In response to a request to a while ago when I posted the Mathematics paper, here is the Physics paper I took as part of the Cambridge Entrance Examinations way back in 1981.
I’ve decided to try out Qu. 13 on my third-year students doing Nuclear and Particle Physics this year just for fun. Other comments on the content and/or difficulty are welcome through the box below!
Follow @telescoperI thought I’d take 5 minutes this lunchtime to add another item to the collection of old examination papers I’ve been posting, as someone asked me about this type of examination via a comment recently. This is the Mathematics paper I took way back in November 1981 for entry the following October to do Natural Sciences. I also took papers in Physics and Chemistry, as well as a General paper. Looking at this after a gap of over 30 years it looks pretty tough. One thing I should point out, though, is that the timing of the paper required us to come back after A-levels for an extra term (“the seventh term”) at my school, the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle, to form the “Third Year Sixth” who were all Oxbridge candidates. We were then intensively coached for the entrance examination. You will notice, for example, a couple of questions on this paper relating to group theory, which wasn’t on the A-level syllabus but which we were taught specifically for this examination. Some schools couldn’t offer this specialist teaching so pupils from them were significantly disadvantaged by this form of selection. As it happens, I answered both the (relatively easy) questions on group theory and got in to Cambridge…
Comments on the content and/or difficulty are welcome through the box below!
Follow @telescoperYesterday’s post got me thinking about what it is that makes scientists decide on their own speciality. It’s got to have something to do with the intersection between interest and aptitude, in that I think we learn gradually through our time at School that there are some things we can do well and others that we can’t but the things we can do well aren’t always things we find sufficiently interesting to make a career doing.
I suspect luck also plays a big part, in that the choices one gets to make must be taken from the options at a very particular time. I ended up doing research in cosmology after my first degree, but it wasn’t any kind of a grand plan that got me to Sussex in 1985 to do that but it just seemed the best choice to me out of all the half-a-dozen other places I visited.
Before I meander off the point again I’ll just pass on something that one of my teachers at school told me, and which probably had a big effect on an impressionable teenager. It was my chemistry teacher, Geoff (“Doc”) Swinden, that probably had more influence than anyone in making me decide to become a physicist.
By the way he was called “Doc” because he had a PhD (or perhaps a DPhil, as I think he got his doctorate, in organic chemistry, from Oxford University). I didn’t go into Organic Chemistry, of course, but that was mainly because I hated the practical aspects of chemistry and pose a considerable threat to the safety of others when placed in any kind of laboratory environment.
Anyway, I remember very well a comment of Doc Swinden’s to the effect that anyone wanting to be called a proper scientist should avoid any subject that required the use of coloured pencils. That ruled out biology, geology and a host of others and left me firmly in the domain of physical science. I ended up going to Cambridge to do a degree in Natural Sciences, which allowed me to do chemistry and physics for a year and then decide which to continue. Obviously I went the way of physics.
I don’t regret going into physics at all, but I don’t think this bit of advice was all good. When I went to Cambridge to study Natural Sciences, I had to pick an extra subject to do in the first year to do alongside my main choices, chemistry, physics and mathematics. Among the options were geology, biology of organisms, and biology of cells but, mindful of the possibility that all of these might require the dreaded coloured pencil, I went for a course called Crystalline Materials. It’s true that I didn’t have to colour anything in, but it was the most mind-numbingly awful course I’ve ever taken. I very nearly failed it at the end of the first year, in fact, but still managed to get a First-class mark overall.
Going back to yesterday’s post, I realise that one of the reasons I’m less gung ho for Mars exploration than some of my colleagues might be that it’s a bit too much like geology or even biology. It seems the ghost of the coloured pencil is still haunting me.
