View a FREE sample

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

Short Answer Questions

1. Who were unconvinced by the ideas of an infinite past and future?

2. What does Hawking believe we should try to understand?

3. How did religious leaders respond to Hawking and Penrose's work?

4. What did the philosopher Immanuel Kant worry about concerning time and Newton's model?

5. What is intuitive to think about the "ground state" or stationary state of an object?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does it mean for stars to be red-shifted or blue-shifted?

2. What new sort of symmetry was discovered in the 1970s?

3. Who worked on quantum mechanics in the 1920s, and what discovery was made?

4. What was the bedrock of relativity theory, and what did it imply?

5. What did Penrose and Hawking's theory have to say about the universe's history?

6. What does the E = mc2 equation show?

7. What did Einstein do in 1905 that launched him to the top of the scientific community?

8. Describe imaginary time.

9. Describe the contradiction of relativity to Newton's law of gravity.

10. What changed about the way we view zero point fluctuations in the 1940s?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Examine the relationship of Einstein's theory of relativity to Newton's law of gravity. Name three ways these theories are similar or differ. Be sure to explain the contemporary significance of each theory and their effects on modern scientific thought.

Essay Topic 2

Chapter Five provides a complex picture of the interconnections between space-time, the multiple history idea, and quantum theory. Write an essay that analyzes the relationship between these three concepts, and use at least two examples from Chapter Five that support your argument.

Essay Topic 3

Discussing the future is very prevalent throughout Hawking's book. Write an essay that focuses on two key anxieties and two hopes that Hawking, another scientist, or you, have, for the future of humanity's development, whether it be biological or electronic.

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 848 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample