Paper I — General
32 QUESTIONS
Paper I stands before the disciplines rather than within any one of them. It examines the concepts that the sciences use but do not themselves justify: law and accident, reduction and emergence, explanation and redescription, evidence and its weight, probability and ignorance, simulation and experiment, information and its physicality. Its questions range across the same territory as the specialist papers — the genome, the arrow of time, the periodic table, the boundary between chemistry and physics, the status of species, the brain — but they are put in the general form: not how the mechanism works, but what kind of thing the claim is, and what would establish or overturn it. Two further questions ask whether consonance is discovered or constructed, and what survives when a melody is transposed.
What is examined is judgement about the sciences, exercised with the sciences in hand. A candidate is expected to know enough physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics to reason from real cases rather than from stylised ones, and to argue in the currency of philosophy of science without retreating into it: to say what a fine-tuned constant is, what temperature is, what a measurement without an observer would be, and to defend the answer against a specialist who works with the concept daily. The paper rewards precision about where a question is empirical, where it is conceptual, and where the distinction itself is doing work; it penalises the reflex of citing authority in place of an argument.
Conduct of the response
Answer in the idiom of the college: provocations invite a disciplined essay; technical problems require correct, quantitative reasoning; interdisciplinary questions require two fields to be brought together. A response is an argument, not a survey; where the question admits a position, one is to be taken at the outset and defended. It must be exactly as technical as the question requires, and no more, and its course must remain followable by the educated layman. It may not exceed three thousand words, exclusive of equations, figures, tables, and references; the limit is a ceiling, not a target, and of two answers of equal force the shorter is judged the better. The full statement of the response required is given on the Responses page.
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1.
Is the genome a program?
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2.
What distinguishes a law of nature from an accidental regularity?
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3.
Is mathematics discovered or constructed? Answer without appeal to authority.
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4.
When, if ever, is a computer simulation an experiment?
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5.
Does reduction explain, or only redescribe?
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6.
What would it take to show that a phenomenon is emergent rather than merely complicated?
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7.
Is there a fact of the matter about the arrow of time?
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8.
Why is the universe amenable to mathematics at all?
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9.
Can a measurement have no observer?
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10.
What is the smallest amount of evidence that would rationally overturn a well-confirmed theory?
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11.
Is information physical?
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12.
Distinguish randomness from ignorance.
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13.
Could two theories be empirically equivalent yet not the same theory?
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14.
Is life a physical kind or a historical accident?
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15.
What does it mean to say a constant is "fine-tuned"?
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16.
Can a proof be too long to be a proof?
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17.
Is temperature real?
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18.
Why should the simpler hypothesis be preferred? Give a non-circular answer.
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19.
Does biology have laws?
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20.
What is conserved when energy is conserved?
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21.
Is the periodic table a discovery about chemistry or about physics?
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22.
Can a scientific model be true?
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23.
What is the difference between a symmetry and a redundancy in description?
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24.
Would a complete physics of the brain leave anything unexplained?
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25.
Is there a principled boundary between chemistry and physics?
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26.
When does a correlation license an intervention?
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27.
Is the concept of species dispensable?
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28.
Can the second law of thermodynamics be derived, or must it be assumed?
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29.
What, precisely, does a probability in physics measure?
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30.
If you could establish exactly one currently open scientific question, which would most change the rest of science, and why?
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31.
Is consonance discovered or constructed? Locate it in the signal, in the ear, or in the culture, and say what evidence would decide.
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32.
Is a melody the same object when transposed? Say what is preserved, what is not, and whether the survivor is a pattern, a relation, or a convention.
Questions added by Examination Expansion v5.0, which extended the examination to music and geography. All earlier questions stand verbatim and unrenumbered.