General Paper
Rummaging through my drawers just now I found the General Paper I took in 1981 to get into Cambridge. I haven’t copied Section A, which involves writing a precis of a rather lengthy article about voting systems, but Sections B and C involve different forms of writing challenge.
I don’t remember which questions I answered, but most of the topics are still interesting and/or controversial enough to be topics for a blog post, at least. Which would you have chosen?
Incidentally, the whole paper was of 3 hours duration and all sections were equally weighted so you would be expected to spend about an hour on each question.
I think we should do much more to encourage science students to develop their writing skills nowadays. I think most present-day physics would find these exercises very difficult, simply because they don’t get enough practice at putting pen to paper (or even fingers to keyboard).
If you are feeling keen, and have an hour to spare, feel free to submit a piece through the comments box!
Time starts now…
In the Dark 
May 5, 2013 at 6:13 pm
B2. At first I thought this was written by a misled philosopher. Then I googled Waddington and learned that he was a geneticist, and guessed (rightly) that he would go on to add something like “Together with the genetic theory of heritance, however, it provides a thoroughly scientific framework.” I found it’s from a 1957 book called “The strategy of the genes”.
B3. I wonder if any 6th formers foresaw the www?
B4. I’ve looked into this claim as its content is often quoted and, while the part about unchecked population increasing geometrically (ie, exponentially) is obvious, the increase of food available only in linear proportion with population appeared to be based on empirical/historical observation rather than logical argument. Of course Malthus goes on to say that in that case there may be trouble ahead…
B6. Integrodifferential calculus specifically?
C2. Some candidates: (a) the discovery of bacteria and consequently of antibacterials ie antiseptics and antibiotics; (b) Certain advances in crop rotation; (c) Abraham Darby’s discovery that heating coal in a confined space drives off the impurities that made it unsuitable as the source of carbon in blast furnaces, enabling a huge expansion in iron production and beginning the Industrial Revolution.
C6. True, and reminds me of the cuckoo clock quote in The Third Man.
May 5, 2013 at 6:23 pm
PS I looked into why Malthus was empirically wrong that we are all fighting each other for food almost all of the time. The reasons seem to be that (1) We keep thinking of ways to make the land more productive, eg crop rotation, nitrogenous fertilizer, and next – for better or worse – GM crops; (2) Empirically, affluent societies peacefully limit their population growth. In the era before reliable contraception this appears to have been achieved multifactorially, by a combination of late marriage, and men who delay marriage (or whose wives did not wish to have many children) having sex with prostitutes, whose children seldom survived. And of course wars and plagues help to keep the population down…
While educating myself on this stuff a few years ago I gained a new intellectual hero, the emeritus prof of social anthropology Alan Macfarlane at Cambridge. Wonderful writings.
May 6, 2013 at 3:01 pm
Which raises an interesting question: how do the limits of food production scale? I can think of several limiting factors, water, the fact that plants tend to require a stoichiometric balance of nutrients, photosynthesis is quite inefficient. So there are several places where one could see improvements made through genetic tinkering etc., but I wonder if there is a theoretical limit to the amount of photosynthetic material that could possibly be produced on the planet.
May 5, 2013 at 6:36 pm
You probably know this already, but that quote doesn’t appear in the novel or in the original screenplay for the film; Orson Welles wrote it himself.
May 5, 2013 at 7:08 pm
I didn’t know that… here it is
May 5, 2013 at 10:32 pm
PS I meant “the increase of food available only in linear proportion with TIME”