Clean sweep for witches
QUESTION Are witches on broomsticks a modern idea?
The earliest known image of witches flying on brooms dates to 1451 when two illustrations appeared in the French poet Martin Le Franc’s manuscript Le Champion Des Dames (The Defender Of Ladies).
This 24,000-verse poem extols the virtues of women while condemning heresy and witchcraft. In the drawings, one witch soars through the air on a broom while the other flies on a plain white stick.
Both wear headscarves that identify them as Waldensians, a Christian sect that had been founded in the 12th century. Its followers were branded as heretics by the Roman Catholic Church because women were allowed to become priests.
The first witch to confess to riding a broom was a French priest, Guillaume edelin, in 1453.
having criticised witch-hunting, he was ‘put to the question’ — a form of water torture. he confessed he had signed a compact with the devil to satisfy his carnal desires if he proclaimed witchcraft was impossible.
he also confessed he had paid ‘homage to the enemy, under the form of a sheep, by kissing his posterior’ and to having gone to the Sabbath ‘ mounted on a besom’ (another name for a broom).
Brooms have been long associated with witches. In Ireland in 1324, wealthy widow Alice Kyteler was accused of brushing her neighbours’ doorsteps to sweep their good fortune away from their houses and into her own. She fled the country, but her servant, Petronilla de Meath, was flogged and burned at the stake.
The anthropologist Robin Skelton postulated that the connection between witches and brooms relates to a pagan fertility ritual in which farmers dance and leap astride pitchforks or brooms in the light of the full moon to encourage the growth of their crops.
Another theory is that such beliefs stem from hallucinations caused by eating bread made from rye contaminated with the fungus Claviceps purpurea.
Annabelle Frears, Ledbury, Herefordshire.
QUESTION How does a Schwarzschild black hole differ from a normal one?
A SChWARzSChILD black hole is the classic static, spherical black hole.
German physicist and astronomer Karl Schwarzschild was a key figure in the development of black hole theory.
In 1915, he provided the first exact solution to the einstein field equations of General Relativity. These were a series of ten equations describing gravity because of spacetime being curved by mass and energy.
his work generated other eponymous concepts including the Schwarzschild metric, Schwarzschild coordinates and Schwarzschild radius.
Black holes are thought to form when massive stars collapse at the end of their life. They form a region of space within which the force of gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.
Their existence was postulated as far back as the late 1700s. however, their formation and structure were determined using einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.
Shortly before his death, Schwarzschild developed the concept that matter compressed to a point (a singularity) would be enclosed by a spherical region of space from which nothing could escape. The limit of this region became known as the event horizon, the idea being that it is impossible to observe any event taking place within it. Schwarzschild’s black hole was an elegant perfect sphere. It delineated two regions separated by the event horizon with different geometric properties for the way that space and time behave. It is mathematically satisfying and simple to comprehend, but is probably not the reality in nature. A feature of large objects in space, from planets and stars to galaxies, is that they rotate. This is also thought to be the case for black holes, which makes them far more complex. The mathematics to describe rotating black holes was calculated by New zealand mathematician Roy Kerr in 1963 using einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Like all things that spin, a Kerr black hole has a rotation axis and bulges in the equatorial plane. It has two event horizons and instead of the singularity being dead centre, it is deformed through rotation into a one-dimensional ring in the equatorial plane, called a ringularity. A. F. Howard, Bristol.
QUESTION Were carrots originally purple?
The orange carrot wasn’t widely cultivated until the late 16th century when Dutch growers took yellow and white mutations of the common purple carrot and developed them into the sweet, orange variety we enjoy today. It’s possible they did this in tribute to the house of Orange and the struggle for Dutch independence. Cultivated carrots originated in Afghanistan or Turkey before the 900s. They spread to Spain in the 1100s via the Middle east and North Africa. Purple carrots (pictured) have a more earthy, peppery taste than the orange variety. The colour is derived from pigments called anthocyanins, which are powerful antioxidants. They change colour depending on the acidity of the soil, shifting from red to purple to blue. A red variety was cultivated in China and India in the 1700s. The colour is derived from lycopene, a type of carotene found in tomatoes. Orange carrots are plump, sweet and easy to cultivate. Belinda Giles, Bath, Somerset.
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