So, You Think You're Clever? E-Book

John Farndon

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 250

Beschreibung

From the ever-curious mind that brought you the bestselling Do You Think You're Clever? comes a brand-new trip to the far reaches of the intellectual universe, courtesy of even more notoriously provocative Oxbridge interview questions. How would you poison someone without the police finding out? (Medicine, Cambridge) What makes a strong woman? (Theology, Oxford) Instead of politicians, why don't we let the managers of IKEA run the country? (Social and Political Sciences, Cambridge) How do you organise a successful revolution? (History, Oxford) Whether you're interested in going to Oxbridge or just want to give your brain a workout, join polymath John Farndon on another exhilarating journey through the twists and turns of thought, and explore just what it means to be genuinely clever – rather than just smart.

Leseprobe

SO, YOU THINK YOU’RE CLEVER?

Taking on the Oxford and Cambridge Interview Questions

SO, YOU THINK YOU’RE CLEVER?

John Farndon

This edition published in the UK and USA in 2015 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

First published in the UK and USA in hardback in 2014

by Icon Books Ltd.

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

74–77 Great Russell Street,

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ISBN: 978-184831-932-5

Text copyright © 2014 John Farndon

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Plantin Light by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK by

Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Farndon, a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, is the author of numerous bestsellers on science, ideas and the natural environment, as well as being a playwright, composer and poet. His Do You Think You’re Clever? (Icon, 2009) was shortlisted for the Society of Authors Education Award and he has been shortlisted a record five times for the Royal Society Junior Science Book Prize. He is currently writing The Omnipaedia for Square Peg.

Contents

Introduction: So, You Think You’re Clever?

How would you poison someone without the police finding out?

Will this bag ever be empty?

How would you market a rock band?

Is Wittgenstein always right?

How small can you make a computer?

How do you organise a successful revolution?

If there were three beautiful, naked women standing in front of you, which one would you pick? And does this have any relevance to economics?

Do you believe that statues can move, and how might this belief be justified?

Why do human beings have two eyes?

Was Shakespeare a rebel?

Would Ovid’s chat-up line work?

Instead of politicians, why don’t we let the managers of IKEA run the country?

Here is a piece of bark, please talk about it

My little girl says she knows she’s going to get a brother when my wife gives birth in seven months’ time. Is she right?

If a wife had expressed distaste for it previously, would her husband’s habit of putting marmalade in his egg at breakfast be grounds for divorce?

Which way is the Earth spinning?

Should we have laws for the use of light bulbs?

What do you think of teleport machines?

How many molecules are there in a glass of water?

How is it possible that a sailing boat can go faster than the wind?

Why does a tennis ball spin?

Would Mussolini have been interested in archaeology?

Should poetry be difficult to understand?

What is the square root of –1?

Imagine we had no records of the past at all, except everything to do with sport – how much of the past could we find out about?

How do you see through glass?

Can a thermostat think?

Why might erosion make mountain ranges higher?

Should a Walmart store be opened in the middle of Oxford?

Is the moon made of green cheese?

What makes a strong woman?

Why did Henry VII call his son Arthur?

How would you compare Henry VIII and Stalin?

Why do you think Charlotte Brontë detested Jane Austen?

If you are in a boat in a lake and throw a stone out of the boat, what happens to the level of the water?

Are Fairtrade bananas really fair?

How does geography relate to A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Introduction

So, You Think You’re Clever?

A couple of years ago, I wrote a book entitled Do You Think You’re Clever?. The question in the title is one of the legendarily difficult questions candidates for Cambridge and Oxford Universities sometimes get asked at their interviews. That first book was a selection of possible responses to this and an assortment of other equally tricksy questions that have actually been asked at interviews, such as ‘Is nature natural?’, ‘What happens when you drop an ant?’ and ‘Does a girl scout have a political agenda?’.

Some people think these Oxbridge questions are just weird and pretentious. Or that they’re designed as traps to frighten off any young students foolhardy enough to apply to those privileged pinnacles of learning – like some cabbalistic riddles or a trial of fire for budding Harry Potters. Of course, there probably are some dastardly tutors who do use them in this way – and I must admit that this how I saw them at first. But the brilliant thing about them is: they make you THINK. Aggravating and provocative as they are, they set your mind racing. That’s what to my mind makes them fascinating for everyone, not just those applying to Oxbridge.

The thing is, most of us love thinking. We love having our intellectual curiosity piqued, and it’s the element of surprise in these questions that sparks the mind. The publishers of Do You Think You’re Clever? and I were quite astonished by how well it was received, and how well it sold right across the world, from Korea to Canada. But I realised that the key to its success was that delight in thinking we all have. That’s why I decided to have a go at another set of questions.

I’m sure a lot of people disagreed with my answers in the first book. I’m sure some thought they were rubbish. In fact, I know myself that I was guilty of a foolish error in a question about a man falling down a hole in the world, much to my embarrassment! But that’s the point. Neither Do You Think You’re Clever? nor this new book are meant to be about answers; they’re about asking questions, and getting people thinking – and even flaws can do that (that’s my excuse, anyway!).

There’s no doubt, though, that some of these questions are seriously fiendish – which is why we came up with a Bond-villain variation on our original title, So, You Think You’re Clever? You may imagine poor students moving slowly towards a revolving saw as they desperately try to come up with an answer – which may be what it feels like sometimes in an interview.

But another title we considered for this new book was Do You STILL Think You’re Clever? This is an interesting and very Oxbridge-like variation on the awkward question in the title of the first book, of course, but it is in some ways even more awkward to answer. It’s what’s called a ‘loaded question’ in that it is based on an unjustified presumption that makes it hard to respond to directly without falling into a trap. Students of logic would call it a ‘complex fallacy question’; I’d just call it plain mean. The first (possibly) unjustified presumption is that you at least once thought you were clever. From that flows the implication that if you answer ‘yes’ you’re a fool if you haven’t realised by now in face of all the glaring evidence to the contrary that you’re not so clever as you thought; and if you answer ‘no’ you’ve seen how utterly mistaken you were in ever thinking you were clever. Either way you lose.

An apocryphal example of such a loaded question is to a witness in court who is asked, ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ The witness is incriminated whether he answers ‘yes’ or ‘no’. In a law court, such questions might be described as entrapment, and the judge will usually steer interrogators away from them, but it’s a technique journalists famously try.1 And, of course, we face such loaded questions every day, as when a girl asks her boyfriend, ‘Do I look slimmer in this dress?’ or a dad asks his truculent teenager, ‘When are you going to grow up?’ Fortunately, the consequences of failing to negotiate the traps set by some of the questions in this book aren’t quite so perilous.

The responses I’ve suggested to these questions are by no means intended as definitive or even model answers. Far from it. I’m sure some interviewers would shake their heads in disappointment and turn me down flat. My intention is different. What I have tried to do is carry on where the question leads off – and provide you the reader with food for thought. Quite often, for instance, this means giving background information rather than responding to the question. Or it might mean going off on a flight of fancy. But what I’ve tried to do, throughout, is avoid technical jargon, or assume academic knowledge beyond that which most intelligent readers will normally have. My feeling was that interest in these questions shouldn’t be restricted to subject specialists. After all, questions about the purpose of laws, or how to deal with world poverty, or what makes poetry matter, or just what makes matter – can be fascinating for us all.

Responding to these tricky questions is about being clever. But that’s something that all of us can be. It’s not about knowledge. It’s not even about education. It’s about bending and twisting your thoughts in all kinds of intriguing ways. And that’s something everyone can do. It’s certainly not the exclusive territory of those lucky enough to gain or even try for a place at Oxbridge. There’s no bigger obstacle to genuine cleverness than smugness.

And just in case you don’t believe me, when I say everyone can do it, let me introduce the ultimate birdbrain.

A couple of years ago, a group of Cambridge scientists put some rooks to a test, to see if there was any truth in the famous fable by Aesop about the raven and the water pitcher. They put a nice, juicy worm floating on water in a long narrow tube, too narrow for the rooks to reach in and grab. So how would you get that worm if you were a rook?

The rooks were ingenious. They found stones and dropped them into the water one by one to gradually raise the water level until they could reach the worm. Damned clever, eh? Think about it. It means they not only had to know that putting stones in the water would raise the water level, but actually think of doing so and put it properly into practice. Almost creepy!

And if rooks can be so clever with their tiny brains, do you think all of us with our big brains could too? You bet we could.

Of course this book may help students applying for Oxford and Cambridge. But it is not just for them. It’s for everyone, everywhere in the world, from Australia to Anatolia. We face difficult questions in the world every day – about where we are going, what we are doing – and we badly need new answers, new ways of thinking, thinking ‘outside the box’, and I hope these questions will help do just a little to make people think afresh, to think, yes, we could do this or that differently, we could try this instead. We don’t have to make the same mistakes again …

Footnote

1. Back in 1996, US Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright was apparently trapped like this when interviewer Lesley Stahl asked on the 60 Minutes programme about the effect of UN sanctions on Iraq: ‘We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?’ Albright replied ‘I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.’ – and immediately regretted it.

How would you poison someone without the police finding out?(Medicine, Cambridge)

Clearly this kind of knowledge is essential for any Cambridge undergraduate. After all, you never know when your room-mate is going to become completely intolerable, or your tutor will fail you for what was without doubt the most brilliantly off-the-wall and original essay of the year. But why stop short at poison when there are all kinds of other ways you can do away with your academic cohort without detection? There are plenty of deep spots on the river for boating accidents, the old stone stairs in Grimm’s Court are treacherous when wet, the chemistry lab is well known to be hazardous and Professor Dulles Ditchwater has bored at least a hundred students to death this year alone with his lectures, without any hint of a police investigation …

But maybe I’m jumping to conclusions too fast. The question doesn’t actually specify that my poison victim needs to die. A mild stomach upset might be enough to satisfy the questioner’s rather disturbing interest in chemical suffering. I’ve certainly known one or two dinner parties where I’ve been most definitely poisoned by dreadful food or excesses of alcohol – and the police certainly didn’t find out. In fact, a sure-fire way to poison someone without being taken by the long arm of the law is to take care the damage done by your poison is not severe enough for that blue limb ever to be extended in your direction.

So bad food and dodgy drinks at a dinner party are one way to trick people into swallowing poisonous substances without much likelihood of a crime scene investigation. But actually, many, many things can be poisonous in the wrong doses. As the 16th-century physician Paracelsus said, ‘All substances are poisons; there is none which is not.’ It’s all about dose. In small quantities, vitamin A and vitamin D are essential for good health. But too much of either can be lethal. Even oxygen, the life-giving gas, can in excess harm the body. Of course, everyday drugs like paracetamol are lethal, too, in anything but the smallest doses, not to mention alcohol. And just by getting into a car and starting up you are poisoning someone, somewhere, since your car emits poisonous gases such as nitrous oxide, and soot particles which cause many people to suffer from lung disease. So the choice of poisons is vast.

This question is, I guess, though, about deliberately killing someone with poison. The attraction of poison as a murder weapon is its stealth and the fact that it requires neither strength nor much skill to administer. The assassin doesn’t even need to be at the crime scene when the victim dies, which does make it much easier to get away with murder. That’s why poisoners have always been looked at through history as a more sneaky and sinister brand of killer than honest-to-goodness sword slayers, straight-as-a-die gunslingers and no-nonsense axe murderers, though if you’re the victim you’re equally dead, whatever the method of your despatch.

History is littered with rulers and their rivals brought down by poison. Ivan the Terrible is said to have poisoned his wife and mother with mercury, and ended up a victim of mercury poisoning himself. The Borgias seemed to make poisoning a lifestyle (or deathstyle) choice, administering each other arsenic so frequently it’s amazing the family lasted so long. Apparently, secretly adding small quantities of arsenic to a wet nurse’s food was a neat way to kill an unwanted baby as the arsenic became concentrated in the nurse’s breast milk. Who was the murderer?1

Poisoning was much more popular in the past than it is now, especially among the ruling class. That’s partly because it was fairly easy to send a servant out to a backstreet apothecary and get a bottle of arsenic, no questions asked. It was also much harder to be certain a victim had been really been poisoned. Hamlet needed a ghost to testify that his dad was done in this way. Nowadays, pharmacists are mostly averse to offering supplies of anything remotely poisonous, either over the counter or under, since nearly all potential poisons must be accounted for under Controlled Drugs laws. And your Google search for ‘lethal poisons suppliers’ will inevitably leave an incriminating trace on the internet or your mobile phone records.

Autopsies, too, can now pick up traces of most poisons in the body of a victim. So it’s much, much harder than it was in the past to poison someone and get away with it, especially since we do now have proper police investigations. Forensic diagnostic tests are now so effective that it would be very, very difficult to poison someone without being found out, if the death was sudden and for any reason suspicious. Indeed, there are so few effective but untraceable poisons,2 and those few so hard to obtain, that it really would be difficult to poison someone without the police at least finding that the victim had been poisoned. However, I have a much better chance of poisoning someone without the police finding out that it was me who did it.

First of all, it depends on the choice of victim. The more closely you are associated with your victim, the harder it is to avoid the finger of suspicion. So provided the questioner doesn’t care who I murder (how callous!), I’ve got a much better chance of getting away with it if the victim is a complete stranger than if it was my housemate or family. I could maybe knock off a few random strangers by dropping a grain of ricin3 in the sugar bowl of a restaurant in another part of town, for instance. I’m unlikely ever to be suspected, especially if I cycled there and left minimal trace of my visit.

It might be straightforward, too, to poison drinking water supplies.4 Mercury is relatively easy to obtain, and it is said by some people that al-Qaeda planned to poison water supplies in Iraq with mercury. And there are countless other toxic substances which if added to drinking water in sufficient quantity would make people very ill, even if it didn’t kill them.5 Indeed, many people have been poisoned by contaminated water supplies, at least negligently, if not deliberately.

I realise that I have so far not come up with any kind of methodology for poisoning someone I know – or even much detail on killing complete strangers. This is no bad thing. Even as an intellectual exercise it is an unpleasant line to pursue. A doctor needs to be aware of the effects and signs of poisons on a patient so that one might administer the right treatment. A forensic pathologist perhaps needs to know how poisons might be administered and how they might be hidden in order to track down a murderer. But otherwise, I think the idea of how to commit the ‘perfect murder’ is perhaps best left to crime novelists.

But maybe I could invite my victims to Japan, lay on a special treat of fugu pufferfish sashimi for them in a private apartment as a farewell gift as I head back home – then spike the chef’s drink just before he starts to slice the fish. Fugu liver, of course, contains a lethal toxin, created when the fish ingests the vibrio bacterium, and if the sashimi is not cut perfectly, this toxin can lethally contaminate the food. It takes eight hours for the victims to die, and for a long time all they feel is a mild tingling before the fatal paralysis sets in. By the time the fish has done its dirty work, and the Japanese police have arrested the chef for criminal negligence, or manslaughter, I’ll be safely out of the picture. And if the meal isn’t quite as fatal as I hoped, I can always send ricin pudding as a birthday present by post from an old friend’s neighbourhood.

Footnotes

1. One of the most appealing female poisoners, though, was Giulia Tofana, who lived in Rome in the 17th century. Giulia prepared poisons for young women trapped in difficult marriages to despatch their husbands with. She was such a heroine among these women that when the authorities finally found out about her trade and began to close in, they managed to keep her hidden for some time.

2. I’m reliably informed that there are some sleeping pills which can be lethal in sufficient doses, yet are virtually undetectable in autopsies. But I’m not going to tell you what they are, even if I find out.

3. I say ricin, because it’s absolutely lethal even in the tiniest doses, and it is possible to make it at home from castor oil seeds.

4. One of the most horrific examples of this occurred in 1904, as a UN investigation finally revealed 80 years later. This was the German attempt to eradicate the African Herero and Nama peoples by poisoning the wells that supplied their drinking water. Many thousands died.

5. In Britain’s worst mass poisoning episode, thousands of people in Camelford in Cornwall in 1988 were supplied with drinking water contaminated by 3,000 times the permitted concentration of aluminium sulphate. Many people became ill and some are believed to have suffered grave long-term health problems as a result.

Will this bag ever be empty?(Natural Sciences, Cambridge)

Never has an interview question sounded more like Lady Macbeth wracked with guilt over the murder of Duncan – ‘What, will these hands ne’er be clean?’ And so: the interviewer desperately shaking out an empty bag – the bag in which he carried away the corpse of the candidate whose answer was just a little too clever …

So to be on the safe side, let’s start with a more mundane answer. This bag will be empty once I’ve removed all the visible contents. This is the everyday definition of ‘empty’. So it can be emptied very quickly. All I need to do is turn it upside down and tip out my mobile phone, my lunchbox, my notepad and pen, my ‘I Love Justin Bieber’ T-shirt, my copy of 50 Great Ways to be a Genius, and the envelope stuffed with fivers in case the interview goes badly …

But of course this empty bag is not really empty at all. Besides the dust, the crumbs, the fragments of scrap paper and millions of micro-organisms, it’s actually still full of air, occupying every tiniest bit of space in the bag. As quickly as I remove every solid item, air rushes into the void. The movement of air molecules is so energetic and rapid that every space is filled instantly.

But what if I could remove the air? Would it then be empty? Perhaps I could suck the air out with a vacuum cleaner, in the same way as those vacuum bags that are sometimes used to store duvets. That would make the bag emptier. Of course, it would have to be rigid enough to withstand the air pressure outside without collapsing entirely flat – and absolutely airtight, which is highly unlikely. Even then, though, the best vacuum cleaner in the world can only create a partial vacuum. Physicists typically assess how near perfect a vacuum is by its air pressure. The lower the air pressure, the nearer it is to perfect. Vacuum cleaners get air pressure down by barely a fifth.

Much, much better vacuums are now achievable in ultra-high vacuum chambers in science laboratories and research institutes. So maybe I could put the bag inside one of these? That’s certainly getting emptier. Yet even these scientific vacuum chambers are not perfect. They can achieve pressures as little as a trillionth of atmospheric pressure, but that’s still not a perfect vacuum.

Okay, now I’m getting desperate. What if I put the bag on the next space flight to Mars and have it jettisoned into empty space, then leave it long enough for all its gas content to diffuse away into the void. That seems to be getting there. But even empty space is misnamed. In the emptiest of empty space there are a few hydrogen atoms in every cubic metre. So there are almost certain to be one or two lingering around in the bag and outside. There seems to be no way of physically getting it emptier than that. So I’m defeated.

Indeed, even if I were somehow able to devise a way to capture and remove those last elusive hydrogen atoms, I’d suddenly discover the futility of the exercise.

The concept of emptiness has long been a conundrum for thinkers of all kinds. On a very simple level, there is a problem with definition. If there is nothing between us, then there is nothing between us – so we must be adjoining. It is semantically impossible for emptiness to occupy any space at all.

Classical thinkers such as Aristotle argued that nature contains no vacuums because denser material would always rush in instantly to fill any void. Aristotle is said to have coined the phrase ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’. Indeed, he went further and said that a void is conceptually impossible, since there is no such thing as nothing. He believed therefore that empty space between matter is filled with an invisible medium. Democritus, on the other hand, insisted that the world is just atoms in empty space, writing in his typically acerbic fashion, ‘Nothing exists but atoms and empty space; all the rest is opinion.’

This debate about what occupies the space between matter was still raging 2,000 years later, as Newton argued that the space between worlds must be filled with an invisible, frictionless medium to provide a framework for the normal laws of motion to operate in, while Leibniz insisted that the solid bodies of the universe alone were enough of a framework and that all else was empty space.

Meanwhile, Galileo and Torricelli were showing experimentally that vacuums could really exist. They upturned a closed glass tube filled with water (later mercury) – and saw a void open up in the top of the tube as the water dropped away. Since no air could get into the tube, this void must be a vacuum. Further experiments showed that this vacuum could be changed by, for instance, seeing the void grow when the tube was up a mountain where air pressure was lower. If a vacuum can be affected by physical changes it must have a physical reality.

Over the next few centuries, scientists experimented and achieved better and better physical vacuums – yet no one really knew just what a vacuum is. The idea of some invisible medium between atoms persisted in the concept of the ‘ether’ – the mysterious medium many scientists felt was needed to carry waves of light and electromagnetic fields. Then in a groundbreaking experiment in 1887 Michelson and Morley showed there was no ether that had any kind of measurable existence. So it seemed that maybe my empty bag really could be empty.

And then came quantum science. Quantum science has turned the notion of emptiness completely on its head. Quantum science shows that a particle such as an electron is only probably in one place. Indeed, all particles and fields are just fluctuating probabilities. If my bag was perfectly sealed from the universe outside and contained nothing but a perfect vacuum, there will still be an electric field inside the box surging this way and that, positive and negative, with quarks bubbling up all over the place in response. The overall electrical energy might average out to zero, but this vacuum energy1 is still measurable.

So my perfectly empty bag is actually a seething ferment of quantum energy, with waves and particles popping in and out of existence. The energy fluctuates continually, and when it is at its lowest possible level it is said to be in a vacuum state, but even in a vacuum state there is some energy.

Indeed, some theories suggest our universe is simply a fluctuation of vacuum energy. Like particles in a quantum vacuum, our universe popped out of nothing. Shakespeare’s King Lear was proved wrong when he said to his daughter Cordelia, ‘Nothing will come of nothing.’ So it may be with the universe. Something did come out of nothing. The trouble is, it is a fluctuation, so might just as well vanish back to nothing again, like a bursting bubble. This bag may well be empty sometime, and so might the universe – until another one pops into existence. And who knows, bags might have become empty and universes might have vanished millions or billions of times before.

Footnote

1. In fact, it’s now believed that empty space is filled with vacuum energy that’s creating the pressure that’s driving the universe apart against the pull of gravity. In recent years, distant supernovae suggest the expansion of the universe is not slowing down but accelerating, and it is this dark vacuum energy that may be responsible.

How would you market a rock band?(Economics and Management, Oxford)

The days when a band could just hone their music, play a few gigs and wait for word to spread are largely gone. Nowadays, if a band is not to simply fade away, ignored and forgotten, behind the bedroom door, it pretty much has to become a marketing organisation, too. Indeed, for some bands, marketing actually comes before the music – quite literally. A band I know launched a successful marketing campaign and raised enough money from fans through crowdfunding to pay for studio time – all before they’d ever played a note together!