Q. Passage
The human beings were different primarily because they were the only species intensely curious about their surroundings. In time, mutations occurred, and an odd subset of humans began roaming the land. They were arrogant. They were not content to enjoy the magnificence of the universe. They asked 'How?' How was the universe created? How can the ‘stuff of the universe be responsible for the incredible variety in our world: stars, planets, sea, otters, oceans, coral, sunlight, the human brain? The mutants had posed a question that could be answered —but only with the labour of millennia and with a dedication handed down from master to student for a hundred generations. The question also inspired a great number of wrong and embarrassing answers. Fortunately, these mutants were born without a sense of embarrassment. They were called physicists. Now, after examining this question for more than two thousand years-a mere flicker on the scale of cosmological time—we are beginning to glimpse the entire story of creation. In our observatories telescopes and microscopes, in our laboratories and laboratories— and on our notepads—we begin to perceive the outlines of the pristine beauty and symmetry that governed in the first moment of the universe. We can almost see it. But the picture is not yet clear, and we sense that something is obscuring our vision—a dark force that blurs, hides, and obfuscates the intrinsic simplicity of our world. This book is devoted to one problem, a problem that has confounded science since antiquity. What are the ultimate building blocks of matter? The Greek philosopher Democritus called the smallest unit the atomos (literally ‘not able to be cut’). This a-tom is not the atom you learned about in high school science courses, like hydrogen, helium, lithium, and hell proceeding all the way to uranium and beyond. Those are big, clunky, complicated entities by today's standards (or by Democritus standards, for that matter). To a physicist, or even a chemist, such atoms are veritable garbage cans of smaller particles —electrons, protons, and neutrons—and the protons and neutrons in turn are buckets full of still smaller guys. We need to know the most primitive objects there are, and we need to understand the forces that control the social behavior of these objects. It is Democritus’ a-tom, not your chemistry teacher's atom that is the key to matter. The matter we see around us today is complex. There are about a hundred chemical atoms. The number of useful combination of atoms can be calculated, and it is huge: billions and billions. Nature uses these combinations, called molecules to build planets, suns, viruses, mountains, paychecks, Valium, literary agents, and other useful items. It was not always so. During earliest moments after the creation of the universe in the Big Bang, there was no complex matter as we know it today. No, nuclei, no atoms, nothing that was made of simpler pieces. This is because the searing heat of the early universe did not allow the formation of composite objects: such objects, if formed by transient collisions. Would be instantly decomposed into their most primitive constituents. There was perhaps one kind of particle and one force—or even a unified particle/force- and the laws of physics. Within this primordial entity were contained the seeds of the complex world in which humans evolved, perhaps primarily to think about these things. You might find the primordial universe boring, particle physicist, but to a were the days! Such simplicity, such beauty, however mistily visualized in our speculations. Even before my hero Democritus, there were Greek philosophers who dared to try to explain the world using rational arguments and rigorously excluding superstition, myth, and the intervention of gods. These had served as valuable assets in accommodating to a world full of fearsome and seemingly arbitrary phenomena. But the Greeks were impressed too by regularities, by the alternation of day and night, the seasons, the action of fire and wind and water. By the year 650 BC, a formidable technology had arisen in the Mediterranean basin. The people there knew how to survey land and navigate by the stars; they had a sophisticated metallurgy and a detailed knowledge of the positions of stars and planets for making calendars and assorted predictions. They made elegant tools, fine textiles, and elaborately formed and decorated pottery. And in one of the colonies of the Greek empire, the bustling town of Miletus on the west coast of what is now modern Turkey, the belief was, articulated that the seemingly complex world was intrinsically simple—and that this simplicity could be discovered through logical reasoning. About two hundred years later, Democritus of Abdera proposed a-toms as the key to a simple universe, and the search was on. The genesis of physics was astronomy because the earliest philosophers looked up in awe at the night sky and sought logical for the patterns of stars, the motions of plants, the rising and setting of the sun. Over time, scientists turned earthward: phenomena taking place at the surface of the earth-apples falling from trees, the flight of an arrow, the regular motion of a pendulum, winds, and tides-gave rise to a set of 'laws of physics: Physics blossomed during Renaissance, becoming a separate, distinct discipline by about 1500. As the centuries rolled by, and as our powers of observation sharpened with the invention of microscopes, telescopes, vacuum pumps, clocks, and so on, more and more phenomena were uncovered that could he described meticulously by recording numbers in notebooks, by constructing tables and drawing graphs, and then by triumphantly noting conformity to mathematical behaviour.
Q62. According to the passage which of the following questions mutants asked to themselves and tried to answer
1. Who created the Universe?
2. Why did somebody create the Universe?
3. How was the Universe created?
4. What stuff underlay in the innermost layer all the variety of creation?
