Poirot’s date with Marple
QUESTION Did Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple ever meet?
THEY did not – at least not in Agatha Christie’s novels.
Christie herself was asked this many times and answered the question in An Autobiography: ‘but why should they? I am sure they would not enjoy it at all. Hercule Poirot, the complete egoist, would not like being taught his business by an elderly spinster lady. He was a professional sleuth, he would not be at home at all in Miss Marple’s world.’
She stated that she would never place them in the same story, unless ‘I feel a sudden and unexpected urge to do so’.
Poirot operated in London society, though he did work in the countryside and abroad. The parochial Miss Marple stays in her village of St Mary Mead.
They did meet in the persons of David Suchet as Poirot and Joan Hickson as Marple, the two actors who made the roles their own, at the 1990 Agatha Christie centenary celebration in Torquay.
As a point of interest, the two solved crimes together in a 39episode Japanese animation called Agatha Christie’s Great Detectives Poirot And Marple (2004-05). Elaine Woodward, Cannock, Staffordshire.
QUESTION How much does it cost to run the Hadron Collider and what practical benefits has it produced?
THE European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), was established in 1954 by 12 European countries to share the cost of increasingly more expensive research projects attempting to understand our universe.
CERN’s most ambitious project, the 17-mile-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is the largest and most complicated particle accelerator ever built.
Conceived in Lausanne in Switzerland in 1984, it was built between 1998 and 2008 for the equivalent of €3.5billion, with annual running costs in the order of €1.2billion.
When most people think of the LHC, the first thing that pops into their head is probably the 2012 discovery of the Higgs Boson. This offered a monumental contribution to our understanding of the standard model of particle physhunted, ics. The LHC has created a number of important applications particularly in the medical field. The PET scan (positron-emission tomography), a medical imaging device using antimatter to observe metabolic processes in the body, such as cancerous tumours, is a spinoff technology created in the building of the LHC.
The LHC is also the source of the Medipix Collaborations, an advanced form of 3D X-ray imaging technology, with applications in materials science, astronomy, high-energy physics, biological/medical imaging, and X-ray spectroscopy.
Ultrasonic instruments, developed to monitor the composition of gas mixtures in the ATLAS silicon tracker cooling environment (ATLAS is one of two main particle detectors in LHC), are being adapted as tools for clinical anaesthesia.
Diamond sensors used in the ATLAS detector have been successfully applied to hadron therapy, a medical treatment that uses charged particles (like protons or carbon ions) to irradiate tumours.
Inspired by ATLAS’s optical metrology technology, researchers developed a new system to recover sound from old records.
LHC has led to the development of a new system of data crunching. The LHC Computing Grid is the world’s largest computing grid comprising more than 170 computing facilities in a worldwide network across 42 countries. Finally, the internet was developed at CERN, by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee to aid internal communication.
Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge.
QUESTION Is there a reason why the plural of most species of fish is the same as the singular, for example, plaice, cod, whiting and hake?
ENGLISH is generally quite regular. The vast majority of nouns form the plural by simply adding -s or -es. A handful of nouns are completely irregular, such as ‘women,’ ‘men,’ ‘oxen’ and ‘children,’ but what causes greater trouble are nouns that do not change at all in the plural. These are technically called ‘zero plurals’ and most refer to animals, e.g. ‘deer,’ ‘moose,’ ‘sheep,’ ‘elk,’ ‘walrus,’ ‘antelope,’ ‘buffalo’ and ‘fish’.
Referring to types of fish using the same singular and plural form is common. It’s not just animals though, other non-‘s’ plurals include ‘series,’ ‘offspring’ and ‘species’ and modes of transport such as ‘aircraft,’ ‘hovercraft’ and ‘spacecraft’.
Linguists propose three key explanations for why so many animal nouns have zero plurals, though each has its flaws. 1. Game Theory: Many zero-plural words refer to animals that are or are considered uncountable. However, we still hunt squirrels sometimes with ferrets. 2. Grandfather Theory: The zeroplural words are very old. ‘Deer’ and ‘sheep’ did appear before the 12th century, but so did many animal nouns that form their plurals by adding ‘s’ eg, ‘horse,’ ‘dog,’ ‘cat’. 3. The German Theory: Many of the zero-plural words come from German, which rarely forms plurals by adding -s.
True enough, ‘deer,’ ‘sheep’ and ‘hake’ do derive from German but ‘salmon’ and ‘plaice’ come from Latin via the French.
The zero plural seems a combination of these factors coupled with traditional usage. Modern usage does allow for the use of an ‘s’ for fish when differentiating between species, for example: ‘The diversity of the reef’s fishes [fish species] is threatened by human activity’, and ‘Certain populations of salmons are reduced to 3% of their original size due to overfishing.’