Do You Think You're Clever? Read Free Page B

hindsight? Then, it would be unimaginably wasteful not to try.
    Maybe, for instance, I could go back to Sarajevo on the morning of 28 June 1914 and warn the Bosnian police to keep Gavrilo Princip away from the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination by Princip later that day triggered the events that led to the First World War of 1914–18. Perhaps that one small intervention might have averted the First World War – the most horrific, traumatic, ghastly war then yet seen, claiming millions of lives and casting such a dark shadow over people’s minds that we have never recovered. And if there had been no First World War, maybe there would have been no Second World War, since Hitler’s rise in Germany was a direct consequence of the reparations from the first war, and the lives of tens of millions of people around the world would have been saved. There might have been no Holocaust …
    Of course, the train of subsequent events would be so tangled, so infinitely varied in possibilities that it’s impossible to even speculate on the effect of such an intervention. Maybe the story of the world, released from such a terriblefate, would have been of incredible joy and wonder as lives and attitudes improved. Or maybe it would have turned to one of even greater calamity. And maybe, too, just as in chaos theory the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas, so even a small intervention in history, rather than something as marked as averting Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, might have had massive consequences for the world’s story.
    But even if the time machine I am supplied with only allows me to witness things rather than intervene, I surely should try to learn something that I might bring back to help the world now. Of course, the chances are that on my return my discoveries would be treated as the ravings of a fantasist. But what if I were able to convince people of what I’d seen? Again, it’s impossible to know, since the chances are that I might learn something just as important from some small, surprising moment than one of history’s Big Events. As an agnostic, I can imagine the impact on my life personally – and maybe the future world if I could acquire convincing evidence – of going back and discovering, say, that the Biblical story of Christ was literally true. Of course, if it turned out to be not true at all, the time trip would have been wasted.
    So again, I think perhaps I should just go where the ride takes me …

Are you cool?
    (Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Oxford)
    It’s just possible this question is about my physical comfort on a hot day. If so, I could say ‘yes’ with a fair degree of confidence and precision. In fact, I know just how cool I am to within a few tenths of a degree (36.8°C), because like all mammals we humans have a remarkably good feedback mechanism for thermoregulation that ensures that our body temperature remains pretty much steady. Indeed, we humans are probably the coolest of all mammals because we have especially good mechanisms for keeping cool. Unlike other mammals, we have no fur, and can lose heat by sweating profusely. Only horses sweat as much, and horses don’t walk upright so more of their body is exposed to the heat of the sun. Interestingly, though, with a drop in body temperature of less than a degree I’d turn from cool to cold. A drop of much more than a degree and I’d go from cold to hypothermia, with my skin turning blue, my extremities numb and my whole body shivering in a futile attempt to keep warm …
    Of course, this question is probably meant to be about metaphorical cool, not body cool! In the last decade, at least, ‘cool’ has become such a ubiquitous word for all things good among the younger generation that it’s actually no longer cool. Cool is too ordinary, too much used by all kinds of people to quite live up to its name. The concept of cool will surely survive, though. It’s an old idea –