Book description
The forward march of human knowledge has deepened our understanding
of the universe and flung wide the floodgates of technological
advance: we have established that the world came into being more than
4. 5 billion years ago; we have deciphered the Rosetta Stone;
travelled to the moon; eliminated smallpox and isolated the 'fat
gene'. But in every domain of inquiry there remain a myriad things
that we do not know, and which lurk tantalizingly beyond the bounds of
our understanding. In The Things that Nobody Knows, William Hartston
takes us on a guided tour of 501 gaps in our knowledge of cosmology,
mathematics, animal behaviour, medical science, music, art, language
and literature. As well as explaining our ignorance of the answers to
such questions as 'What is Dark Energy?', 'Is colour a product of the
mind?', 'Was there ever a real Pope Joan?' and 'Why are so many male
giraffes gay?', he considers the likelihood of light being shed on
these mysteries in the future. Both cerebrally satisfying and
more-ishly dip-into-able, rigorously researched but also
serendipitously playful, The Things that Nobody Knows is the book for
intellectually inquisitive people of all ages.
William Hartston is a Cambridge-educated mathematician and
industrial psychologist. In his ill-spent youth, he played chess
competitively, becoming an international master and winning the
British chess championship in 1973 and 1975. He runs a competition in
creative thinking for the Mind Sports Olympiad. He writes the off-beat
Beachcomber column for the Daily Express, for which he is also the
opera critic, and has written a number of books on chess, numbers,
humour, useless academic research and trivia.
