A time traveller gives Beethoven’s symphony to Beethoven, who copies it and takes the credit. So who actually composed it? Welcome to the paradox of the thing with no origin.
Two suspects, held apart, each offered the same deal. The maths says both should betray the other, even though silence would serve them both better. The puzzle at the heart of trust.
An octopus runs on three hearts and blue blood, and most of its nervous system is not in its head. Eight of its nine brains are in its arms, and they think for themselves.
In 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic sank, a struggling writer published a novel about an unsinkable liner that hits an iceberg in April with too few lifeboats.
On a January afternoon in 1919 a five-storey tank in Boston split open and sent a wave of molasses through the streets at 35 miles an hour. It killed 21 people.
In 1932 Australia sent soldiers and two machine guns to fight the emus destroying its wheat crops. After six weeks the birds had won. Here is how the strangest war unfolded.
No one has heard a real dinosaur. So the sounds in Jurassic Park were built from tortoises, elephants, horses and a Jack Russell terrier. The raptors’ menacing chatter has an X-rated source.
The mechanical shark in Jaws barely worked. It sank, corroded and jammed. Forced to hide it, a young Spielberg made the film scarier than any working shark could have been.
Replace a ship’s planks one by one until none of the original remains. Is it the same ship? Now rebuild the old planks into a second ship. Which one is the real one?
Give a tortoise a head start and, by one ancient argument, the fastest runner alive can never overtake it. The logic is clean. The conclusion is absurd. Untangling it took 2,000 years.
A judge promises a prisoner a hanging next week, on a day he will not see coming. The prisoner proves it can never happen. Then it happens, exactly as promised.
Measure Britain’s coast with a long ruler and you get one number. Use a shorter ruler and it grows. Keep shrinking the ruler and the coastline heads toward infinity.
In huge collections of real-world numbers, the leading digit is a 1 about 30% of the time, not 11%. The pattern is so reliable that auditors use it to catch fraud.
A simple coin game has an infinite average payout, so in theory you should stake everything you own to play. Almost no one would pay more than a few coins. That gap founded a science.
You have 100 kilograms of potatoes that are 99% water. Leave them out until they are 98% water. They now weigh 50 kilograms. The maths is right, even though it feels impossible.
In 1973 Berkeley seemed to admit men far more often than women. Look department by department and the bias vanishes, even tilts the other way. Same numbers, opposite story.
A hundred prisoners must each find their own number among a hundred boxes, opening only half. Random guessing gives essentially no hope. One clever rule gives them a 31% chance.
Someone hands you two envelopes, one holding twice as much money as the other. You pick one. Should you switch? A tempting argument says yes, forever.
Hitchcock’s Psycho terrified audiences in 1960 with a murder that used chocolate syrup for blood and a melon for the sound of the knife.
You have probably heard that medieval windows are thicker at the bottom because glass slowly drips over centuries. It is a tidy story, and it is false.
