Sign in
Please select an account to continue using cracku.in
↓ →
Read the following passage and answer the THREE questions that follow.
Later, I realized that reviewing the history of nuclear physics served another purpose as well: It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humankind the nuclear burden. No. Given the development of nuclear physics up to 1938, development that physicists throughout the world pursued in all innocence of any intention of finding the engine of a new weapon of mass destruction—only one of them, the remarkable Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, took that possibility seriously—the discovery of nuclear fission was inevitable. To stop it, you would have had to stop physics. If German scientists hadn’t made the discovery when they did, British, French, American, Russian, Italian, or Danish scientists would have done so, almost certainly within days or weeks. They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons. Here was no Faustian bargain, as movie directors and other naifs still find it intellectually challenging to imagine. Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might have hidden from the politicians and the generals. To the contrary, here was a new insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coax forth. “Make it seem inevitable,” Louis Pasteur used to advise his students when they prepared to write up their discoveries. But it was. To wish that it might have been ignored or suppressed is barbarous. “Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, not always welcome. The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. “It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”
...Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal of science is “the gradual removal of prejudices.” The discovery that the earth revolves around the sun has gradually removed the prejudice that the earth is the center of the universe. The discovery of microbes is gradually removing the prejudice that disease is a punishment from God. The discovery of evolution is gradually removing the prejudice that Homo sapiens is a separate and special creation.
Based on the passage, which of the following would the author BEST agree with?
Throughout the passage, the author emphasises that the pursuit of science is not towards moral correctness. The author uses the example of nuclear power and the discovery of fission, saying that someday or another, somewhere, we would have discovered nuclear power. These discoveries were going on at the time of Nazi Germany. To say then that physicists would have come together at as barbaric a place as the Nazi footholds to keep the discovery a secret is a stretch. The author is suggesting that the discovery of nuclear power was inevitable, regardless of its later consequences.
Option A is incorrect because the author repeatedly emphasises that science does not address moral questions, or that the moral quandary is not a consideration of science as it moves towards human discoveries; thus, science is neither benevolent nor not benevolent. Option B is incorrect. Although science lacks consideration of moral questions as it moves towards discovery, this is not because it is inconsiderate, but because it is a function of the pursuit of truth and not of morality. Option C is correct for the same reason; 'amoral' refers to something which is unconcerned with whether something is right or wrong.
Option D is incorrect; the author emphasises the pursuit of truth that science embodies, but also quotes Bohr by saying that science is a 'gradual removal of prejudices'. Since it cannot be said that science, at any point in time, has pursued the whole of the truth, option D cannot be inferred. Option E is incorrect for the same reason as option A, and also for the same reason why option C is correct; science is neither moral nor immoral, therefore, it is 'amoral'.
Create a FREE account and get:
Educational materials for CAT preparation