更多"(1) Gerald Feinberg, the Columbia U"的相关试题:
[单项选择](1) Gerald Feinberg, the Columbia University physicist, once went so far as to declare that "everything possible will eventually be accomplished." Well, that of course left only the impossible as the one thing remaining for daring intellectual adventurers to whittle away at Feinberg, for one, thought that "they"d succeed even there."
(2) It was a point worth considering. How many times in the past had certain things been said to be impossible, only to have it turn out shortly thereafter that the item in question had already been done or soon would be. What greater cliche was there in the history of science than the comic litany of false it-couldn"t-be-dones; the infamous case of Auguste Comte saying in 1844 that it would never be known what the stars were made of, followed in a few years by the spectroscope being applied to starlight to reveal the stars" chemical composition; or the case of Lord Rutherford, the man who discovered the structure of the atom, saying in 1933 mat dreams of controlled nuclear fission were "moonshine." And those weren"t even the worst examples. No, the huffiest of all it-couldn"t-be-done claims centered on the notion that human beings could actually fly, either at all, or across long distances, or to the moon, the stars, or wherever else.
(3) There had been so many embarrassments of this type that about mid-century Arthur C. Clarke came out with a guideline for avoiding them, which he termed Clarke"s Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
(4) Still, one had to admit there were lots of things left that were really and truly impossible, even if it took some ingenuity in coming up with a proper list of examples. Such as. "A camel cannot pass through the eye of a needle." (Well, unless of course it was a very large needle.) On "It is impossible for a door to be simultaneously open and closed." (Well, unless of course it was a revolving door.)
(5) Indeed, watertight examples of the really and truly impossible were so exceptionally hard to come by that paradigm cases turned out to be either trivial or absurd. "I know I will never play the piano like Vladimir Horowitz," offered Milton Rothman, a physicist, "no matter how hard I try". Or, from Scott Lankford, a mountaineer "Everest on roller skates."The false it-couldn"t-be-dones in science are comic because ______.
A. they are cliches, repeated too often by scientists
B. they are almost always proved to be wrong by later scientific research
C. they are mocked at by later generations
D. they provide material for good comedies
[填空题]
At Columbia University, where I taught economics for many years before coming to China, most of my students spent a great deal of time in volunteer work. They taught poor children in the local neighborhoods, they visited the elderly in hospitals and at home and helped them with their shopping, they worked to preserve historic sites and places of beauty, they cleaned up waste dumps, they prepared food for the hungry, they created and ran student newspapers, they organized concerts and artistic events, they acted as translators for migrant workers, they formed political pressure groups, they raised money to combat AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, and so on.
As part 0f that tradition I do volunteer work here in Beijing, just as I did in New York, but I find that my students at Tsinghua University and at other schools in Beijing are much less involved in volunteering then I had expected; In part, of course, this reflects the heavier workload in Chinese schools, which leav
[单项选择]Basically, there are three types of fatigue: physical, pathological (由疾病引起的), and psychological. As you might suspect, each differs significantly from the others.
When you exercise your body you produce waste products. Muscles, for example, discard lactic acid (乳酸) into the blood; cells dump in carbon dioxide, When these wastes reach a certain level in the blood, the brain is notified and your activity level drops. Excess wastes in the muscles may produce soreness. If the blood of a physically fatigued animal is injected into a rested animal, it will produce fatigue. The solution to this type of fatigue is simple—rest. That should revive you; if it doesn’t, another cause should be sought.
Have you ever become involved in so many activities that you had to be in two places at once This is what happens when your body has a disease. The cells are overtaxed and cannot keep up with both fighting the disease and keeping you active. The result is fatigue. Some communicable diseases
A. Sleep is the solution for all types of fatigue.
B. Psychologically healthy people do not suffer from fatigue.
C. Changing your diet cannot cure psychological fatigue.
D. You won’t become fatigued if you are doing something you enjoy.
[单项选择]It is a curious paradox that we think of the physical sciences as "hard", the social sciences as "soft", and the biological sciences as somewhere in between. This is interpreted to mean that our knowledge of physical system is more certain than our knowledge of biological systems, and these in turn are more certain than our knowledge of social systems. In terms of our capacity of sample the relevant universes, however, and the probability that our images of these universes are at least approximately correct, one suspects that a reverse order is more reasonable. We are able to sample earth’s social systems with some degree of confidence that we have a reasonable sample of the total universe being investigated. Our knowledge of social systems, therefore, while it is in many ways extremely inaccurate, is not likely to be seriously overturned by new discoveries. Even the folk knowledge in social systems on which ordinary life is based in earning, spending, organizing, marrying, taking part
A. theories of its origin and history are varied
B. our knowledge of it is highly insecure
C. only a very small sample of it has been observed
D. few scientists are involved in the study of astronomy
[单项选择]
When Dr. John W.Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California and a leading nuclear critic, speaks of "ecocide" in his adversary view of nuclear technology, he means the following: A large nuclear plant like that in Kalkar, the Netherlands, would produce about 200 pounds of plutonium each year. One pound, released into the atmosphere, could cause 9 billion cases of lung cancer. This waste product must be stored for 500,000 years before it is of no further danger to man. In the anticipated reactor economy, it is estimated that there will be 10,000 tons of this material in Western Europe, of which one table-spoonful of plutonium-239 represents the official maximum permissible body burden for 200,000 people. Rather than being biodegradable, plutonium destroys biological properties.
In 1972 the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration ruled that the asbestos level in the work place should be lowered to 2 fibers per cubic centimeter o
A. nationwide application of anti-pollution devices can finally prevent cancer
B. tough legislation is needed to set lower limits of worker exposure to harmful chemicals
C. more research is required into the causes of cancer before further progress can be made
D. industrialization must be slowed down to prevent further spread of cancer-causing agents
