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The Dreamers and the Doers
Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot live in the cradle
forever.
K.E. Tsiolkovsky
Very little that is worthwhile is ever achieved without dreams. But to be
fruitful, dreams must be controlled by reason and founded on reality.
Though men have speculated about space travel for more than 2000 years,
it was not until the beginning of the 17th century that those speculations had
any scientific basis. In 1609 Galileo Galilei turned the newly invented
telescope upon the heavens, and became the first of all
men to see (however dimly through the chromatic haze of
his crude lenses) that there were worlds beyond the
earth. He saw the sharp-edged shadows of great mountains
arranged across the lonely lunar plains. He glimpsed,
but could not understand, the enigma of Saturn's rings. He saw Venus as a tiny, dazzling
crescent, waxing and waning like a distant moon. Above all, he discovered
four sparks of light orbiting the planet Jupiter, and so destroyed forever
the belief that all the heavenly bodies revolved around the earth. Indeed, if
Jupiter possessed four satellites while the earth had but one, perhaps man
was not as important in the celestial scheme as he had fondly imagined.
Within a century, the closed and tidy mediaeval cosmos, which contained
only Heaven, Earth and Hell like a three-storey building, had vanished into
oblivion. We find perhaps its last traces in Paradise Lost (1667), and even
there it is obvious that Milton is well aware of the new astronomy and the
vast scale of the real universe. Only a single lifetime earlier, Shakespeare's
"Doubt thou that the stars are fire,/ Doubt that the Sun doth move" had
continued to pay tribute to the idea of a fixed central earth and a revolving
heaven. Between these two masters of the English language lies the Great
Divide which we call the Copernican Revolution.
For it was the Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus who in the 15th
century paved the way for the modern picture of the universe by publishing a theory of the solar system in which the sun is the central body and the earth
is merely one of the planets revolving around it. Two other scientists established this theory beyond dispute. First in the 17th century Johannes Kepler,
after years of patient calculation and endless detours down mathematical
blind alleys, discovered the laws that govern the movements of the planets
-- and which today control the movements of those artificial planets, our
space probes. The simplest and most surprising of Kepler's three laws was
the first: planets do not -- as everyone, including Copernicus, had supposed
-- travel around the sun in perfect circles. They follow that considerably
more complex curve, the ellipse.
Then in the next generation came the great Newton, banishing the last
traces of metaphysics from the heavens, and turning the solar system into
one vast machine whose every movement is explained by a single all-embracing law
-- the Law of Universal Gravitation. The celestial matter of
the heavenly bodies and the gross matter of this earth obey the same rules:
no longer could any distinction be drawn between them.
And so a strange paradox occurred: as the new telescopes multiplied the
scale of the universe beyond all the dreams of earlier ages, the new
knowledge made this vastly expanded universe understandable and even
familiar. Astronomy ceased to belong to the theologians and became a
sort of extension of geography.
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1. |
From the passage we can say that the writer |
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(A) |
approves of all dreams. |
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(B) |
disapproves of all dreams. |
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(C) |
approves of dreams based on reason and reality. |
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(D) |
approves only of reason and reality. |
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2. |
According to the passage, which of these statements is true ? |
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(A) |
Scientific speculation about space began only 2000 years ago. |
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(B) |
Scientific speculation about space began over 2000 years ago. |
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(C) |
Scientific speculation about space began in the 17th century. |
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(D) |
Scientific speculation about space began only recently. |
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3. |
Galileo Galieli's greatest discovery was |
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(A) |
the lonely lunar plains. |
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(B) |
Saturn's rings. |
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(C) |
the planet Jupiter. |
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(D) |
that the heavenly bodies do not all revolve around the earth. |
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4. |
"the celestial scheme" refers to |
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(A) |
the system of ideas about Heaven. |
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(B) |
God's plan for man in the universe. |
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(C) |
Heaven. |
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(D) |
the systematic arrangement of the heavenly bodies. |
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5. |
In the Middle Ages people believed that the
universe |
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(A) |
consisted of Heaven, Earth and Hell, arranged in that
descending order. |
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(B) |
was limitless. |
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(C) |
was closed and tidy. |
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(D) |
had vanished into oblivion. |
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6. |
From the quotation in the second paragraph
we can deduce that Shakespeare. |
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(A) |
doubted that the stars were fire. |
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(B) |
doubted that the sun moved. |
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(C) |
thought that the heavens were fixed. |
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(D) |
believed that Earth was the centre of the universe. |
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7. |
Which of these statements is false ? |
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(A) |
The Copernican Revolution was named after Nicholas
Copernicus. |
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(B) |
The Copernican Revolution was firmly established in the
17th century. |
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(C) |
The Copernican Revolution placed the sun as the centre
of the solar system. |
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(D) |
The Copernican Revolution was concluded during
Shakespeare's lifetime. |
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8. |
Johannes Kepler discovered that planets |
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(A) |
control the movements of our space probes. |
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(B) |
move around the sun in an ellipse. |
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(C) |
move around the sun in a perfect circle. |
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(D) |
do not move around the sun. |
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9. |
Newton established that |
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(A) |
the Law of Universal Gravitation affects heavenly matter
and earthly matter in the same way. |
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(B) |
metaphysics has a place in astronomy. |
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(C) |
the solar system is a big machine. |
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(D) |
there are no differences between heavenly bodies and the
earth. |
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10. |
We may infer from the passage that astronomy
was once |
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(A) |
a paradox. |
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(B) |
governed by religious beliefs. |
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(C) |
geography on a bigger scale. |
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(D) |
beyond the dreams of man. |
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