When Edgar Allan Poe wrote the worldââ¬â¢s first detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, he put an epigraph at its head taken from the great English polymath Sir Thomas Browne, declaring that the question of what name Achilles assumed when he hid among women was ââ¬Ånot beyond all conjectureââ¬Â. Poe meant by this to support a scientific principle of open inquiry.
So we must view with admiration the work of academics at the University of Leicester in calculating just how many seagulls it would take to transport Jamesââ¬â¢s Giant Peach across the Atlantic. Roald Dahl unscientifically made it 501. The Leicester physicists came up with the nicely exact number of 2,425,907. Of course, the first conjecture is the size of the peach. Given that, the seagullpower, or rather seagull-force, needed to shift it follows with pleasing inevitability.
