called wave – particle duality of light. An electron is a wave and a particle, which is seemingly contradictory, but it turns out they are just two different sides, different aspects of the same reality. Energy is matter. Matter is energy. Bohr generalized this. Although they seem to be contradictory, they are not contradictory, they are complementary, and they add up and allow getting a more wholesome picture of the world. All the phenomena a scientist deals with are many-sided and their research should involve science (experiment), philosophy (theory), arts (imagination, creativity), religion (intuition) and social responsibility. This is what Niels Bohr called complementarity of thinking.
Take a sunset as an example. One can look at it from the point of view of scattering of light; one can look at the wonderful color combinations. They are equally valid ways of human perception of the world. For me the sunset is more intriguing if I not only admire the color, but also think, “How did this color come about?”
POST-READING TASK
(To be done at home in writing)
I. Study the quotation and formulate its main idea.
II.Formulate Bohr’s principle of complementarity of thinking.
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III. Give your own example of a phenomenon to be investigated from different angles and describe it.
ASK THE RIGHT QUESTION
“It’s not every question that deserves an answer.”
Syrups 42 BC, Roman poet and writer
Study the passage. Mind the underlined grammar points.
Science is an endless process of questioning. All you have to do is ask the right question. The answer you get is to the question you really asked, not to the question you thought you were asking. Every new answer gives rise to new questions. Do you remember Ramsey experiments? He thought he could get nitrogen by taking away oxygen, vapor and carbon dioxide from the air. What is left would have to be nitrogen. Nitrogen made like this, however, was slightly different in weight from nitrogen made from chemicals. Ramsey discovered that mixed in with nitrogen made from the air were the now famous gases: neon, xenon and krypton.
He thought he was asking the question about nitrogen. He should have asked a question about the mixture of gases left behind when certain things are taken away from the air.
POST-READING TASK
(To be done at home in writing)
1.Formulate the question which Ramsey should have asked before he started the experiment.
2.Formulate your own conclusion.
CLASS EXERCISES
Exercise 1 (in groups)
One of you makes up a tag question, another one answers it.
1.Looking at any phenomenon at one angle is not enough.
2.The principle of complementarity is based on the so-called waveparticle duality of light.
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3.A wave and a shower of photons are two contradictory pictures of reality.
4.A wave and a shower of photons are two different sides of the same reality.
5.A whole is different from its parts.
6.Science is a process of questioning.
7.Every new answer gives rise to new questions.
8.Ramsey thought he could get nitrogen by taking away oxygen, vapor and carbon dioxide from the air.
9.Ramsey was really asking a question about the mixture of gases left behind when certain things are taken from the air.
Exercise 2 (do it yourself)
Translate the sentences. Follow the passage.
1.Чтобы получить правильный ответ нужно задать правильный вопрос.
2.Наука есть бесконечный поток вопросов, так как каждый новый ответ порождает новые вопросы.
3.Что хотел получить Рамсей в результате своего эксперимен-
та?
4.Как Рамсей хотел получить азот?
5.Что обнаружил Рамсей?
UNIT 6
THE ADVANCE OF SCIENCE
“Scientific truth never triumphs by convincing its opponents.”
Max Planck
PRE-READING TASK Study some grammar points. I. The Passive Voice
On the basis of the passive infinitive to be (is/are, was/were, will be, have been) + V3 we form passive sentences and prefer passive when it is not important who or what does the action.
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Note A verb can have a direct object and an indirect one.
We can make both the direct object and the indirect one the subject of a passive sentence.
Study the sentences.
1.Feynman formulated a theory (a direct object) The theory was formulated by Feynman.
2.We consider Boltzmann (a direct object) one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century.
Boltzmann is considered one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century.
3.A new generation replaces the old generation (a direct object). The old generation is replaced by a new generation.
4.Habit rules us (an indirect object). We are ruled by habit.
5.My father influenced me greatly (an indirect object). I was greatly influenced by my father.
6.I gave him (an indirect object) a draft of my first book. He was given the draft of my first book.
II. There is used as the subject of the verb ‘be’. It is used when you want to say that something exists. We use There is no + N to say that something does not exist.
Study the sentences.
1.There are well-defined laws that govern how the universe develops in time. We haven’t yet found the exact form of all these laws. I think there is a fifty-fifty chance that we will find them.
2.There may only be a small number of laws.
3.There has been no significant biological evolution, or change in human DNA, in the last ten thousand years.
III. We use to Vo to talk about the purpose of doing something
(why someone does something)
Study the sentences.
1.Suddenly I realized that the techniques that Penrose and I had developed to prove singularities could be applied to black holes.
2.The predictions of the theory of fluid mechanics are not exact. One only has to listen to the weather forecast to realize that. But they are good enough for the design of ships or oil pipelines.
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Give Russian correspondence:
This is the case (this is true), another (a second), the other (the second of the two), to make somebody do something (to force somebody to do it), rather (introduces a correction), eventually (finally, ultimately), in a natural way
Study the quotations.
“If I have seen further it was by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Sir Isaac Newton
“The human mind treats the new idea the way the body treats a new protein, it rejects it.”
Medawar, biologist
“The human mind is the most inertial system.”
(Anonymous)
THE OPPONENTS ARE NEVER CONVINCED
FYI
1 an opponent – a person who disagrees with something you suggest and criticizes it
2 utopian – idealistic
Study the passage. Mind the underlined grammar points.
There is a beautiful, utopian notion that science marches forward step-by-step in understanding the world we live in. The trouble is, there is a non-linearity in the advance of science, as in other fields of creative human activity. The history is much more dramatic than that utopian notion. Bolzmann committed suicide. Today he is considered one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century. He was one of the inventors of statistical mechanics. One of the reasons he committed suicide was because the leading intellectual figure in Vienna at that time was Ernst Mach and Mach didn’t believe in atoms. All of Boltzmann’s work depended on the existence of atoms.
Another example is Maxwell, the other great scientist of the end of the nineteenth century. James Maxwell came up with Maxwell’s equa-
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tions for electromagnetism. The leading physicist of his time was Lord Kelvin, who decided that Maxwell was wrong. And when Maxwell died, there were only a handful of young physicists in England who thought that Maxwell was right.
There are many stories like this. But of course when they write a history of science, they take all of that out and make it sound like science is a step-by-step march forward and that everyone agrees when a new idea comes. To show how little this is the case in science, as in other fields, there is a beautiful quote from Max Planck: “Scientific truth never triumphs by convincing its opponents and making them see the light., but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with that and regards new ideas in a natural way.” Planck was one of the inventors of quantum theory, a very revolutionary theory. He did this work around nineteen-hundred. It was really the first step in the direction of the quantum theory.
Chitin, American mathematician
Vocabulary Notes
1.to convince somebody – to talk somebody into the idea
2.a notion – a concept – an idea
3.to come up with a theory – to suggest a theory
4.to regard – to consider
POST-READING TASK
(To be done at home in writing)
I. Explain why there is a non-linearity in the fields of creative human activity.
II. Reconstruct the passage.
Begin with: ‘The scientific truth never triumphs by convincing its opponents.’ and then give some examples to prove it.
III. Complete the sentences. Follow the passage.
1.There is a beautiful utopian notion …..
2.There is non-linearity ……
3.There is another ….
4.There were only a handful of young physicists …..
5.There are ….
6.There is ….
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IV. Give words close in meaning.
1.idealistic
2.a concept
3.the progress of science
4.to consider
5.to suggest a theory
6.this is true
V. Study grammar point I and make the sentences passive. Make an indirect object the subject of a sentence and use the
passive form of the V.
Model: Life bored me. – I was bored with life.
1.My mother took me to a family doctor.
2.Doctors never actually told me what was wrong.
3.Then the doctors told me I had a brain damage.
4.It was the end of the fifties, and what was called the Establishment disillusioned young people. Life bored me and most of my con-
temporaries.
5.Stars drew me.
6.Medicine or biology didn’t attract me because they seemed too inexact and descriptive.
7.My mother did not influence me as much as my father.
8.They sent me a copy of the review
9.The television series impressed me very much.
10.No alien civilization has contacted us yet.
(From the book Black Holes and Baby Universes by Stephen Hawking)
Note
1.The Establishment – the political system
2.Someone who is your contemporary lives at the same time as
you.
CLASS EXERCISES
Exercise 1 (in pairs)
You have different points of view with your partner. One of you reads the positive sentence. The other one changes its meaning to the negative. Follow the passage.
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1.Science marches forward step-by-step in understanding.
2.There is a linearity in the advance of science.
3.Mach believed in atoms.
4.Lord Kelvin decided that Maxwell was right.
5.Many physicists in England thought that Maxwell was right.
6.Science is a step-by-step march forward.
7.Everyone agrees when a new idea comes.
8.Scientific truth triumphs by convincing its opponents.
Exercise 2 (do it yourself)
Translate the sentences using there is, there are. Follow the passage.
1.Существует утопическое понятие, что наука развивается равномерно.
2.Это не так. Развитию науки присуща нелинейность.
3.Нелинейность присуща любой области творческой человеческой деятельности.
4.Существует еще один пример.
5.Таких историй много.
6.Существует прекрасное изречение Макса Планка, которое объясняет причину нелинейности развития любой области творческой человеческой деятельности.
Exercise 3 (in pairs)
Make up sentences by matching the left and the right columns. Follow the passage.
Model: This notion is (was) utopian.
1. |
The history of science |
a. |
are never convinced |
2. |
Boltzmann |
b. |
a creative human activity |
3. |
Ernst Mach |
c. |
a very revolutionary theory |
4. James Maxwell |
d. |
one of the inventors of quantum theory |
|
5. |
Lord Kelvin |
e. |
an inventor of statistical mechanics |
6. |
Science |
f. |
the leading intellectual figure in Vienna |
7. |
Max Planck |
g. |
the other great scientist of the 19th |
8. |
The quantum theory |
|
century |
9. |
The opponents |
h. |
dramatic |
|
|
i. |
the leading physicist of his time |
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