I Am Not Insane Trivia Quiz

Answer: Earth's circumference

Eratosthenes was the chief librarian at one of the greatest libraries in the world, the Library of Alexandria, who lived between 276 BC and c194 BC. He was a fine mathematician and astronomer, who is considered to be one of the inventors of the discipline of geography. Eratosthenes made a measurement of the Earth's circumference using local knowledge of Egypt and some simple tools.

He knew that, at noon on the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, the sun was directly overhead in the city of Syene (which is now Aswan).

He put a rod vertically in the ground at that time in Alexandria, which is north of Syene, measured its shadow and hence the angle of the sun's rays. He calculated that the angle was 7.2 degrees, and that the distance between Syene and Alexandria was therefore about a fiftieth of the earth's circumference (360 divided by 7.2).

His estimate was within 15% of the actual value.

Answer: Washing hands

Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) was a Hungarian doctor was an early adopter of antiseptic principles. His work at the Vienna General Hospital identified unexplained differences in mortality of women after childbirth in the two clinics at the hospital. One of the clinics had a mortality rate of 10%, and women begged to be allowed to go to the second, where mortality was less than half that rate, or even give birth in the street. Semmelweis methodically looked at any factors that might account for the difference.

The methods and practices all seemed the same - the only difference was the staff working at the two clinics. He concluded that the issues with the first clinic were due to medical students having conducted autopsies and then looking after maternity patients without having washed their hands.

They must have "cadaverous particles" on their hands, which infected the mothers. Semmelweis brought in a regime where doctors washed their hands with chlorinated lime after autopsies, and brought the mortality rate down by 90%.

Despite his results, the medical establishment were highly reluctant to believe his conclusions. Some doctors were offended that gentlemen would need to clean their hands, others believed "puerpal fever" was infectious and passed between the women. It was only later, when the germ theory of disease was clearly defined by Pasteur and others, that Semmelweis's contribution was fully appreciated.

Answer: cholera

John Snow (1813-1858) was an English doctor who was sceptical of the idea that diseases like cholera were caused by something in the air. He reached this opinion through observation and believed something contaminating water might be a more likely cause.

In 1854 the world was in the middle of a global cholera pandemic, when an outbreak of cholera in the Soho area of London occurred, killing over 600 people. Snow investigated the outbreak and concluded that the cause was water from a pump well in Broad Street.

The instances of cholera reduced when the pump handle was removed, although Snow felt that the outbreak might have died down without his intervention. The well had been contaminated with sewage from the River Thames. Interestingly, the workers at the Broad Street brewery were found not to have contracted cholera, because they drank beer rather than water from the well, and the brewing process made the water safe.

Answer: benzene

August Kekulé (1829-1896) was a German chemist who made breakthroughs in understanding the structure of molecules in organic chemistry. His most notable achievement, in 1865 was describing the structure of benzene as a ring of six carbon atoms with a hydrogen atom attached to each of them. Benzene is the simplest of the aromatic hydrocarbons, so-called because of their pleasant aroma.

In an 1890 speech marking the 25th anniversary of this significant achievement, Kekulé attributed his breakthrough to a dream of a snake swallowing its own tail.

Answer: mosquito

Walter Reed (1851-1902) was an American doctor who worked for the US Army, whose work overturned assumptions about water or clothing and bedding soiled by victims of the disease being the source of yellow fever. Yellow fever is a virus that can be debilitating for victims. Around 15% of victims suffer complications that make them very ill and approximately 5% of victims die from the disease. It kills tens of thousands of people every year.

While he was working in Cuba, new germ theories about disease, from the likes of Cuban scientist Carlos Finlay, and his own experimental work and a board of inquiry he was heading led him to conclude that yellow fever was transmitted by a particular species of mosquito. The crucial experiment involved testing on live volunteers who allowed themselves to be infected deliberately. Reed's work was credited with a large reduction in mortality rates from the virus during the construction of the Panama Canal, although he didn't live to see that - dying in 1902 from peritonitis.

Answer: Big Bang

Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was an English astronomer and author who had a high public profile and was influential and controversial. He was an originator of the theory that complex elements are produced in stars by successive nuclear fusion reactions within stars. Colleagues were awarded a Nobel Prize, but Hoyle, the originator of the field - which became known as stellar nucleosynthesis - was controversially overlooked.

Hoyle was well known as a proponent of the "Steady State" model of the universe and considered the rival theory of an expanding universe to be pseudoscience. His disparaging nickname, "Big Bang", for a "beginning" that he considered akin to a religious article of faith, rather than being scientific, was later picked up by that theory's proponents.

Answer: homosexual men

Evelyn Hooker (1907-1996) was an American psychologist whose best known work challenged the orthodox opinion among psychologists that homosexuality was a psychological disorder. Many in the psychological community were proud to have worked to move attitudes in society away from considering homosexual behaviour to be a sin, arguing that it was a psychological disorder that should not be punished, but treated just like any other disorder. Considering it an illness, and not a normal condition, the consensus was that it would lead to maladjusted individuals who would be unhappy and could be "cured". Homosexuality was still illegal in the USA when Hooker carried out an experiment where a cross-section of men - 30 homosexual and 30 heterosexual - were given a set of psychological tests.

The results of the tests were analysed by three specialists in the use of the tests who were asked to determine which of the subjects were homosexual. All three were astonished to have to conclude that they could not detect any psychological difference between the two sets of men. Hooker's 1957 paper, "The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual" led to the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's list of psychological disorders.

Answer: pulsars

Jocelyn Bell Burnell (born 1943) was an astronomer from Northern Ireland whose discovery of pulsars is considered one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth century. In 1967 she was working at Cambridge University as a PhD student, part of a team investigating quasars, which had recently been discovered. Burnell discovered on one of the charts she was analysing an odd "signal" that was pulsing at regular intervals.

Her colleagues disbelieved her but she showed it was real and the signal was nicknamed "Little Green Man 1".

Some years later, and following the discovery of similar signals, the signal was determined to be due to a rapidly rotating neutron star, which was called a pulsar, after "pulse" and "quasar". Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 for the discovery.

This was the first time astronomers were given the award. It was controversial that Burnell, the discoverer of pulsars, was excluded from the award - Fred Hoyle was among those who spoke out - but the award followed the convention that the leaders of research projects should be given the award rather than their workers.

Answer: False

Rupert Sheldrake (born 1942) was an English scientist who was a biochemist and plant physiologist whose theories about morphic resonance have not been accepted by mainstream science. He developed the theory as an attempt to explain a process for how observed evolution and improvements in animal and human abilities could occur. In his 1981 book "A New Science of Life" Sheldrake suggested that newly acquired behaviours could be passed onto future generations through a sort of collective memory for a species rather than genetically. His theories were linked to Jung's theories of "Collective Unconscious". In his own words "In its most general sense this hypothesis implies that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits."

The scientific mainstream considers Sheldrake's ideas to be pseudoscience.

Answer: peptic ulcers

Barry Marshall (born 1951) was an Australian physican who, along with Robin Warren, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2005 "for their discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease".

In 1982 Marshall and Warren developed their hypothesis that bacteria - H. pylori - could cause peptic ulcers and gastritis. The scientific consensus was that bacteria would not survive in the highly acid stomach environment. Their research funding was limited and they found that their laboratory technicians had been throwing away their cultures too early to show results and they didn't have the funds to restart the trial. As a result, they could only show a limited number of positive results, and their 1983 paper was very poorly received. In frustration with their lack of progress, in 1984 Marshall had an endoscopy before drinking a broth containing H. pylori. A few days later he showed symptoms of nausea and an endoscopy 8 days after drinking the broth showed gastritis and a biopsy showed large quantities of H. pylori had colonised his stomach. He subsequently took antibiotics to clear up the condition. Marshall was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1999, for which his citation said: "the view that gastric disorders are infectious diseases is now firmly established and there is increasing evidence for a role of H. pylori infection in gastric cancers. The work of Marshall has produced one of the most radical and important changes in medical perception in the last 50 years."