Science, in practice, depends far less on the experiments it prepares than on the preparedness of the minds of the men who watch

admin2018-03-01  39

问题     Science, in practice, depends far less on the experiments it prepares than on the preparedness of the minds of the men who watch the experiments. Sir Isaac Newton supposedly discovered gravity through the fall of an apple. Apples had been falling in many places for centuries and thousands of people had seen them fall. But Newton for years had been curious about the cause of the orbital motion of the moon and planets. What kept them in place? Why didn’t they fall out of the sky? The fact that the apple fell down toward the earth and not up into the tree answered the question he had been asking himself about those larger fruits of the heavens, the moon and the planets.
    How many men would have considered the possibility of an apple falling up into the tree? Newton did because he was not trying to predict anything. He was just wondering. His mind was ready for the unpredictable. Unpredictability is part of the essential nature of research. If you don’t have unpredictable things, you don’t have research. Scientists tend to forget this when writing their cut and dried reports for the technical journals, but history is filled with examples of it.
    In talking to some scientists, particularly younger ones, you might gather the impression that they find the "scientific method" a substitute for imaginative thought. I’ve attended research conferences where a scientist has been asked what he thinks about the advisability of continuing a certain experiment. The scientist has frowned, looked at the graphs, and said "the data are still inconclusive." "We know that," the men from the budget office have said, "but what do you think? Is it worthwhile going on? What do you think we might expect?" The scientist has been shocked at having even been asked to speculate.
    What this amounts to, of course, is that the scientist has become the victim of his own writings. He has put forward unquestioned claims so consistently that he not only believes them himself, but has convinced industrial and business management that they are true. If experiments are planned and carried out according to plan as faithfully as the reports in the science journals indicate, then it is perfectly logical for management to expect research to produce results measurable in dollars and cents. It is entirely reasonable for auditors to believe that scientists who know exactly where they are going and how they will get there should not be distracted by the necessity of keeping one eye on the cash register while the other eye is on the microscope. Nor, if regularity and conformity to a standard pattern are as desirable to the scientist as the writing of his papers would appear to reflect, is management to be blamed for discriminating against the "odd balls" among researchers in favor of more conventional thinkers who "work well with the team."
What can we learn from Paragraph 3?

选项 A、Scientists don’t like to be asked to speculate.
B、Scientific method is more important than imaginative thought.
C、Young scientists tend to replace imaginative thought with "scientific method".
D、Scientists don’t like to answer questions.

答案C

解析 选项C对应第三段的第一句,这句话的后半句提到:他们认为“科学方法”可以代替创造性思维。这里的“substitute”的意思是“替代”,刚好对应选项C中的“replace”,因此选项C是同义替换的正确答案。选项A对应这个段落的最后一句:这位科学家对于被要求作出预测感到很震惊。并没有说科学家不喜欢被要求去预测,因此选项A偷换了概念。选项B对应这段的第一句后半部分,根据对于选项C的解释可以看出,文中并没有提及谁重要的问题,因此选项B的说法不对。选项D无中生有。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/iyBZ777K
0

最新回复(0)