Quick!!!!!!!!!!! 朗讀一問 20分!!!!

I get many strange reactions from people when I tell them I am a scientist.
Frequently I'll be told by my new acquaintances that they were hopeless at science at school, or I'll be asked if I make atom bombs
. People, it seems, are frightened by science,
so they take every opportunity to belittle it.
They'd like to believe that science is all very well in the lab and for making bombs,
but that it doesn't apply to real life.
The comic-song writer Michael Flanders summed it up beautifully when he said that he cannot understand scientists and they cannot understand anyone else.
Scientists must be spoken to in their own language: "H2S04 Professor! Don't synthesize anything 1 wouldn't synthesize! And the reciprocal of [pi] to your good wife!"
One favourite subject that people raise is the old line about scientists having proved that the bumble-bee cannot fly. It's a much loved piece of urban folklore. There it is, the humble Bombus Terristris, plainly flying around us throughout the summer, and those crazy know-all scientists with their noses in their test-tubes say it cannot possibly fly. What utter nonsense! It is obvious to any scientist that the bumblebee can fly because experiment proves it. So what is this business about proving bees cannot fly? And who started it?
First, let's look at the physics behind the story. The lift equations for rigid wings are straightforward enough. Bumble-bees are fairly big, weighing almost a gram, and have a wing area of about a square centimetre.Tot up all the figures and you find that bees cannot generate enough lift at their typical flying speed of about 1 ms.
But that doesn't prove that bees cannot fly. All it proves is that bees with smooth, rigid wings cannot glide, which you can show for yourself with a few dead bees and a little lacquer.

2006-10-18 21:18:01 補充：
I get many strange reactions from people when I tell them I am a scientist. Frequently I'll be told by my new acquaintances that they were hopeless at science at school, or I'll be asked if I make atom bombs. People,

And who started it?唔知係咪呢一句......

To achieve stature in the sciences, mathematics or engineering requires not only intelligence but also a major commitment of time and effort. Few are willing to make the required sacrifices and to delay the gratification that a scientific life ultimately provides.



The rest of us have ambivalent attitudes toward scientists. We hold their achievements in awe — most notably spectacular technological accomplishments like space flight, heart transplants and atomic bombs. But we caricature the working scientist as an oddball in a lab coat wearing thick lenses and the inevitable plastic pocket protector. We also retail stories about scientists’ inability to cope with the “real world.”



Perhaps the most famous of these stories is the one about the aeronautical engineer who proved with geometric logic (to use Captain Queeg’s famous phrase) that the bumblebee cannot fly.



Boeing engineer John McMasters sought out the source of this story. His search took him back to the 1930s and finally to a Swiss professor famous for work in supersonic gas dynamics. McMaster’s account continues, “The aerodynamicist was engaged one evening in light dinner-table conversation with a biologist, who asked in passing for enlightenment about the aerodynamic capabilities of the wings of bees and wasps. Intrigued by the question, the aerodynamicist did some preliminary calculations based on the assumption that the wings were more-or-less smooth, flat plates. The resulting calculations ‘proved’ the bee to be incapable of flight....



“The assumptions were almost wildly wrong, and the aerodynamicist himself later discovered part of his error by examining a bee’s wing under a microscope — but not, alas, before the myth was born in the hands of overeager journalists.”



McMaster and others have since studied insect wing structure and have found it to be “if not optimum aerodynamically, certainly...a good shot at the problem in a very difficult flow regime.” In less technical terms insects can fly. Indeed they solved the problem of flight some 350 million years before we did.



A less well known insect flight myth was picked up by many newspapers including The New York Times as well as books recording world records. They reported a deer botfly with a speed of over 800 miles per hour. The source of this myth was a report in the Journal of the New York Entomological Society: “On 12,000 foot summits in New Mexico I have seen pass me at incredible velocity what were certainly [botflies.] As closely as I can estimate, their speed must have approximated 400 yards per second.” (That is equivalent to 800 miles per hour.)



Nobel Prize winning chemist Irving Langmuir examined the report with some care. He (and later McMasters) discovered some problems. At that altitude 800 miles per hour is faster than the speed of sound yet the entomologist reported no sonic boom. To maintain that speed the fly would have to consume more than its own weight of food each second. And finally, McMasters wrote, “Botflies tend not to be very graceful fliers, even running into things on occasion while zipping around — deer and people, for example. Langmuir calculated that the impact of a 0.3-gram botfly traveling at Mach 1.1 would produce a wound equivalent to that of a large-caliber pistol bullet, making hiking on the ‘summits in New Mexico’ a somewhat risky business.”



Using the original report as a basis, Langmuir performed experiments that corrected the insects’ speed to 25 miles per hour, a rather substantial change.



We can laugh at these scientists’ bloopers, but it is important to notice that scientists themselves made the corrections. Most of the rest of us do not have the necessary intellectual tools