Under the Microscope: This week I offer you a selection of seasonal jokes and a quiz based on important people and places in Irish science, writes Dr William Reville.
He gets out a new piece of paper and begins again: "Dear baby Jesus, I have been a good boy for most of the year, so I want a new . . ." He again looks at it with disgust and throws it away.
Then he gets an idea. He goes into his mother's room, takes a statue of the Virgin Mary, puts it in the closet, and locks the door. He takes another piece of paper and writes: "Dear baby Jesus. If you ever want to see your mother again . . ."
"That might be true," says the travel agent, "but you have to take into account that the Sea of Galilee is water on which our Lord himself walked."
"Well, at €50 an hour for a boat," said the Scotsman, "it's no wonder he walked."
Christmas Science Quiz
1. Who was Ireland's most famous mathematician?
2. Which TCD Archbishop worked out the age of the world by studying genealogies in the Bible?
3. Which father of quantum mechanics worked in Dublin from 1940 to 1956?
4. Which galaxy shape was discovered by William Parsons in 1845?
5. Which Belfast-born physicist died in 1990 and made fundamental contributions to quantum theory?
6. Which Co Kilkenny-born philosopher (1685-1753) studied perception and existence?
7. Which Irish midlands town contained the then largest telescope in the world, built in the 1840s?
8. Which Nenagh-born scientist pioneered biological X-ray crystallography?
9. Who won Ireland's only Nobel Prize for science?
10. Which TCD mathematician prefigured Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity?
11. Which Co Carlow-born scientist explained why the sky is blue?
12. Which Maynooth priest and scientist invented the induction coil and self-exciting dynamo?
13. Which Dublin firm built some of the greatest telescopes of the 19th century?
14. Who coined the term "electron"?
15. Which Co Down chemist pioneered battery-powered transport?
16. Who drew up a classification of wind speeds?
17. Which Co Sligo-born scientist studied viscous flow?
18. Which Lismore-born scientist discovered that the volume of a gas is inversely related to its pressure?
19. Who introduced the first Irish White Paper on science?
20. Who founded the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies?
21. Where can you find the oldest fossil footprints in the northern hemisphere?
22. Which Enniskillen-born medical epidemiologist first demonstrated the link between a virus and human cancer?
23. Which Belfast-born scientist discovered pulsars in 1968?
24. Who was the first professor of mathematics at UCC and father of computer science?
25. Who invented the cream cracker? William Reville is Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Director of Microscopy at UCC
Answers
1. William Rowan Hamilton 2. James Ussher
3. Erwin Schrödinger 4. Spiral 5. John Bell
6. George Berkeley 7. Birr 8. John Desmond Bernal
9. Ernest Walton 10. George Francis Fitzgerald
11. John Tyndall 12. Nicholas Callan 13. Grubb
14. George Johnstone Stoney 15. James Drumm
16. Francis Beaufort 17. George Gabriel Stokes
18. Robert Boyle 19. Pat Rabbitte 20. DeValera
21. Valentia 22. Denis Parsons Burkitt
23. Jocelyn Bell Burnell 24. George Boole
25. George N. Jacob