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.
The detective novelist 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 39-episode Japanese animation called Agatha Christie’s Great Detectives Poirot And Marple (2004-05).
Elaine Woodward, Cannock, Staffs.
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, including Britain, to share the cost of increasingly expensive research projects attempting to understand our universe.
CeRN’s most ambitious project, the 17- mile Large hadron Collider, is the largest and most complicated particle accelerator ever built.
Conceived in Lausanne in 1984, it was built between 1998 and 2008 for £3 billion, with annual running costs in the order of Clued in: Joan Hickson as Miss Marple and David Suchet as Poirot in 1990 £1 billion. It is most famous for the 2012 discovery of the higgs boson, a monumental contribution to our understanding of the standard model of particle physics.
however, it’s also had a number of important applications, particularly in medicine. The PeT scan ( positronemission tomography), a medical imaging device using antimatter to observe metabolic processes in the body, such as cancerous tumours, is a spin-off technology created in the building of the Large hadron Collider.
It is also the source of 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 collider’s particle detector, the ATLAS silicon tracker cooling environment, are being adapted as tools for clinical anaesthesia.
Diamond sensors used in the ATLAS detector have been applied successfully to hadron therapy, a medical treatment that uses charged particles (protons or carbon ions) to irradiate tumours.
Inspired by ATLAS’s light measuring technology, researchers developed a system to recover sound from old records.
The collider has led to the development of a new system of data crunching. The LhC Computing Grid is the world’s largest, comprising more than 170 facilities in a worldwide network across 42 countries. Finally, the internet was developed at CeRN by British scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee to aid internal communication.
Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge.
QUESTION Why is the plural of most species of fish the same as the singular, such as plaice, cod, whiting and hake?
The vast majority of nouns are regular, which means they form the plural by simply adding -s or -es.
A handful of nouns are 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, such as deer, moose, sheep, elk, walrus, antelope, buffalo and fish. So referring to types of fish using the same singular and plural form follows this pattern.
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 hunted or are considered uncountable. however, we still hunt squirrels, sometimes with ferrets. 2. Grandfather Theory: Zero plural 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’, such as horse, dog and 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 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 per cent of their original size due to overfishing.’
James Carr, Leeds.