Class 11 Physics - Chapter Physical World NCERT Solutions | Some of the most profound statements on

Attempt to formulate your ‘moral’ views on the practice of science. Imagine yourself stumbling upon a discovery, which has great academic interest but is certain to have nothing but dangerous consequences for the human society. How, if at all, will you resolve your dilemma?

Write in about 1000 words a fiction piece based on your speculation on the science and technology of the twenty-second century.

Though the statement quoted above may be disputed, most physicists do have a feeling that the great laws of physics are at once simple and beautiful. Some of the notable physicists, besides Dirac, who have articulated this feeling, are : Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Chandrasekhar and Feynman. You are urged to make special efforts to get access to the general books and writings by these and other great masters of physics.

(See the Bibliography at the end of this book.) Their writings are truly inspiring !

The shells of crabs found around a particular coastal location in Japan seem mostly to resemble the legendary face of a Samurai. Given below are two explanations of this observed fact. Which of these strikes you as a scientific explanation ?

(a) A tragic sea accident several centuries ago drowned a young Samurai. As a tribute to his bravery, nature through its inscrutable ways immortalised his face by imprinting it on the crab shells in that area.

(b) After the sea tragedy, fishermen in that area, in a gesture of honour to their dead hero, let free any crab shell caught by them which accidentally had a shape resembling the face of a Samurai. Consequently, the particular shape of the crab shell survived longer and therefore in course of time the shape was genetically propagated. This is an example of evolution by artificial selection.

[Note : This interesting illustration taken from Carl Sagan’s ‘The Cosmos’ highlights the fact that often strange and inexplicable facts which on the first sight appear ‘supernatural’ actually turn out to have simple scientific explanations. Try to think out other examples of this kind].

“Every great physical theory starts as a heresy and ends as a dogma”. Give some examples from the history of science of the validity of this incisive remark.

“Politics is the art of the possible”. Similarly, “Science is the art of the soluble”. Explain this beautiful aphorism on the nature and practice of science.

“It is more important to have beauty in the equations of physics than to have them agree with experiments”. The great British physicist P. A. M. Dirac held this view. Criticize this statement. Look out for some equations and results in this book which strike you as beautiful.

No physicist has ever “seen” an electron. Yet, all physicists believe in the existence of electrons. An intelligent but superstitious man advances this analogy to argue that ‘ghosts’ exist even though no one has ‘seen’ one. How will you refute his argument ?

Though the law gives women equal status in India, many people hold unscientific views on a woman’s innate nature, capacity and intelligence, and in practice give them a secondary status and role. Demolish this view using scientific arguments, and by quoting examples of great women in science and other spheres; and persuade yourself and others that, given equal opportunity, women are on par with men.

The industrial revolution in England and Western Europe more than two centuries ago was triggered by some key scientific and technological advances. What were these advances ?

The sign of work done by a force on a body is important to understand. State carefully if the following quantities are positive or negative:

(a) work done by a man in lifting a bucket out of a well by means of a rope tied to the bucket.

(b) work done by gravitational force in the above case,

(c) work done by friction on a body sliding down an inclined plane,

(d) work done by an applied force on a body moving on a rough horizontal plane with uniform velocity,

(e) work done by the resistive force of air on a vibrating pendulum in bringing it to rest.

A geyser heats water flowing at the rate of 3.0 litres per minute from 27 °C to 77 °C. If the geyser operates on a gas burner, what is the rate of consumption of the fuel if its heat of combustion is 4.0 x 10⁴ J/g?

Estimate the fraction of molecular volume to the actual volume occupied by oxygen gas at STP. Take the diameter of an oxygen molecule to be 3Å.

A cricketer can throw a ball to a maximum horizontal distance of 100 m. How much high above the ground can the cricketer throw the same ball?

A geyser heats water flowing at the rate of 3.0 litres per minute from 27 °C to 77 °C. If the geyser operates on a gas burner, what is the rate of consumption of the fuel if its heat of combustion is 4.0 x 10⁴ J/g?

A metre-long tube open at one end, with a movable piston at the other end, shows resonance with a fixed frequency source (a tuning fork of frequency 340 Hz) when the tube length is 25.5 cm or 79.3 cm. Estimate the speed of sound in air at the temperature of the experiment. The edge effects may be neglected.

A physical quantity P is related to four observables a, b, c and d as follows :

The percentage errors of measurement in a, b, c and d are 1%, 3%, 4% and 2%, respectively. What is the percentage error in the quantity P ? If the value of P calculated using the above relation turns out to be 3.763, to what value should you round off the result ?

Ten one-rupee coins are put on top of each other on a table. Each coin has a mass m. Give the magnitude and direction of

(a) the force on the 7^th coin (counted from the bottom) due to all the coins on its top,

(b) the force on the 7^th coin by the eighth coin,

(c) the reaction of the 6^th coin on the 7^th coin.

An air bubble of volume 1.0 cm³ rises from the bottom of a lake 40 m deep at a temperature of 12 °C. To what volume does it grow when it reaches the surface, which is at a temperature of 35 °C?

If, in Exercise 5.21, the speed of the stone is increased beyond the maximum permissible value, and the string breaks suddenly, which of the following correctly describes the trajectory of the stone after the string breaks:

(a) the stone moves radially outwards,

(b) the stone flies off tangentially from the instant the string breaks,

(c) the stone flies off at an angle with the tangent whose magnitude depends on the speed of the particle ?

A vector has both magnitude and direction. Does it mean that anything that has magnitude and direction is necessarily a vector? The rotation of a body can be specified by the direction of the axis of rotation, and the angle of rotation about the axis. Does that make any rotation a vector?

The speed-time graph of a particle moving along a fixed direction is shown in Fig. 3.28. Obtain the distance traversed by the particle between (a) t = 0 s to 10 s, (b) t = 2 s to 6 s.

(Fig. 3.28)

What is the average speed of the particle over the intervals in (a) and (b)?