Specimen paper for 2012
Answer one question from Section A and three questions chosen from Section B.
SECTION A
1. If you were writing a book entitled the Origins of Modern Science, which historical
period would it be about?
2. In what ways do earlier centuries’ conceptions of the scientific role continue to
inform our understanding of what it means to be a scientist in the twenty-first
century?
SECTION B
3. Compare and contrast the ways in which knowledge of the natural world was made
by physicians and natural philosophers in early modern Europe.
4. Did experimental philosophy displace the magical and occult arts in the
seventeenth century?
5. What was the role of novel instrumentation in the development of electricity and of
chemistry during the eighteenth century?
6. Discuss this extract from a 1971 advertisement for the Financial Times: ‘Isaac
Newton is the British physicist linked forever in the schoolboy mind with an apple
that fell and bore fruit throughout physics.’
7. What differences did laboratories make to the development of the sciences during
the nineteenth century? Discuss in relation EITHER to the physical sciences OR to
the life sciences.
8. Was Charles Darwin a professional scientist?
9. Did Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift initiate a scientific revolution?
10. What effect did the discovery of the structure of DNA have on the biological
sciences?
11. ‘It is of no significance whatsoever where nineteenth-century medical science was
done. What matters is how.’ Discuss.
12. ‘Psychiatry came of age when it was taken over by the drug companies.’ Discuss.