[00:04.78]Reading NO BOUNDARIES
[00:09.64]Imagine this:you are twenty-one years old
[00:15.10]and a promising graduate student at one of the top universities in the world.
[00:21.76]One day,your doctor tells you that you have an incurable disease
[00:28.24]and may not have more than twelve months to live.
[00:32.68]How would you feel? What would you do?
[00:37.36]Most of us would probably feel very sad
[00:42.21]and give up our dreams and hopes for the future.
[00:46.89]Here is what Stephen Hawking thought:
[00:50.83](There did not seem) much point in working on my PhD
[00:56.11]I did not expect to survive that long.
[01:00.26]Yet two years had gone by and I was not that much worse.
[01:06.19]In fact,things were going rather well for me
[01:11.34]and I had got engaged to a very nice girl, Jane Wilde.
[01:17.22]But in order to get married,I needed a job,
[01:22.36]and in order to get a job,I needed a PhD.
[01:27.93]Instead of giving up,Hawking went on with his research,
[01:33.88]got his PhD and married Jane.
[01:38.85]Nor did he let the disease stop him from living the kind of life
[01:44.41]he had always dreamt of.
[01:47.57]He continued his exploration of the universe
[01:52.22]and travelled around the world to give lectures.
[01:56.48]In 2002,Hawking visited China
[02:01.16]and spoke to university students in Hangzhou and Beijing.
[02:07.11]As his disease has disabled him,
[02:11.27]Hawking has to sit in his now-famous wheelchair and speak through a computer.
[02:19.02]He told the students about his theories and thoughts on some of the greatest questions.
[02:25.87]What is time,how did the universe begin,and what exactly are black holes?
[02:34.41]Hawking became famous in the early 1970s,
[02:39.87]when he and American Roger Penrose
[02:44.44]made new discoveries about the Big Bang and black holes.
[02:50.37]Since then,Hawking has continued to seek answers to questions
[02:56.90]about the nature of the universe.
[03:00.66]In 1988, he wrote A Brief History of Time,which quickly became a best-seller.
[03:09.20]Readers were pleased and surprised to find that a scientist
[03:15.13]could write about his work in a way that ordinary people could understand.
[03:21.90]In the book,
[03:24.64]Hawking explains both what it means to be a scientist and how science works.
[03:31.91]He tells readers how discoveries are made and how they change the world.
[03:38.28]Science,according to Hawking,is often misunderstood:
[03:44.73]people often think that science is about "true" facts that never change.
[03:51.60]Scientists,on the other hand,Hawking writes,
[03:57.17]know that their job is never finished
[04:01.21]and that even the best theorycan turn out to be wrong.
[04:06.78]A scientific theory is the result Of the scientific method.
[04:12.84]Scientists look at the world and try to describe and explain what they see.
[04:20.21]First,they carefully observe what they are interested in.
[04:25.95]To explain what they have seen,
[04:29.71]they build a theory about the way in which things happen
[04:34.86]and the causes and effects.
[04:38.70]Finally,the scientists test the theory to seeif it matches what they have seen
[04:45.86]and if it can predict future events.
[04:50.12]If what they are observing can be tested in a practical way,
[04:55.08]scientists will use experiments.
[04:59.65]But if,like Hawking,
[05:03.73]they are studying something that is too large or too difficult to observe directly
[05:10.57]they will use a model to test the theory.
[05:14.93]People who listen to Hawking's lectures
[05:19.37]sometimes find it difficult to understand him,
[05:24.10]because his thoughts and ideas
[05:27.97]often seem as large as the universe he is trying to describe.
[05:33.82]The speech computer is not the problem.
[05:38.39]In fact,people who hear it often say it sounds just like a human voice.
[05:45.23]Hawking is happy with it, too.
[05:49.20]"The only trouble,"says Hawking,who is British,
[05:54.06]"is that it gives me an American accent."
[06:04.49]Reading MAKING A DIFFERENCE
[06:09.95]It is not necessary to be a great scientist to make a difference,
[06:16.29]but there are things we can learn from the best minds in this world.
[06:22.07]Great scientists like Stephen Hawking always want to know more.
[06:28.41]They are never satisfied with a simple answer
[06:33.17]and are always looking for new questions.
[06:37.61]The Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was so curious that he used a microscope
[06:46.15]and a telescope
[06:49.39]in order to be able to take a closer look at things both great and small.
[06:56.34]By asking why, how and what if,curious minds find new ideas and solutions.
[07:06.19]If knowledge is power,as Sir Francis Bacon wrote in 1597,
[07:13.45]then perhaps creativity can be described as the ability to use that power.
[07:20.89]Scientists must be creative and use their imagination all the time.
[07:27.76]When Zhang Heng,the Chinese astronomer and geographer,
[07:33.33]wanted to draw a map of the heavens,
[07:37.59]he was not satisfied with a simple paper map.
[07:42.34]Instead, he built a model that could move
[07:47.30]in order to show how the position of the stars changed from season to season.
[07:54.46]We must believe in what we do,even when others do not.
[08:00.31]Both Galileo and Zhang Heng
[08:04.68]found it difficult to make people believe that their theories were correct.
[08:10.84]People laughed at Zhang Heng when he first introduced his seismograph,
[08:16.90]and it was only later that the world recognised his greatness.
[08:22.83]Galileo's observations show that Copernicus,another great astronomer,
[08:29.68]was right and that the earth moves around the sun,not the other way around.
[08:36.73]At that time,the church said that the earth was the centre of the universe
[08:43.49]and Galileo was not allowed to publish or discuss his observations.
[08:49.06]Today,both Zhang Heng and Galileo are known as scientific pioneers
[08:56.71]who helped us better understand the world.
[09:00.84]Perhaps the most important thing if we want to make a difference
[09:07.11]is to find something that we like to do and that we are good at.
[09:13.27]Knowing who we are means knowing how we think and what we like to do.
[09:20.43]Everyone has his or her special skills and interests,
[09:26.67]and only by discovering what we do best
[09:30.93]can we hope to reach our goals and truly make a difference.
[09:37.41]Work Book unit 1 Integrating skills
[09:47.44]Reading ALBERT EINSTEIN
[09:52.20]When Stephen Hawking was writing A Brief History of Time,
[09:57.86]his editors told him that he would lose half of his readers
[10:03.19]for each equation he put in the book.
[10:07.32]Despite this warning,Hawking found it necessary to include one equation.
[10:14.30]His choice was the world's most famous equation,Albert Einstein's E = mc2.
[10:23.96]As simple as the equation may seem,
[10:28.22]it represents a theory so important
[10:33.57]that it changed science and physics completely.
[10:38.82]In fact, Einstein's discoveries made such a big difference
[10:45.49]that he felt he had to apologise to Newton.
[10:50.45]"Forgive me,"Einstein wrote, "you found the only way which,
[10:57.21]in your age,was just about possible for a man of highest thought
[11:04.06]and creative power.
[11:07.22]Einstein had replaced Newton's theories with his own
[11:13.38]and changed our understanding of the universe.
[11:18.45]Before Einstein,
[11:21.61]scientists believed that light travelled through space in a straight line.
[11:27.96]But Einstein was able to prove that light coming from the stars
[11:33.92]was bent as it passed the sun.
[11:38.17]As a result,it appeared to scientists on earth that the stars had moved.
[11:45.54]He worked out just how much the light would be bent;
[11:50.50]he could also work out how far the stars would appear to have moved.
[11:57.14]His discovery was completely new;
[12:01.50]it was said that only three people could understand it at the time.
[12:07.75]The difficulty was how he could prove his ideas to other scientists
[12:14.72]Many of them did not accept his scientific ideas.
[12:20.78]But Einstein went on with his research.
[12:25.82]By 1919,scientists who had been watching the stars believed in his work
[12:34.18]and he quickly became world-famous.
[12:38.73]From that time on Einstein was greatly respected
[12:44.40]as the leading scientist of the century.
[12:49.36]The First World War (1914-1918) had brought him great sadness.
[12:58.50]He had taken Swiss nationality in 1901
[13:04.25]and therefore did not have to join the army,
[13:08.48]as Switzerland did not take sides in the war.
[13:13.63]Einstein thought that war was a terrible thing
[13:18.48]and believed that fighting and killing in wars was wrong.
[13:24.13]He did urge the United States to build an atomic bomb to defeat the Nazis,
[13:31.28]but when Einstein saw the effect of the bomb,he regretted his actions.
[13:38.26]What he wanted to see was an end to all the armies of the world.
[13:44.61]When Hitler came into power in the early 1930s, Einstein,
[13:51.58]who was a Jew,found it impossible to continue living in Germany.
[13:57.93]His friends were beaten, or taken away,or their homes were destroyed.
[14:04.77]While he was doing research in America,
[14:09.42]Einstein wrote a letter to a newspaper to say that these acts were wrong.
[14:16.50]It meant that he would never be able to visit Germany again.
[14:21.86]That is why Einstein and his family left Europe for the USA in 1933 |