The Linguistic Culture-12 (American Science) (Старые лекции в ворде), страница 2

Since then, there have been other American flights to the moon. Displays at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. show the developments in space travel. From the scientific point of view, Apollo 15 and Apollo 16 expeditions were especially important, as they were aimed at learning more about the origin of the moon and the universe. During the moon expedition astronauts Scott and Irwin were able to leave the lunar Module to drive around over more than 27 kilometers of lunar ground and bring back a chunk of truly ancient lunar crust. After Apollo 17 the exploration of space shifted from the Apollo lunar program to Skylab, the manned orbital space station.

In 1975, NASA began to cooperate with the Soviet Union to achieve the first international human spaceflight, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP). The two spacecrafts were launched within 7.5 hours, docked three hours after and 3 American astronauts Thomas P. Stafford, Vance Brand, Donald Slaytor and 2 Soviet Cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Valerii Kubasov met and shook hands in orbit. After that various US space shuttles docked with the Soviet Mir nine times, and 52 American astronauts as well as astronauts from Europe and Japan, visited the station for research and training.

During the 1980s and the 1990s, the USA launched several spaceships to investigate distant planets: Jupiter, Venus and Mercury. The Viking probes landed on Mars and provided valuable information of the planet. Since 1975 there have been a number of space expeditions to Mars, Jupiter and its moon Europa stimulating public interest in aerospace exploration. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990 discovered 16 extrasolar planet candidates. Using innovative technologies, the Mars spacecraft landed on Mars on July 4th, 1997 and explored the surface of the planet. The Mars Pathfinder mission was a scientific success, watched by many via the Internet.

By the 1980s NASA had created the nation’ space transportation system of the future – the Space Shuttle that was a reusable manned spacecraft taking off like a rocket and landing like an airplane. After the number of successful missions of shuttle Columbia, on January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded soon after liftoff due to the leak of one of two Solid Rocket Boosters. All seven members of the crew including a woman astronaut were killed. On the First of February 2003 American Space Shuttle Columbia again broke up over Texas as it descended for a landing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida following a 16-day flight. All its seven crewmembers died. After the Challenger disasters the Shuttle program was stopped for over two years.

In spite of the tragedies and loss of the human lives NASA continued space scientific research with the cooperation between Russian and U.S. scientists.

The USA and Russia set up quite a number united workgroups for coordination of cooperated actions in such fields as biology, astrophysics, solar physics and interplant researches. From 1995 to 1998 the joint programs Mir-Shuttle and Mir-NASA were carried on. The USA-Russian Space cooperation was supervised by joint American-Russian workgroups, including the representatives of different governmental bodies, universities and institutions of the USA and Russia.

The ILS (International Launch Services) joint venture was formed in 1995 and became another example of cooperation between the two countries One of the notable events in bilateral space work was the establishment of the Sea Launch International consortium, of which 40% was owned by Boeing Commercial Space Co. and 25 % by Russian Energiya Rocket Space Corp. The achieved experience paved the way for the creation of another International project ISS with the participation of 11 countries. The permanent work of ISS began in November 2000. In May 2000 the first launch of the U.S. rocket-carrier Atlas 111, equipped with a Russian RD-180 engines was conducted.

John Mather and George Smoot’s Nobel Prize awards of 2006 marked the inception of cosmology as a precise science and manifested the work of more than 1,000 researchers, engineers and other participants for the experimental measurements that revealed the blackbody form of the microwave background radiation measured by satellite launched by NASA in 1989.

1. Answer the questions.

1. What do you know about NAS activity? What are the similar and different features in the work of the US National Academy of sciences and the Russian one?

2. Which non-profit scientific institutions do you know in the USA? What is “Think Tanks”?

3. Which role did the World Wars play in the development of American science?

4. What part did the US universities occupy in the development of research?

5. Which names of American Nobel prize winners do you know? Do you know any Russians among them?

6. What do you know about NASA activities?

7. Tell about the space age in the USA and Russia. Give the examples of space cooperation of our two countries.

2. Render the texts in English:

Современная сеть научных организаций в США включает государственные ведомственные лаборатории, федерально финансируемые исследовательские центры, частные промышленные фирмы и некоммерческие (бесприбыльные) организации. Это обусловлено тем, что федеральное правительство тратит огромные средства на науку. Оно - ocновной источник финансирования фундаментальных исследований и самый крупный заказчик военных программ.

Б). Бесприбыльные исследовательские организации.

Бесприбыльные исследовательские организации не ставят своей целью получение коммерческой прибыли. Это освобождает их от федеральных налогов и делает их относительно независимыми. Бесприбыльными исследовательскими организациями являются исследовательские отделы университетов, федерально финансируемые исследовательские центры, научно-технические общества, музеи, частные благотворительные фонды. Сюда же относятся независимые исследовательские институты, профессиональные общества и Академия наук.

Наибольший объем исследований среди бесприбыльных организаций выполняют независимые исследовательские институты. Они не входят в состав фирм и университетов и различны по своим размерам и структуре. Это, как правило, специализированные исследовательские организации. Старейшими бесприбыльными организациями являются Меллоновский, Беттелевский и Рокфеллеровский фонды. Особое место в этой группе бесприбыльных федеральных исследовательских центров занимает «РЭНД корпорейшен». Это специализированный научный центр, который дает независимую экспертную оценку качества и способов исполнения различных научно-исследовательских проектов. Эта корпорация проводит предварительные исследования, предшествующие выполнению проекта, но не принимает практического участия в их осуществлении, хотя консультирует исполнителей в ходе выполнения проекта. Ее часто называют «мозговым центром», или «мыслительным резервуаром».

Read and translate the following words and word combination:

To spawn - (создавать, зарождаться, размножаться), an entrepreneur - предприниматель, владелец предприятия ,venture capital –капитал, вложенный в предприятие, synergy - явление в деловой практике, когда общий результат превышает сумму отдельных эффектов, to endow - -капитал, вкладываемый в предприятие, to impedе- обеспечивать капиталом, Insulator - диэлектрик, непроводник, flagship - флагман.

Geographically, the Silicon Valley is the northern part of the Santa Clara County, an area stretching from the south end of the San Francisco to San Jose.

The name Silicon Valley was coined in 1971 by Don C. Hoefler, editor of the Microelectronics News, when he used this term in his magazine as the title for a series of articles about semiconductor industry in Santa Clara County. Silicon Valley saw the development of the integrated circuit, the microprocessor, the personal computer and has spawned a lot of high-tech products as pocket calculators, cordless telephones, lasers or digital watches. Looking at our high-tech society in which the PC has become indispensable-both in businesses and at home, the crucial role of Silicon Valley as the birthplace of the microelectronics and then the PC revolution has become even more evident.

Silicon Valley is also seen as a place where many entrepreneurs backed by venture capital have made the American Dream come true as “Overnight Millionaires”. This makes Silicon Valley a philosophy saying that everything which seems impossible is feasible and that improvements in the US society can take place. The mayor of San Jose Thomas Emery called it the “economic and cultural frontier where successful entrepreneurship and venture capitalism, innovative work rules and open management styles provide the background for the most profound inquiry ever into the nature of intelligence” which might, together with “bioengineering and artificially intelligent software”, affect our evolution. The revolutionary inventions and developments, which have been made in this «Valley», affect the daily life and it is hard to imagine high-tech society without them.

The story of the “Silicon Valley” starts with Stanford University, which has been of fundamental importance in the rise of the electronics industry in Santa Clara County. In 1887, Leland Stanford, a wealthy railroad magnate who owned a large part of the Pacific Railroad, decided to built a university and dedicate it to the memory of his son who died very young. The university was opened in 1891 and became later one of the world’s greatest academic institutions.

Frederick Terman who is known today as a godfather of the Silicon Valley changed the position of this university fundamentally. After graduation from Stanford University he decided to go east to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but after receiving his doctorate in 1924 he turned to Palo Alto and became the head of the engineering department in 1937.Terman established strong cooperation between Stanford and the surrounding electronics industry to stop the brain drain among the university graduates, as they could not find good jobs in California at that time. Thanks to him many companies endowed the university with gifts, which Terman used to hire qualified professors from all over the USA. Thus, he created a mechanism, which increased the settlement of the electronics industry.

During World War II, after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor in 1942, a great deal of the US military forces and of the military production was moved to California. Within a few years, California became a booming industrial state and the military center of the USA. After World War II, the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was founded to provide the industry with more skilled specialists and increase the number of companies in Santa Clara County. More firms - among them Hewlett-Packard as one of the first residents - settled their departments in this park.

Military funding for high-tech products was responsible for the rapid growth of Silicon Valley. A lot of firms (Such firms as FMC, GTE, Varian Associates, Westinghouse, and finally Lockheed) opened their R&D departments in the Stanford Research Park and started Lockheed Missiles and Space Company (LMSC). The invention of the microprocessor in the early 1970s represented the next step towards the modern way of computing, providing the basis for the subsequent personal computer revolution.

I’ll just call the companies Intel Corporation (Integrated Electronics),that designed the first microprocessor, IBM (International Business Machines) that has become the world’s leading company in the big mainframe computers since the 1950s., The Apple Company, the Sun workstation, and Microsoft Corporation.

CULTURAL LIFE

Although it is a generalization, it is useful to divide the US cultural history into three broad stages.

The first stage stretches from colonial times until about the Civil war. In this period, American art, architecture, music and literature were strongly influenced by European ideas and traditions. What was fashionable or popular in London, Paris, Rome or Vienna usually set the pattern for Boston, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia. Some of the colonial painters, like other craftsmen, came across the sea to try their luck.

The period after the Civil War saw two new genres in American painting, the creation of works, which described American landscapes and the everyday life of people, depicted mostly by a Russian artist Pavel Svirin. Scores of street scenes, gathering in village taverns, political rallies, poor women’s kitchens, factory workers, Black slaves were already on canvases.