Speed king of the road
QUESTION What is the world’s fastest road car?
Officially, this is the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport with its speed limiter removed. it recorded a Guinness verified speed of 267.8mph.
The test took place across a measured mile in both directions in July 2010. The Veyron is powered by a quad-turbo W16 engine that generates a whopping 1,184bhp. it’s probably the most luxurious of current supercars and costs £2 million.
Theoretically, there are faster cars. Swedish company Koenigsegg has produced the Koenigsegg One:1 with a notional top speed of 280mph. its 5-litre twin turbo V8 makes a staggering 1,346bhp but, as the One:1’s tyres are rated to only 273mph, it clearly can’t attain this speed.
another Koenigsegg, the agera R, can — on paper — reach 273mph, too. These cars cost about £1.1 million.
another candidate is the Hennessey Venom GT that comes with a 1,244bhp twin- turbocharged version of the chevrolet corvette’s V8 engine bolted onto a modified lotus Exige body.
it achieved 270.49mph on the Space Shuttle runway at the Kennedy Space centre in florida in 2014, but in only one direction so hasn’t been officially ratified. This car costs £750,000. David Clarke, Liverpool.
QUESTION What is the origin of the place name Oslo?
THIS has been a matter of great debate for Norwegian etymologists. in 1613, priest and linguist Peder clausson friis (15451614) in his Norrigis Bescrifuelse, a topographical-historical work on population, cities, nature, wildlife, food and history, claimed that Oslo means the ‘mouth of the loevla’, a former name of the River alna, which runs through Oslo from alnsjoen to the Oslo fjord at Bjorvika.
This explanation appears in Norwegian textbooks but is now considered to be ‘folk’ etymology.
it’s generally agreed that Oslo is derived from the old Norse elements aas and lo. The lo element is cognate with the English lea — meadow — and is frequently found in Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
Aas is thought to mean either ‘deity’, making Oslo the rather grand ‘meadow of the gods’, perhaps a reference to a cultic site, or may simply be a ‘hill’ or ‘ridge’ giving the more prosaic ‘meadow by the hill’.
J. Samit, London SW11.
QUESTION Does gravity cancel itself out at the middle
of the earth? if THE Earth were a perfect sphere of uniform density, and you were placed within its centre, then theoretically you would be weightless.
This is because you would be being pulled equally in all directions by the mass of the (uniform) planet, giving an overall gravitational force of zero. and with no overall gravity force, there is no weight.
However, Earth is not a perfect sphere; it’s squashed at the poles and bulges at the centre. it has topographical features at the surface and its composition isn’t uniform so it isn’t of uniform density.
in reality, you would experience a slight gravitational pull and thus some weight.
Of course, getting anywhere near the Earth’s core would be impossible. its temperature is about 9,000 f (4,982 c) — as hot as the sun’s surface — and the pressure is about three million times that of the Earth’s surface.
Catherine Powell, oxford.
QUESTION What is the origin of the Holy Grail story?
What is a ‘grail’?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, the origin of the Holy Grail doesn’t lie with french trouvère (medieval epic poet) chrétien de Troyes. His graal (leading to the English ‘grail’) had little in common with christian doctrine and his somewhat celtic grail wasn’t especially ‘holy’.
The pseudo- christian ‘ Holy’ version emerged around 1210, roughly 30 years after chrétien’s death, from the pen of fellowcountry man, Robert de Boron. Robert reinvented the Grail as the calice (chalice) of christ’s last Supper, with which Joseph of arimathea had collected the last drops of blood from the crucified Saviour.
in another story, Robert invented the character of Merlin, whose father was a devil.
The deeply pagan, even heretical, roots of what is now commonly called the Holy Grail have been cited as a reason why the church rejects the Grail as a potential holy relic. But the catholic Encyclopaedia, far from snubbing the topic, includes a substantial article on the Holy Grail, concluding ‘. . . the whole tradition concerning the Grail is of late origin and on many points at variance with historical truth’.
The alternative concept of the Grail as a stone came from German knight-poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, whose epic poem Parzival is a richly embellished adaptation of chrétien’s work. Wolfram described his grâl as a lapsit exilis [sic], a stone from the stars, which he equated with an emerald dislodged from the diadem of lucifer when he and his army of rebel angels were cast out of heaven.
it’s mainly the literary inventions of Robert de Boron, along with certain arthurian characters and settings from chrétien’s works, that were taken up and developed by cistercian monks. Their end-product was the strongly christianised Vulgate cycle, which became the dominant basis for many later adaptations of the myth, up to the present day.
Beyond the name of the ‘Holy Grail’ we may find additional clues to its creative sources in the turbulent, formative environment of Mediaeval Europe. The french city of Troyes, from which chrétien took his title, had also been the origin, in 1119, of the first nine Templar knights (named for the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem).
a century later, Wolfram von Eschenbach created an Order of Templeisen (knights) as guardians of the Grail castle. Troyes was also home to the famed Jewish Rabbi known as Rashi who, until his death in 1105, had been consulted on the Hebrew of the Old Testament by the scholarly Stephen Harding, who became the third abbott of the first cistercian monastery.
cistercian abbot Bernard of clairvaux (later canonised as Saint Bernard) was an enthusiastic early sponsor of the Knights Templar, writing their first constitutional Rule, which he had presented to the church’s council of Troyes in 1128.
Why Troyes became connected with the development of so many alternative Grail stories has never been satisfactorily explained, but it seems likely that it was the single crucible out of which various Grail-related ideas were born.
David Bradford, Belmonte, Portugal.
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