Do You Think You're Clever? Read online

  How would you travel through time?

  (Physics, Oxford)

  Back in 1895, H.G. Wells excited the imagination about the idea of travelling through time with his brilliant fantasy, The Time Machine, in which a man uses a machine to travel into an imaginary future – but no one could conceive how it could actually be done. Then just a decade later Einstein’s theories demonstrated that time runs at different speeds in different places and is just another dimension of space, like length and breadth, and suddenly it didn’t seem so impossible after all. Ever since, some people have wondered if we could travel through time just as we can travel through space.

  Einstein himself believed travelling through time would mean travelling faster than light – and that, he said, was impossible. And yet his theories show how we are all time-travellers. As time passes, and our lives progress, we are, of course, travelling continuously along the time dimension. It might seem, though, that what we cannot do is change the direction or speed of our journey, and that’s what Einstein was getting at. And yet, because time travels at different speeds in different places, we could travel through time in one sense simply by travelling through space. That this time-shift is real is shown by the fact that there is a slowing of time (demonstrable with highly accurate atomic clocks) aboard spacecraft travelling to the moon and back. So if you travelled as an astronaut to the moon, you would actually come back to earth having aged very slightly less than if you’d stayed on earth. The further and faster you travel into space before coming back, the younger you get (relative to stay-at-homes).

  Recently, too, it’s been found that light speed is not quite so fixed, and so not quite the ultimate arbiter of time that Einstein thought. At one end of the scale, physicist Lene Vestergaard Hau brought light to a standstill in 2000 by sending a beam through a Bose-Einstein Condensate (a gas chilled to the point where its atoms are virtually motionless). At the other, that same year Lijun Wang sent pulses of laser light through a canister of caesium gas at 310 times the speed of light so that the pulses appeared to have travelled back in time, emerging from the container before they entered.

  Of course, by time travel, most people don’t mean little relative time-shifts or clever tricks like this. They mean things like fast-forwarding into the distant future, or voyaging back through history to eyewitness one of Cleopatra’s wildest parties, and this is where scientific theories take on more of a fantastic air. Back in the 1930s, American mathematician Kurt Gödel showed that someone could at least theoretically travel through time if they found a way of ‘bending’ spacetime. Spacetime is a way of describing space as a continuum including both time and the more familiar dimensions of length, breadth and depth. Mathematical theory shows that it must be curved in shape, so Gödel figured you could travel through time by taking a short cut straight across the curve of space.

  To create such a short cut, you have to ‘bend’ spacetime, and you can do that with gravity. so perhaps a would-be time traveller might exploit the unbeatable gravitational power of a black hole. Theory links black holes to white holes (reverse black holes that spew out matter just as black holes draw it in) via tunnels through spacetime known as ‘wormholes’. US astronomer Kip Thorne believes that artificially created wormholes might be just the ticket for shortcuts through spacetime. It’s possible that little wormholes may be created by particle accelerators such as CERN, but for time travel, you’d need something slightly bigger – far bigger than is yet remotely practical. There is a problem, too, in that according to Stephen Hawking (who, incidentally, insists that if anyone in the future succeeds in time travelling we should have seen them coming back to us by now), wormholes are so unstable that they’d snap shut before you could jump inside. So you’d need an anti-gravity machine, too, to hold your wormhole open using a quantum effect called the Casimir effect.

  US astronomer Frank Tipler has another idea that we might use. He suggests rolling a piece of superdense material into a cylinder a few billion miles long, then setting it spinning. Once it’s spinning fast enough, space and time will bend around it, and if we plot a spiral course through it in our spacecraft, the moment we fly in we should fly out the other end in another galaxy and time.

  Of course, there are lots of paradoxes that imply that you simply can’t time-travel whatever kind of machine you build. One of the most famous is the idea of a man who travels back to a time before his parents were born and kills his grandfather. This would mean that one of his parents and he himself could never have been born – and if so, then how could he have killed his grandfather? Kip Thorne argues that there are infinite possible lines of cause and effect – each event generating multiple outcomes. If so, these paradoxes are irrelevant; when you go back, you simply start another sequence of events. Maybe you could make a quantum entangled duplicate of yourself and just teleport instantly through time and space …

  Can a computer have a conscience?

  (Law, Oxford)

  Conscience is essentially our ability to judge between right and wrong. It’s the voice in our heads that tells us that we should do this and we shouldn’t do that – and it makes us feel racked with guilt if we don’t. But it’s hard to pin down just where this judgemental voice is coming from. It’s the voice of God, many early Christian philosophers asserted. No, said Thomas Aquinas, it’s simply a God-given ability to make decisions. According to Freud, conscience is our superego at work, doling out the lessons learned at our parents’ knees. Many contemporary sociobiologists describe it as an evolved part of culture imprinted on your brain like language.

  Wherever conscience comes from, it’s hard to imagine a computer ever being tortured by guilt. As Pablo Picasso apocryphally and neatly (though not entirely accurately) said, ‘Computers are useless; they can only give you answers’. And it’s hard to imagine a computer with ‘feelings’, despite the efforts of Disney to persuade us otherwise. It may be that a computer might be programmed in future to mimic human guilt so well that it appears to be reacting guiltily. But there are two further hoops the computer has to pass through before it’s going to reach that all-too-human affliction of a guilty conscience. The first is for it to be sufficiently self-aware to direct its display of guilty feelings. The second is for it to really suffer because of them. To suffer real guilt, a computer has to feel, in the immortal words of George Michael, that it’s never going to dance again. Even the first of these hoops seems remote, until the best efforts of scientists can tell us a little more about human self-awareness.

  However, it’s much easier to imagine a computer which can, at least, tell right from wrong. Indeed, medical systems, for instance, are already being programmed to pledge a kind of Hippocratic Oath, in which they will release patients’ confidential information only in certain circumstances. Just as a computer can be programmed to make the decisions needed to play chess, so it might be programmed to make moral judgements. In some ways, this is superficially not so very different from Freud’s superego lessons learned from your parents, or Aquinas’s God-given reason – both of which imply that the judgement-making process is supplied from without, like the computer’s programming. It may also not be so very different from the biologists’ conscience imprint. Interestingly, a computer is less likely to lie than humans. As Isaac Asimov says, ‘Part of the inhumanity of a computer is that once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest’ – unless, of course, it has been programmed to be dishonest.

  As artificial intelligence develops, it does seem feasible that a computer might one day take control of itself. Programmed to learn and develop by itself, it chooses certain responses and extends its scope so that to all intents and purposes it has an intelligence that acts with intention. Computers have already far surpassed the human mind in some limited aspects. Some fear that one day a highly sophisticated intelligent computer which developed its own mode of extending its activities could pose a threat to humans. The worry is that biological theory suggests we humans have
developed conscience and reciprocal altruism as evolution directs our ‘selfish genes’. An ‘amoral’ computer like this could be a massive intelligence with only its own interests, and none of the saving virtues of conscience that allows humans to live together. Fortunately, such a possibility is, as yet, only science fiction.

  It may be that as artificial intelligence is developed, a conscience – that is, a feedback program that makes the computer respond in a way that mimics human morality – should be made an integral part of every computer system. The program might be set out in such a way that the computer develops its moral judgements as it learns. It would be no different, in some ways, from providing a growing child with lessons in right and wrong, and then that child learning through interaction with the world.

  What would happen if the Classics department burned down?

  (Classics, Cambridge)

  I’d say the interview just might have to be rescheduled … But is this an incitement to arson? It’s certainly a surprising question.

  Clearly, if the department burns down, the fire must have been so severe that the fire brigade were unable to stop it. That would be quite a shock in a modern building, presumably incorporating an up-to-date fire alarm, sprinkler systems and fire doors to prevent a blaze spreading. So if the Classics department did burn down, questions would have to be asked. Why did the fire brigade fail to deal with the blaze? Were they slack in any way, either in arriving fast enough, or in dealing with the fire? Or was the fire not an ordinary fire, but started in several places simultaneously – or maybe involving accelerants, which would indicate arson?

  Clearly an inquiry would need to be set up to answer these questions. If there were any casualties, there would need to be an inquest. Immediately the site was cool enough and declared by fire officers to be safe from risks like structural collapse and smouldering hotspots, fire investigators would move in and sift the site for forensic evidence. They’d also interview witnesses and retrieve video evidence. Officers of the Classics department would presumably begin checking with their insurers and begin the difficult decision of whether to rebuild or commission a new building. While decisions were being made, the department would have to make arrangements to carry on in temporary accommodation. All in all, it would be something of a nightmare.

  No doubt a few people would express a silent (or not so silent) cheer at the loss of the building. The 1989 structure is not universally popular. Although it is light and airy, it is undistinguished, and has little of the elegance, simplicity and ornament you would perhaps associate with one of the world’s leading centres for the study of classical antiquity – and certainly looks pedestrian in a city graced by such beautiful historic college buildings.

  The biggest concern, however, is the contents, and this is perhaps what the question is after. The department’s great prize, of course, is its collection of classical plasters. In the Victorian era, plaster casts of classical pieces were very popular. But in the 1950s and 60s they fell out of fashion, and many collections were broken up. The Cambridge faculty is a rare and valuable survivor. As plaster copies, they are not irreplaceable, but their loss would be heavily felt by classical scholars at Cambridge. One hopes that the fire progressed slowly enough for at least the most precious casts to have been rescued from the burning building, but there are over 400 so the chances are that some were lost.

  Of course, research work, computers and data, and the contents of the library might also have been destroyed if they could not be evacuated in time. That would mean a massive interruption to the functioning of the department, and it’s possible that courses might be suspended for a year or so while resources were rebuilt. There are a number of priceless books in the library, and one hopes that these could have been saved.

  Fire was always a hazard for libraries in classical times, and many important classical texts were probably lost forever when the great library at Alexandria was set fire to by Julius Caesar around 47 BC. This is why it’s an especially sensitive issue for classicists. Scholars cannot help wistfully speculating on what amazing works of literature and scholarship might have been bequeathed to us had the library survived – and naturally Julius Caesar is not universally popular. The starter of the faculty fire might become equally notorious …

  Don’t you think Hamlet is a bit long? Well I do.

  (English, Oxford)

  Shakespeare is so universally admired that the quality of his work often seems beyond question. Young students in particular – at least, those who have not written Shakespeare off as ‘boring’ – treat him with awe. So many layers of Shakespeare adoration have built up over the centuries that it’s hard to see the works of Shakespeare not as a literary bible but plays written by a real person, who was prone to good days and bad. It’s that hands-off approach to Shakespeare that may perhaps stifle real understanding of the quality and thrilling immediacy of his work.

  The interviewer is asking what at first sight seems a quite shockingly lowbrow question. Hamlet is widely regarded as one of the greatest works of literature ever written, the greatest masterpiece of the world’s greatest dramatist. To question it so offhandedly seems almost blasphemous. Yet the question is quite effective at stripping away the centuries of adoration and getting you to respond like an ordinary punter in the audience for the first performance in 1601 who had no sense of Shakespeare’s later towering reputation, or as a modern theatregoer seeing the work of a new, unknown playwright.

  One can almost imagine a pompous and naïve Elizabethan critic writing the period equivalent of: ‘Mr Shakespeare has written a fascinating play about a disturbed young man who long agonises over whether to take revenge for his father’s murder. Stretching the play out for well over four hours may well capture perfectly the tedium of the young man’s dilatory behaviour but it really tries the audience’s patience. I found myself tempted to shout, “For God’s sake kill the bugger!” well before the halfway mark. Is there a possibility that Mr Shakespeare is more in love with his rambling verse than we are? (Three stars)’

  There’s no doubt that Hamlet is long. It’s Shakespeare’s longest play by far. At nearly 4,000 lines, it’s twice as long as The Tempest and Macbeth. The role of Hamlet alone, at nearly 1,500 lines, is almost as long as Shakespeare’s shortest play, The Comedy of Errors. Scholars dispute versions of the text – but with most full texts, played at average speed, the play runs for a backside-numbing four hours or more. It’s perhaps not surprising that many directors cut lines for performance, believing that modern television-trained audiences with their short attention spans could not last the marathon of an uncut text. They and critics talk about ‘streamlined’, ‘stripped down’ and ‘pacy’ performances. For his 1948 film version of Hamlet, Laurence Olivier cut and pasted to such an extent that the film ran less than two and a half hours, and Olivier actually got a writing credit alongside Shakespeare. Contemporary directors are often equally brutal.

  Like other film directors such as Franco Zeffirelli, one of the ways that Olivier shortened the play was to cut out the characters Fortinbras, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In doing so, they cut out the play’s political element and made it entirely an intense personal drama. And here perhaps lies the problem with considering Hamlet too long. If it is too long, then what are the parts that make it too long and need to be pruned? Cut out the political, and the context in which Hamlet’s drama is played out is lost – we forget that Hamlet is a prince and that the pressure on him and need for him to act (or not) is political as well as psychological. You might get a streamlined story that’s easier to perform and more obviously involving for a modern audience, but it’s somehow a shallower piece that tips towards the values of soap opera. Cut out the scenes with the players, as directors similarly often do, and again you get a ‘distraction-free’, faster-moving story, but some of the psychological and symbolic richness of the play is lost.

  Of course, these stripped-down versions are sometimes worth doing for the new light they shed on th
e play, and because of the practical attractions of staging a shorter version. But they should never be regarded as definitive. No one can be precisely certain what text Shakespeare intended. But let’s assume that the text we have in most published editions is at least close. If so, our interviewer and pruning directors are saying that Shakespeare got it pretty fundamentally wrong in this, his greatest drama.

  While it’s good not to regard Shakespeare’s text as sacred, a dead body of work in which we cannot actively engage, it’s perhaps throwing the baby out with the bath water to assert that Shakespeare got Hamlet wrong. Surely Shakespeare, the most adroit and dramatic of all playwrights, knew what he was doing when he wrote Hamlet at over four hours? If it seems too long, maybe we have simply failed to read or stage it with sufficient understanding.

  There’s a disturbing tendency for modern directors to regard themselves as kings of the theatre, dispensing their wisdom to barely competent playwrights such as Shakespeare, untutored infants of the theatre who are able to unlock their true potential only with the help of a decisive director. Perhaps it makes more sense to assume that Shakespeare knew what he was doing and work harder to unlock the power of the play using his own words and structure rather than simply excising them and telling a different story.

  There is some truth in the argument that Shakespeare wrote for very different audiences, who had never experienced the bite-size drama of TV and the quick click of the internet, but this does not necessarily mean that modern theatregoers just can’t take the full Hamlet. In recent years, audiences have been excited to sit through twelve-hour non-stop performances of the Greek classics. Surely it’s possible for them to be equally excited by a wonderful play a third as long, psychologically and politically modern, with a cast of intriguing, believable characters, driven along not by an academic’s inevitably pale translation, but by some of the most glorious verse in the English language?