Q. Why are there 26 letters in the alphabet? —Katherine H.

Edh: ripe for revival?

Meanwhile, monks in Europe were adding letters, too. Around the year 1000, they invented both U and W ("double U") by making small changes in the letter V. The U caught on in England, but the W didn't replace the "wen" for another 200 years or so. About the same time, "edh" died out, and somebody put a tail on the I to make J, the last new letter. For a few centuries there were 27 letters in the English alphabet: all the modern ones, plus "thorn." "Thorn" gradually went out of use, but you still see it around. The "Y" on signs like "Ye Olde Antique Shoppe" is really a badly written "thorn."

—Robert

When I was in eighth grade, my friend Robert Halcombe tried to revive edh by writing it instead of th in all his school assignments. Our teachers were not impressed.

In Iceland, it turns out, edh and thorn are still in use. You can see what they look like at this Web site (where edh is spelled "eth"). (It will open in a new window. Close the window to return here.)

—Robert

Q. I have several questions, here goes:

1. Does it hurt a cat to be picked up by its scruff?
2. What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything? (I hope you can answer that one!)
3. How many hours of TV should a normal child watch each day?
4. What is the airspeed velocity of a European swallow (unladen)?

—Daisy W.

A. One answer to a customer, please! Well, all right, just this once . . .

1. I phoned Sandy Sawchuk, who works and teaches at the University of Wisconsin's veterinary hospital. "Scruffing" a cat probably won't do it any permanent damage, she said, but it does annoy cats, so veterinarians avoid it if they can. If a cat is already angry and out of control, a vet might whisk it into a cage by the scruff of its neck to keep from being scratched or bitten. But even that is risky, she said, because "cats are good at twisting around."

2. According to Life, the Universe and Everything, part of a series of funny science-fiction books written by Douglas Adams, the answer is the number 42. Unfortunately, there is a natural law that keeps anyone from ever finding out what the question is. (You didn't really ask one.)

3. So who wants to be normal?

4. This question is dangerous. In the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, anyone who gave the wrong answer was hurled off a bridge into a deep gorge. Well, no more! According to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Ornithology, a European swallow flies at 9 meters per second, or 20 miles per hour. Of course, swallows don't fly at the same speed all the time. They slow down before they land, and they can put on a short burst of speed to escape from hawks or other predators. The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds reports that in 1930, the driver of a car in California noticed a barn swallow flying at 46 miles per hour. (American barn swallows are the same species as the European swallow.) I don't know why that bird was in such a hurry, but my guess is that it was flying like mad to get away from the big metal monster chasing it down the highway.

—Robert

Correction to answer 2: Douglas Adams revealed the significance of the number 42 in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the first book in his science-fiction series. Life, the Universe, and Everything, the third book in the series, tells more about it.

—Robert

Q. Are llamas and alpacas close enough relatives that they could be bred together, like a horse and donkey equal a mule?

—Stacy B.

A.They are, and they can. Llamas, alpacas, and their wild relatives, the vicunas and guanacos, all can be bred with one another to produce babies called huarizos. That's because the four animals are close relatives. Their ancestors roamed the plains of North America about 10 million years ago. Some of the herds wandered down to South America and gradually evolved into llamas and their close kin. Others crossed a now-vanished land bridge into Asia, where their descendants became modern camels.

For a long time, scientists wondered whether the llama branch and the camel branch of the family could produce babies together. The surprising answer is yes. In 1998, in the Middle Eastern country of Dubai, a guanaco mother gave birth to a male baby whose father was a one-humped camel, or dromedary. Scientists called the young animal a cama, a mixture of the words "camel" and "llama."

Rama the cama has a long tail like a camel but cloven hooves and a humpless back like a guanaco. When he grows up, scientists will be eager to find out whether he is able to father babies of his own. Mules generally cannot have babies, but huarizos can. As for the world's only cama, so far nobody knows.

—Robert

Rama at the age of two

Rama is no longer the world's only cama. Since this Q&A appeared, two more of the beasts have been born at Dubai's Camel Reproduction Centre: a female named Kamilah, born in February 2002, and a male born a year later.

Rama himself, unfortunately, has had a lonely life. His mother rejected him, so he had to be hand-reared by human beings, and he became a surly adolescent with a fierce temper. The scientists in charge of him hoped that Kamilah might mellow him, but she is still too young for them to tell whether romance will blossom between them.

In any case, you probably won't see herds of camas galloping across the desert. The breeders hoped to produce camels with wool that could be used for clothes, as alpaca wool is used for sweaters. It turns out that camas are woollier than camels but not woolly enough to be useful to people, so Dubai is unlikely to breed many more of them.

In the October 2000 issue's Muse Mail, reader Erica J. of Virginia pointed out that Dubai is not a country, but a city in the United Arab Emirates. Actually, things are slightly more complicated than that. Before 1971, Dubai was one of nine emirates (princedoms) known as the Trucial States. Dubai and six other Trucial States banded together to form the U.A.E., while the other two became the independent countries of Bahrain and Oman. So Dubai is more than a city, but Erica was right that I shouldn't have called it a country.

—Robert

Q. Why does light sometimes behave like a wave and sometimes like a particle?

—Molly S.

A. In the world of familiar, everyday objects, particles and waves are very different. The bowling ball you roll at a row of pins is a particle. The wave that demolishes your sand castle at the beach is (what else?) a wave. Both of them carry energy—that's how they knock things down—but it's easy to tell which is which. Very small energy carriers like light beams, however, aren't that simple. Things that are smaller than atoms ("subatomic," a scientist would say) tend to be neither all particle nor all wave, but a little bit of both. To find out why, I e-mailed Ed Witten, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology and the world's top expert on the difficult branch of science called superstring theory. Here's what he wrote back:

The question "Why does light sometimes behave like a wave and sometimes like a particle?" is an excellent and difficult one. The answer is tied up with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which says that the commonsense ideas of the position and velocity of an object, and other concepts that we take for granted in everyday life, do not really apply in the subatomic world. As a result, all particles have some wave-like properties, and all waves have some particle-like properties. This applies to light as well as to other things. The uncertainty principle was discovered because without it, 19th-century physics predicted that an electron in an atom would spiral in a very short time into the atomic nucleus, leading to a catastrophe that we do not see in nature. The uncertainty principle, by giving the electron some wave-like properties, smears things out and avoids the catastrophe.

We have a pretty good understanding of how all this works. It is described in the framework of quantum mechanics, which has been developed and tested with great success since its discovery in the mid-1920s. The question of why is harder and can be addressed on different levels. At one level, the answer is that once one starts to develop quantum mechanics, the theory makes sense only if the quantum laws apply to everything, including light. I suspect that the question of why quantum mechanics is valid in nature may have a deeper answer, involving gravity, of which we are only now beginning to see glimmers. I hope we will understand more in the next century. Maybe you, and other readers of these pages, will help in the quest!

— Robert

I met Dr. Witten a couple of weeks after Time magazine had declared him the smartest man in the world. We were at a big birthday party the New York Academy of Sciences was throwing for The Sciences magazine, where I worked. Dr. W. had been 45 minutes late for the panel discussion that kicked off the celebration, and afterwards he came up to me at the reception to apologize. "I misread the invitation," he explained. "I'm so sorry. I can't believe I did that. I'm such an idiot." When Molly's question arrived, I thought of Dr. Witten and e-mailed him immediately. Ten minutes later he wrote back saying that he'd be delighted to help but only if I promised to print his answer exactly as he wrote it. So there you have it, pure and unedited from the most expert of the Q&A column's many expert sources. —Robert

Ed Witten, world's most intelligent individual and Muse guest columnist

Q. What would happen if Napoleon had a B-52 at the Battle of Waterloo?

Napoleon Bonaparte, for those of you who haven't studied history, was a brilliant soldier who became emperor of France 200 years ago. He started wars, conquered huge chunks of Europe, and made enemies, as bullies do. In June 1815, British and Prussian armies finally defeated him in Belgium, near the town of Waterloo. They sent him to an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where he died six years later.

But suppose that, along with his muskets and cannons, Napoleon had a secret weapon. Suppose some 20th-century mad scientist could rev up a time machine and send back a B-52 bomber, complete with crew, fuel, and, of course, bombs. What then?

Napoleon in action	B-52 bomber, ditto

I asked Dale Cozort, a computer scientist and history buff who runs a Web site devoted to all sorts of historical "what if" questions. For best results, Dale said, you should send the bomber back flying. A B-52 needs a runway to take off, and there weren't any at Waterloo. Then it would be simple just to drop a few bombs on Napoleon's enemies and let the French cavalry take it from there.

But the bomber wouldn't even need to fly. The B-52's crew would almost certainly have portable radios in case they get shot down or crashed. "If they wanted Napoleon to win," Dale said, "they could just give him the radios and show him how to use them. In the hands of a military genius like Napoleon, the advantage in ability to communicate orders quickly and possibly get scouting reports back more quickly would be enough to turn the tide."

And after the battle? Some historians think Napoleon's victory wouldn't have lasted long. He had made too many enemies, they say. Someday he would have lost another battle, and then it would have been all over. Of course, he could have solved that problem by making peace. But peacemaking wasn't very much like Napoleon. Raising armies and stirring up trouble was just what he did, and most experts seem to agree that it was bound to catch up with him sooner or later. (That is, unless he had plenty of bombs and airplane fuel!)

—Robert

This is my favorite Q&A. At first Mr. Cozort was reluctant to help with it, because he was afraid that it would make counterfactual history (the study of things that didn't happen) sound silly. His own Web site, he pointed out a bit stiffly, deals with serious questions, such as what might have happened if the Iroquois Confederation had stayed united or if Great Britain had recognized the Confederacy during the American Civil War. He entered into the spirit of things, though, and his fine answer showed that you can think clearly and systematically about almost anything. He posted a more detailed version online, but unfortunately it's gone now.

—Robert

Q. I've heard that smoke is highly flammable, how can that be true? That's all.

—Dana M., 14

A. "Yes, smoke can indeed burn," Phillip Westmoreland, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, told me. Here's why:

The best fuels all contain plenty of the chemical element carbon. When there's not enough oxygen to burn the fuel completely, the flame gives off lots of little specks of a special powdery form of carbon called soot.

Soot can still burn if it gets more oxygen. You can see that happening in a candle flame. The clear blue inner part of the flame is where the fuel (wax) burns partway, creating particles of soot so small that you cant see them. The yellow part of the flame is where the invisible soot specks burn the rest of the way, giving off heat and yellow light. Soot that escapes from a flame without burning is what we call smoke.

"We actually want soot to form in a furnace—at home in the winter, or in an electric generating plant—but we want it to burn up before it goes out the chimney," Westmoreland said. "It gives off the fire's heat, warming the walls of the furnace or the faces that are looking into a fireplace." When you see smoke, though, it means part of the fuel is getting away without doing its job.

—Robert

Q. Do fish drink water?

—Jacob S.

A. The ones that drink, drink water. But many fishes don't drink at all.

That's the word from Les Kaufman, a marine biology professor (or "fish guy," as he calls himself) at Boston University. Freshwater fishes don't need to drink, he told me, because their bodies absorb the water around them. Fishes that live in the ocean are different. Their bodies lose water, so they have to drink more water to replace it.

The difference is in the water, not the fish. Fresher water will always flow into saltier water to make it less salty. That's called osmosis, and it happens even when some of the water is in the body of a fish. The water inside the cells and bloodstreams of all fishes is saltier than lake or river water, but it's fresher than ocean water. So lake or river fishes absorb water as they swim around in it, but ocean fishes have to keep gulping down seawater to make up for the water they lose to the saltier ocean. Why doesn't the salt water just make the fish more thirsty? As they drink, special cells in their gills and kidneys strain out the salt, turning the salt water into fresh water.

—Robert

When I phoned Dr. Kaufman, the first thing he said was, "Oh, my children read Muse. They love it." A lot of my sources tell me that. No surprise there: Muse kids have smart parents, and vice versa.

—Robert

copyright © 2000 Robert Coontz