We are obsessed (迷恋)with ourselves. We study our history, our psychology, our philosophy. Much of our knowledge revolves (使旋转)around humankind itself, as if we were the most important thing in the universe.
But in the course of the centuries we have come to realize just how many wrong ideas we’ve had. We have learned of the existence of black holes, waves of space, and of the extraordinary molecular structures in every cell of our bodies.
The more we discover, the more we understand that what we don’t yet know is greater than what we know. The more powerful our telescopes, the stranger and more unexpected are the heavens we see. The closer we look at the minute detail of matter, the more we discover of its profound structure.
In a famous story told by Plato in the seventh book of The Republic, some men are chained at the bottom of a dark cave and see only shadows cast upon a wall by a fire behind them. They think that this is reality. One of them frees himself, leaves the cave and discovers the light of the sun and the wider world. At first the light, to which his eyes are unaccustomed, stuns and confuses him. But eventually he can see and returns excitedly to his companions to tell them what he has seen. They find it hard to believe.
We are all in the depths of a cave, chained by our ignorance, our prejudices, and our weak senses reveal only shadows. If we try to see further, we are confused: we are unaccustomed. But we try. This is science. Scientific thinking explores and redraws the world, gradually offering us better and better images of it, teaching us to think in ever more effective ways. Its strength is its capacity to demolish (推翻)old ideas, to reveal new regions of reality, and to construct new, more effective images of the world. This adventure rests upon the entirety of past knowledge, but at its heart is change.
The incompleteness and the uncertainty of our knowledge, hung over the abyss (深渊) of what we don’t know, does not make life meaningless: it makes it interesting and precious.
【小题1】What does the author want to tell us in the first three paragraphs?| A．The new discoveries of the universe prove to be wrong. |
| B．Man has created splendid cultures in the course of centuries. |
| C．Our knowledge of the universe is incomplete and uncertain. |
| D．The existing technologies are enough for further exploration. |
| A．make us aware of the cruelty of reality |
| B．encourage us to explore the unknown world |
| C．applaud the heroic deeds of chasing freedom |
| D．justify our ignorance and prejudice about the world |
| A．Exploring the universe makes our life meaningful. |
| B．Leaving things as they are makes our life perfect. |
| C．New discoveries of the universe will cause confusion. |
| D．Past knowledge prevents us constructing a new world. |
