2. 外语
  3. Society is generally amenable to subsidizing science’s expensive machinery, which at some point will provide civilizatio

Society is generally amenable to subsidizing science’s expensive machinery, which at some point will provide civilizatio

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问题              Society is generally amenable to subsidizing science’s expensive
        machinery, which at some point will provide civilization with another advance
        on the scale of relativity theory, but such heedless optimism can mislead one
Line     into the notion that the aim of science is to find the "meaning" of the world.
(5)      That there must be a meaning seems certain, for otherwise there could be no
        such a thing as progress, but we must also acknowledge that as science keeps
        uncovering more and more secrets, it progresses in the way that computations
        in the infinitesimal calculus keep approaching nearer and nearer to infinity
        without ever getting there, and we must not assume that progress should seek a
(10)     final end to the quest for knowledge.
            The amateur scientist Goethe, though vehemently and mistakenly opposed
        to Newton’s mechanistic model of reality, demonstrated the dangers of his
        co/league’s positivist approach, for though his science was bad science, his
        scientific writings are not bad philosophy. Goethe demanded that science should
(15)     always hold to the human scale, opposing the use of the microscope on the
        grounds that what cannot be seen with the naked eye should not be seen, that
        what is hidden from us is hidden for a purpose. In this, Goethe was a scandal
        among scientists, whose first, firm, and necessary principle is that if something
        can be done, it should he, and his furious denial of Newton was more than
(20)     merely the bloodshot jealousy of one great mind drawing a bead on another.
        Goethe’s theory of light is wrong insofar as the science of optics is concerned,
        yet in the expression of his theory Goethe achieves a pitch of poetic intensity
        that is as persuasive, in its way, as anything Newton did: there is, Goethe
        suggested, a world beyond the current state of science.
(25)          At the end of the 19th century, before Einstein, professors were steering
        students away from physics because they believed little was left undiscovered
        about the nature of physical reality. As we approach the end of the 20th
        century, we are still guilty of hubris: probably a Unified Field Theory will be
        achieved, and will seem for a time, perhaps even as long as the period between
(30)     Newton’s Principia and Einstein’s first paper on the theory of relativity, to
        explain everything; but then a Heisenberg or a Gdel will come forward and
        unravel the entire structure. Einstein correctly remarked more than once how
        strange and suspicious it is that reality, as we know it, keeps proving itself
        amenable to the rules of man-made science. Our thought extends only as far as
(35)      our capacity to express it, and thus what we consider reality is only that stratum
        of the world that we have the faculties to comprehend. There is a truth that
        scientists not blinded by hubris, or a cramped imagination, have always
        acknowledged: that there is no end to the venture.
According to the passage, the work of scientists is similar to that of equations in infinitesimal calculus because scientists
选项 A、work to explain concepts that are abstract in nature, not unlike infinity
B、recognize that meaning is not the only benefit of scientific endeavor
C、are unable to explain their work in any more concrete terms than mathematicians express theirs
D、can discover a series of more and more precise truths, but can never achieve absolute accuracy
E、are intrinsically more interested in formulas and theories than the predictions that can be made by them
答案D
解析
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