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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. Aristotle thought that the Earth was what?

2. From what location was the Introduction written?

3. What theory best describes the singularities of black holes and big bangs?

4. Who demonstrated that an atom is made up of electrons orbiting a nucleus made up of protons?

5. Black holes are similar to the singularity that existed before what event?

Short Essay Questions

1. What stops quantum mechanics from explaining everything in the universe?

2. How did Einstein observe Brownian motion?

3. When looking at the sky on a clear night what do you see and how far away is it?

4. In 1687 Newton published mathematical formulas that do what?

5. What will happen if the expansion of the universe stops?

6. Light behaves in which two manners?

7. What model of the atom persisted until the 1960's?

8. Why do scientists think that there is a black hole in the star system Cygnus X-1?

9. According to Carl Sagan, what prompts children to ask seemingly unanswerable questions?

10. What determines whether a star can become a black hole?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Hawking states that without science there can be no prediction and without predictive ability time is meaningless (Chapter 1). What does Hawking mean by this statement? Use examples from the text to support your position.

Essay Topic 2

Black holes exist in math, but not in observational reality. What does this mean for the evolution of ideas that scientists accept the idea of a new creation purely by seeing the math work? What does Hawking say about the evolution of ideas without observational proof? Please use the text to support your answer.

Essay Topic 3

A thesis is a main point, or argument, that an essay or book is intended to support. If there was a thesis for this book, what would it be and why? Please cite examples from the book.

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