QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (33 page)

Lunch.

Guinea pigs, or cavies, are almost never used for vivisection these days, but Peruvians consume an estimated 65 million of them each year. They are also eaten in Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador. The best bits are the cheeks, apparently.

Ninety-nine per cent of laboratory animals are mice and rats, and more rabbits and chickens are used as ‘guinea pigs’ than guinea pigs are.

Rats and mice are easier to manipulate genetically and can be made to model a greater range of human conditions than guinea pigs, which were much more popular victims of medical research in the nineteenth century. In 1890, the antitoxin for diphtheria was discovered using guinea pigs and saved the lives of millions of children.

One area where they are still used today is in the study of anaphylactic shock. They are also useful in nutritional research because guinea pigs are the only mammals (apart from primates) that cannot synthesise their own vitamin C
and have to absorb it through their food.

Ordinary guinea pigs weigh on average 250 g (about half a pound) to 700 g (around a pound and a half), but researchers at La Molina National University in Peru have developed guinea pigs that weigh a kilogram (or over 2 lb), which they hope will catch on in the export market. The meat is low in fat and cholesterol and tastes like rabbit.

In Peru, the animals are kept in the kitchen because of the ancient Andean belief that they need smoke, and folk doctors in the Andes use guinea pigs to detect illness in people – they believe that when the rodent is pressed against a sick person, it will squeak when near the source of disease. In the cathedral of the city of Cuzco, Peru, there’s a painting of the Last Supper in which Jesus and the disciples are shown about to eat roast guinea pig.

In 2003, archaeologists in Venezuela discovered the fossilised remains of a huge guinea pig-like creature that lived eight million years ago.
Phoberomys pattersoni
was the size of a cow and weighed 1,400 times more than the average pet guinea pig.

Nobody really knows where the expression ‘guinea pig’ comes from but the most likely suggestion is that they reached Europe as part of the triangle of slave-trade routes that linked South America to the Guinea coast of West Africa.

The fruit fly.

The tiny astronauts were loaded on to an American V2 rocket along with some corn seeds, and blasted into space in July
1946. They were used to test the effects of exposure to radiation at high altitudes.

Fruit flies are a lab favourite. Three-quarters of known human disease genes have a match in the genetic code of fruit flies. They also go to sleep every night, react in a similar way to general anaesthetics and, best of all, reproduce very quickly. You can have a whole new generation in a fortnight.

Space is defined as starting at an altitude of 100 km (62 miles). After fruit flies, we sent first moss, then monkeys.

The first monkey in space was Albert II in 1949, reaching 134 km (83 miles). His predecessor, Albert I, had suffocated to death a year earlier, before reaching the 100 km barrier. Unfortunately, Albert II also died, when the parachute on his capsule failed on landing.

It took until 1951 for a monkey to return safely from space, when Albert VI and his eleven mice companions managed it (although he died two hours later).

Generally, pioneering space monkeys were not distinguished by their longevity, with the honourable exception of Baker, the squirrel monkey, who survived his 1959 mission by twenty-five years.

The Russians preferred dogs. The first animal in orbit was Laika on Sputnik 2 (1957), who died of heat stress during the flight. At least ten more dogs were launched into space before the first man, Yuri Gagarin, made it up there in 1961. Six of the dogs survived.

The Russians also sent the first animal into deep space in 1968. It was a Horsefield’s tortoise and it became the first living creature to orbit the moon (as well as the world’s fastest tortoise).

Other animals in space have included chimps (who all survived), guinea pigs, frogs, rats, cats, wasps, beetles, spiders and a very hardy fish called the mummichog. The first Japanese animals in space were ten newts in 1985.

The only survivors of the Columbia space-shuttle disaster in 2003 were some nematode worms from the shuttle’s lab found among the debris.

They both have seven neck vertebrae, as do all mammals except for manatees and sloths.

Because two-toed sloths have only six neck vertebrae, they find it hard to turn their heads.

Birds, who need to turn their heads a lot to preen, have many more neck vertebrae than mammals. Owls have fourteen; ducks, sixteen; but the record-holder is the mute swan with twenty-five.

Owls can’t turn their head through 360°, as some people claim, but they do manage 270°. This is made possible by the extra vertebrae and specialised muscles that allow the bones to move independently of one another.

It compensates for the fact that owls can’t move their eyes. If they want to change their view, they have to swivel their head.

An owl’s eyes are forward-facing to increase their binocular vision, which is the ability to see things in three dimensions. This is essential for hunting at night. Their eyes are also very large to capture as much light as possible. If we had eyes on the same scale, they’d be the size of grapefruits.

Owls’ eyes are tubular rather than spherical to create an even larger retina. A tawny owl’s eyes are one hundred times more sensitive to light than ours. They can still see a mouse on the ground if the light level is reduced to a single candle 500 metres (about 547 yards) away.

Since 21 June 1792.

It was then that a group of London ‘bards’ staged an entirely invented ceremony on Primrose Hill in London, involving a stone circle made from pebbles, and claimed they were reviving a ritual that stretched back to the ancient Celtic nation and its Druids.

Prior to this, there is no record of the word ‘Celt’ having been used to describe the pre-Roman inhabitants of Britain or Ireland and it was certainly never a term they used to describe themselves.

The word ‘Celt’ was coined by the Greek historian Herodotus in 450
BC
when he described the peoples of the headwaters of the Danube north of the Alps.

The Roman name for such people was
Galli
(‘chicken people’) and they called the inhabitants of the British Isles
Britanni
, never Celts.

The use of the term ‘Celt’ in English dates from the seventeenth century.

A Welsh linguist living in Oxford called Edward Lluyd noted the similarities between the languages spoken in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. He called these languages ‘Celtic’ and the name stuck. The word ‘Celtic’ has also been used to describe the curly-wurly

style of design found in Irish gift-shops. There is no evidence to suggest that this was produced by an ethnically homogeneous group of people.

Most historians believe the language and culture we call ‘Celtic’ spread by contact not invasion. People ‘became’ Celtic by adopting the architecture, fashions and ways of speaking because they were useful or attractive, not because they belonged to the same ethnic group.

The romantic notion of a Celtic Empire of horse-loving master craftsmen, wise old Druids, harp-strumming poets, and fierce bearded warriors is the product of the Celtic Revival that started in the late eighteenth century.

It has more to do with modern Irish, Welsh and Scottish nationalism than with any historical reality.

Henry the Black.

An unfamiliar name to almost everyone, Enrique de Malaca was Magellan’s slave and interpreter.

Ferdinand Magellan himself never completed his circumnavigation. He was killed in the Philippines in 1521, when he was only halfway round.

Magellan first visited the Far East in 1511, arriving from Portugal across the Indian Ocean. He found Henry the Black in a slave market in Malaysia in 1511 and took him back to Lisbon the way he had come.

Henry accompanied Magellan on all his subsequent voyages, including the round the world attempt which set off in 1519. This went in the other direction, across the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, so when it arrived in the Far East in
1521, Henry became the first man to have been right round the world.

No one knows where Henry the Black was born – he was probably captured and sold into slavery by Sumatran pirates as a child – but when he arrived in the Philippines, he found the locals spoke his native language.

After Magellan’s death, the expedition continued on its way, successfully completing the circumnavigation under Juan Sebastián Elcano, the Basque second-in-command.

Henry the Black was not with them. Elcano had refused to honour the promise made in Magellan’s will to release Henry from slavery, so he escaped and was never seen again.

Juan Sebastián Elcano gets the credit for being the first man to travel round the world in a single trip.

He returned to Seville in September 1522. Five ships had set sail four years earlier but only the
Victoria
made it back. It was full of spices, but just eighteen of the original crew of 264 had survived: scurvy, malnutrition and skirmishes with indigenous peoples had accounted for the rest.

The Spanish king awarded Elcano a coat of arms depicting the globe and carrying the motto ‘You first circumnavigated me’.

Henry the Black is a national hero in several South-East Asian nations.

Aristarchus of Samos, born 310
BC
, a whole 1,800 years before Copernicus.

Not only did Aristarchus suggest the Earth and planets
travelled round the Sun, he also calculated the relative sizes and distances of the Earth, Moon and Sun and worked out that the heavens were not a celestial sphere, but a universe of almost infinite size. But no one paid much attention.

Aristarchus was most famous in his lifetime as a mathematician not an astronomer. We don’t know much about him, except that he studied at the Lyceum at Alexandria and is later mentioned by the Roman architect Vitruvius as a man who was ‘knowledgeable across all branches of science’. He also invented a hemispherical sundial.

Only one of his works has survived,
On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon
. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mention his sun-centred theory. The reason we know about it at all is due to a single remark in one of Archimedes’ texts, which mentions Aristarchus’ theories only to disagree with them.

Copernicus was certainly aware of Aristarchus because he credits him in the manuscript of his epoch-making
On the
Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
. However, when the book was printed in 1514, all mentions of the visionary Greek had been removed, presumably by the publisher, nervous of it undermining the book’s claims for originality.

It wasn’t Einstein. The theory of relativity was first stated by Galileo Galilei in his
Dialogue concerning
the World’s Two Chief Systems
in 1632.

To understand relativity we need to understand the theory that it replaced. This was the theory of ‘absolute rest’ postulated by Aristotle in the fourth century
BC
which stated that rest was the natural state of any object and that an object
would return to this state if left to its own devices.

The theory of relativity says that the motion of all objects is relative to the motion of each other, and that to define one as being ‘at rest’ is simply a matter of convention. It follows from this that the speed of an object cannot be stated absolutely – only as ‘relative’ to something else.

Galileo, the Italian astronomer and philosopher, was also one of the founders of modern physics. He is most famous for his support of the ‘Copernican’ (or Aristarchan) theory, that the Earth went round the Sun.

The Catholic Church rounded smartly on him, but Galileo did not rot in a rat-infested cell for his principles. He began his sentence in the luxurious home of the Archbishop of Siena, before being taken back to a comfortable house arrest in his villa near Florence. It wasn’t until 1992 that the Catholic Church finally admitted that Galileo’s views on the solar system were correct.

While Galileo may have been right about this, he was perfectly capable of making mistakes: his favourite argument for a moving Earth was that this movement caused the tides. He observed that the Mediterranean is more tidal than the Red Sea, and attributed this to the water being sloshed about by the Earth’s spin – which he said acted more strongly on the Mediterranean because it is aligned East-West.

This argument was refuted by the eyewitness testimony of seafarers, who pointed out that there were two tides a day, not one as Galileo had assumed. Galileo refused to believe them.

Albert Einstein realised that Galileo had also made a mistake in his theory of relativity, or rather that the theory broke down in special circumstances.

Einstein’s 1905 work,
On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies
, was the first to talk about the Special Theory of Relativity, which describes the strange properties of particles moving at close to the speed of light in a vacuum.

The General Theory of Relativity, which applied the special theory to large-scale phenomena like gravity, was published ten years later in 1915.