High-Q | English פסיכומטרי

Unit 2

Text II (Questions 18-22)

The outcomes of scientific revolutions have hinged on which of two competing hypotheses was accepted. Scientists have been influenced by an obscure Franciscan scholar of the fourteenth century - William of Occam - who first suggested that “it is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” Thinkers of a later age interpreted that to mean that if a simple explanation will do, it is worthless to seek a complex one. This 5 concept became known as Occam's razor. One of the early tests of Occam's razor occurred in the sixteenth century. A young Polish cleric was ready to challenge the 1500-year-old Ptolemaic (geocentric) theory of the universe. According to the geocentric theory, Earth was at the center of the universe, and the sun and the planets revolved around it. In order to explain the apparent motion of 10 the stars, it was necessary for Claudius Ptolemy to propose that the stars exhibited a bewildering complexity of movements. When Nicolaus Copernicus looked at the same heavens, he rejected the geocentric theory for a heliocentric theory that placed the sun at the center and the planets in a circular orbit revolving around the sun. Copernicus argued that his theory eliminated the 15 need for complex trigonometric curves to explain the motions in the heavens. While there were some discrepancies between heliocentric theory and the heavenly motions (these would be eventually resolved when Johannes Kepler replaced the circular orbits with elliptical ones), the simplicity of the Copernican theory eventually won the day.

18. According to Occam's razor, a better theory is -

(1) a complex one (2) a sharp one (3) a meager one (4) a simple one

19. “A young Polish cleric” (lines 7-8) refers to -

(1) Kepler (2) Ptolemy (3) William of Occam (4) Copernicus

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