READING PASSAGE 11
Serendipity:The Accidental Scientists
AA paradox lies clo to the heart of scientific discovery. If you know just what you are looking for, finding it can hardly count as a discovery, since it was fully anticipated But if, on the other hand, you have no notion of what you are looking for, you cannot know when you have found it, and discovery, as such, is out of the question. In the philosophy of science, the extremes map onto the purist forms of deductivism and inductivism: In the former, the outcome is suppod to be logically contained in the premis you start with; in the latter, you are recommended to start with no expectations whatsoever and e what turns up.
BAs in so many things, the ideal position is widely suppod to reside somewhere in between the two impossible-to-realize extremes. You want to have a good enough idea of what you are looking for to be surprid when you find something el of value, and you want to be ignorant enough of your end point that you can entertain alternative outcomes. Scientific discovery should, therefore, have an accidental aspect, but not too much of one.
Serendipity is a word that express a position something like that. It's a fascinating word, and the late Robert King Merton– ‘the father of the sociology of science’–liked it well enough to compo its biography, assisted by the French cultural historian Elinor Barber.
C我说兄弟难当Serendipity means a ‘happy accident’ or ‘pleasant surpri’; specifically, the accident of finding something good or uful without looking for it. The first noted u of ‘rendipity’ in the English language was by Horace Walpole (1717–1792). In a letter to Horace Mann (dated 28 January 1754) he said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, who heroes ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’. The name stems from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka.
DBesides antiquarians, the other community that came to dwell on rendipity to say something important about their practice was that of scientists. Many scientists, including the Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon and, later, the British immunologist Peter Medaw
ar, liked to emphasize how much of scientific discovery was unplanned and even accidental. One of Cannon's favorite examples of such rendipity is Luigi Galvani's obrvation of the twitching of discted frogs' legs, hanging from a copper wire, when they accidentally touched an iron railing, leading to the discovery of ‘galvanism’; another is Hans Christian Orsted's discovery of electromagnetism when he unintentionally brought a current-carrying wire parallel to a magnetic needle. The context in which scientific rendipity was most contested and had its greatest resonance was that connected with the idea of planned science. The rendipitists were not all inhabitants of academic ivory towers. Two of the great early-20th-century American pioneers of industrial rearch–Willis Whitney and Irving Langmuir, both of General Electric–made much play of rendipity, in the cour of arguing against overly rigid rearch planning.
EYet what Cannon and Medawar took as a benign method, other scientists found incendiary To say that science had a significant rendipitous aspect was taken by some as dangerous denigration.If scientific discovery were really accidental, then what was the special basis of expert authority?
FIn this connection, the aphorism of choice came from no less an authority on scientific discovery than Louis Pasteur:"Chance favors the prepared mind." Accidents may happen, and things may turn up unplanned and unforeen, as one is looking for something el, but the ability to notice such events, to e their potential海上的月亮发票丢失证明 线性代数难吗bearing and meaning, to exploit their occurrence and make constructive u of them–the are the results of systematic mental preparation. What ems like an accident is just another form of experti. On clor inspection, it is insisted, accident dissolves into sagacity.
养车一年多少钱GIn 1936, as a very young man, Merton wrote a minal essay on "The Unanticipated Conquences of Purposive Social Action." It is , he argued, the nature of social action that what one intends is rarely what one gets: Intending to provide resources for buttressing Christian religion, the natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution laid the groundwork for cularism; people wanting to be alone with nature in Yomite Valley wind up crowding one another. We just don't know enough–and we can never know enough–to ensure that the past is an adequate guide to the future: Uncertainty about outcomes, even of our best-laid plans, is endemic. All social action, including that underta
ken with the best evidence and formulated according to the most rational criteria, is uncertain in its conquences.
上坟有什么讲究
You should spend about 20 minutes on question 28-40, which are bad on reading passage 3 on the following pages.
Questions 28-33
Reading passage 3 has ven paragraphs, A-G
Choo the correct heading for paragraphs A-F from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, i-x, in boxes 28-33 on your answer sheet.
List of headings |
i The origin of rendipity ii 南瓜糕的做法Horace Walpole's fairy tale iii Arguments against rendipity iv Two basic knowledge in the paradox of scientific discovery v The accidental evidences in and beyond science 闲逛vi Opponents of authority vii Accident and mental preparation viii Planned rearch and anticipated outcome ix The optimum balance between the two extremes |
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28 Paragraph A
29 Paragraph B
30 Paragraph C
31 Paragraph D
32 Paragraph E
33 Paragraph F
Questions 34-36
