单选题 Gerald Feinberg, the Columbia University physicist, once went so far as to declare that "everything possible will eventually be accomplished." He didn"t even think it would take very long for this to happen: "I am inclined to put two hundred years as an upper limit for the accomplishment of any possibility that we can imagine today."
Well, that of course left only the impossible as the one thing remaining for daring intellectual adventurers to whittle away at. Feinberg, for one, thought that they"d succeed even here. "Everything will be accomplished that does not violate known fundamental laws of science," he said, "as well as many things that do violate those laws."
So in no small numbers scientists tried to do the impossible. And how understandable this was. For what does the independent and inquiring mind hate more than being told that something just can"t be done, pure and simple, by any agency at all, at any time, no matter what. Indeed, the whole concept of the impossible was something of an affront to creativity and advanced intelligence, which was why being told that something was impossible was an unparalleled stimulus for getting all sorts of people to try to accomplish it anyway, as witness all the attempts to build perpetual motion machines, antigravity generators, time-travel vehicles, and all the rest.
Besides, there was always the residual possibility that the naysayers would turn out to be wrong and the yeasayers right, and that one day the latter would reappear to laugh in your face. As one cryonicist pat it, "When you die, you"re dead. When I die, I might come back. So who"s the dummy?"
It was a point worth considering. How many times in the past had certain things been said to be impossible, only to have it turn out shortly thereafter that the item in question had already been done or soon would be. What greater cliche was there in the history of science than the comic litany of false it-couldn"t-be-dones; the infamous case of Auguste Comte saying in 1844 that it would never be known what the stars were made of, followed in a few years by the spectroscope being applied to starlight to reveal the stars" chemical composition; or the case of Lord Rutherford, the man who discovered the structure of the atom, saying in 1933 that dreams of controlled nuclear fission were "moonshine".
And those weren"t even the worst examples. No, the huffiest of all it-couldn"t-be-done claims centered on the notion that human beings could actually fly, either at all, or across long distances, or to the moon, the stars, or wherever else. It was as if for unstated reasons human flight was something that couldn"t be allowed to happen. "The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be." That was Simon Newcomb, the Johns Hopkins University mathematician and astronomer in 1906, three years after the Wright brothers actually flew.
There had been so many embarrassments of this type that about mid-century Arthur C. Clarke came out with a guideline for avoiding them, which he termed Clarke"s Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Still, one had to admit there were lots of things left that were really and truly impossible, even if it took some ingenuity in coming up with a proper list of examples. Such as: "A camel cannot pass through the eye of a needle." (Well, unless of course it was a very large needle.) Or: "It is impossible for a door to be simultaneously open and closed." (Well, unless of course it was a revolving door.)
Indeed, watertight examples of the really and truly impossible were so exceptionally hard m come by that paradigm cases turned out to be either trivial or absurd. "I know I will never play the piano like Vladimir Horowitz," offered Milton Rothman, a physicist, "no matter how hard I try." Or, from Scott Lankford, a mountaineer: "Everest on roller skates."
No one would bother trying to overcome those impossibilities, but off in the distance loomed some other, more metaphysically profound specimens. They beckoned like the Mount Everests of science: antigravity generators, faster-than-light travel, antimatter propulsion, space warps, time machines. There were physicists aplenty who took a look at these peaks and decided they had to climb them.

单选题 If the claim made by Feinberg in Para. 2 should turn out to be tree, which of the following must also be true?

单选题 In what sense was the concept of the impossible an "affront"?

单选题 The author cites Lord Rutherford" s accomplishment in order to show that ______.

单选题 It can be inferred from the passage that the author considers Newcomb"s comments more irresponsible than Comte"s for which of the following reasons?

单选题 The reference to Mount Everest in Para. 9 differs from that in para. 10 in that the first reference is an example of ______.