The undiscovered country from which a puzzle returns
IT ONLY took 32 years to solve Enigma No 45. The version of the weekly 51¶ŻÂț puzzle that was set in the issue of 3 January 1980 â a problem in linear algebra â was, it seemed, too difficult even for 51¶ŻÂțâs notoriously clever readers. The deadline for responses passed and, two weeks later on 17 January, Enigmaâs editor announced: âNo correct solutions were received for Enigma No 45.â
âFrequently we see signs warning us: âwet floorâ. Perry Bebbington cannot help seeing these as an instruction â which if followed would require the presence of a warning sign, whichâŠâ
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And thatâs how things stood until December 2011, when Jim Randell emailed 51¶ŻÂț to say: âI was browsing through Google Books and âŠâ He promptly had a go at the puzzle himself and found âa solution that satisfies the conditionsâ.
âWhat Iâd like to know,â said Jim, âis whether mine is the first correct solution youâve received for this puzzle â albeit almost 32 years late.â
We forwarded Jimâs email on to the mathematical genius who regularly checks readersâ solutions for Enigma puzzles.
He said that Jim had indeed got the answer right, and added that he had used âa reasonably straightforward computer programâ to do the checking. âPresumably the reason no one got this answer 32 years ago,â he surmised, âwas because of the lack of computers then.â
Our congratulations go to Jim Randell, who will be awarded an Enigma prize â at the 2012 rate, not the 1980 one. His solution to the puzzle is published in this weekâs Enigma on page 35.
Damned like an ill-roasted egg?
WHILE the world waits for news of the existence, or otherwise, of the Higgs boson, we need to know the origins of the unfortunate name given to it in the press. We are reliably informed that Leon Lederman, who won the Nobel prize for physics in 1988, originally wrote of it as âthe goddam particleâ, alluding to its cussed reluctance to appear on the world stage. His publisher, however, chose to omit the âdamâ â or indeed the âdamnâ in British-English spelling â and thus was born a slough of cod-theological despond.
Did the publisher get cold feet, and veer away for fear of angering those of a religious persuasion, only to make up a heresy all of its own? But âgoddamâ is not found in the âseven deadly wordsâ list of expletives that, if broadcast in the US, invoke the full, and expensive, weight of the Federal Communications Commission. And, looking into how offensive it is, Feedback was perversely delighted to discover a wonderfully sweary document from the UKâs Advertising Standards Authority: an impressive piece of social science on the 28 most offensive expletives â see . Incidentally, âgoddamâ is not one of them.
Perhaps circumspectly, Lederman has not responded to Feedbackâs enquiry as to what he thought at the time. But we think the world can probably guess anyway.
This may help to thicken other proofs
CHECKING out 51¶ŻÂțâs coverage of the search for the âgoddam particleâ, we were treated to an advert supplied not by 51¶ŻÂț but by a famous web search engine â as was the advert offering a Large Hadron Collider by post (11 February).
This new one invited us to discover âa proof why Higgs doesnât exist for physicists and science loversâ at that high-ranking research institution .
Weâre baffled by the argument made on this website, but we appreciate the reaction its author ascribed to âa senior physicist in the fieldâ who âa few years agoâ agreed to look at it: âI donât know where your mistake is, but the probability that you are right and everyone else is wrong, is one to a million.â
Sadly, the author of the theory has since thought better of reporting this and it no longer appears on his website. How things have changed since then. People can buy prominence for their arguments by sending money to that famous web search engineâs âAdWordsâ scheme, so that their ads appear when âtheirâ words are searched for.
Looking at websites about AdWords, it seems likely that the nohiggs ad appears because someone has thus paid cash to link it to some combination of the words âhadronâ, âcolliderâ and âparticleâ. The age of free-market publication, or truth, is upon us.
No more than a fish loves water
SEVERAL readers raise concerns about our report on treating sick fish using homeopathy (4 February). They note that if the fishâs homeopathic remedy is added to its water, as was recommended, this will further dilute the solution and may give the fish an overdose as a result. John Mangan notes that in âproperâ homeopathy one must tap the glass to achieve this.
FINALLY, reader Michael Bell suggests that Feedback may have been had. Could the suggestion that a tooth-whitening kit is âexcellent at solving complex algorithmsâ (28 January) have been written specifically to provoke us to print a Feedback item â and hence give free advertising to a product which we will of course not now name?
