Intelligence

2 1 6 INTELLIGENCE

and writers known as the Fathers of the Church. He became bishop of Hippo (in North Africa) in 396. His influence on both Roman Catholic and Protestant theology was immense, and he is regarded as the patron saint of scholars.

Professor Challenger Professor George Edward Challenger is the distinguished zoologist and anthropologist who leads the expedition to the land of dinosaurs in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912). He also appears in other books by Conan Doyle and is a somewhat irascible and unconventional scientist, given to developing his own individual and rather unlikely theories.

If you took a living body and cut it up into ever smaller pieces, you would eventually come down to specks of pure protoplasm. At one time in the last century, a real-life counterpart of Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger thought that the 'globigerina ooze' at the bottom of the sea was pure protoplasm. When I was a schoolboy, elderly textbook authors still wrote about protoplasm although, by then, they really should have known better.

RICHARD DAWKINS The Blind Watchmaker, 1986

Darwin Charles Darwin (1809-82) was an English naturalist and geologist who formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection to explain the origin of animal and plant species. His work On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871.

Einstein Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a German-born American mathematician and theoretical physicist who formulated the theory of relativity. He was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1921. He is often regarded as the greatest scientist of the 20th century and is frequently mentioned as the archetype of the extremely intelligent person. The phrase 'no Einstein' is commonly used to mean 'unintelligent'.

Bech, rather short for his age, yet with a big nose and big feet that promised future growth, was recognized from the first by his classmates as an only son, a mother's son more than a father's, pampered and bright though not a prodigy (his voice had no pitch, his mathematical aptitude was no Einstein's); naturally he was teased.

JOHN UPDIKE Bech: a Book, 1970

He walked her to the door. They made an odd couple: he, short, slightly rumpled, inclined to corpulence; she, tall, slender elegant. Einstein and Aphrodite.

JOHN SPENCER HILL The Last Castrato, 1995

It's a neat theory, but you don't have to be Einstein to spot some serious flaws.

The Observer, 1998

Stephen Hawking Stephen Hawking (b. 1942) is an English theoretical physicist whose main work has been on quantum gravity and black holes. Confined to a wheelchair because of a progressive disabling neuromuscular disease, he performs his complex mathematical calculations mentally. He is the author of A Brief History of Time (1988).

ecstatic but still disbelieving crowd Newcastle out-played, out-fought and, most of all, out-thought their visitors, whose coach is supposed to be the game's Stephen Hawking, and who carry a spaniel-like sheen that speaks of endless grooming and refining.

The Guardian, 1997

2 1 8 INVISIBILITY

It has been one of the blessings of my life as College Chaplain that I am no longer required to bless any babies. Looking into what I suppose must be called their faces almost convinced me that Darwin was absolutely right. I remember one particularly horrid little boy who made me think of Occam's Razor rather wistfully.

TOM SHARPE Grantchester Grind, 1995

Plato Plato (C.429-C.347 BC) was a Greek philosopher whose ideas had a profound influence on Western thought. The pupil of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, he founded the Academy school of philosophy in Athens. Plato set out his views in the Dialogues, in which Socrates is the central character who conducts the discussions.

Socrates Socrates (469-399 BC) was a Greek philosopher whose method of inquiry (the Socratic method) was based on debating moral issues with those around him: he systematically questioned his pupils and then cross-examined them to expose inconsistencies and errors.

'I do, as it happens,' said Philip and, still skirmishing . . . in the realm of dialectic, went on like a little Socrates, with his cross-examination.

ALDOUS HUXLEY Point Counter Point, 1928

As far as Cassandra Swann was concerned, Charlie Quartermain, gross, unbuttoned, spehisciform, might be St Francis of Assissi and the Angel Gabriel rolled into one, with a touch of Paul Newman on the one hand and a dollop of Socrates on the other, but that still wouldn't make up for the fact that basically she just didn't fancy him.

SUSAN MOODY King of Hearts, 1995

Spock In the original series of the TV science fiction programme Star Trek (1966-9), Mr Spock is the ultra-logical science officer on the USS Enterprise. He has a human mother and a Vulcan father, and it is the Vulcan side of his nature that causes his actions to be governed by logical reasoning rather than by intuition or emotion.

We would like to believe we reasoned with Aristotle's logic. That's why Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek's Mr. Spock are heroes and not fictional commoners.

BART KosKo Fuzzy Thinking, 1993

Invisibility

An object or garment that bestows the power of invisibility on its owner or

wearer is a familiar motif in stories and myths. • See also Disappearance

and Absence.

Alberich's cloak In the German epic poem the Nibelungenlied, Alberich is a dwarf who guards the treasure of the Nibelungs, which includes a cloak of invisibility called 'tarnkappe'. He is robbed of it by Siegfried.

INVISIBILITY 2 1 9

Bilbo Baggins In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937), Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit, a member of an imaginary race of small, hairy-footed, burrow-dwelling people. During his adventures he acquires a magic ring that confers invisibility on the wearer. This ring, 'so powerful that in the end it would utterly overcome anyone of the mortal race who possessed it', is central to the plot of Tolkien's later work, The Lord of the Rings (1954-5).

Til call myself Mary,' Alison said, loudly enough to be sure of his hearing. 'That sounds nice and innocuous! 'No one would suspect a meek, mild Mary of any skullduggery,' . . . It would be like wearing a cloak of invisibility or Bilbow [sic] Baggins, stolen magic ring.

SUSAN KELLY Hope Will Answer, 1992

Cyges Gyges (c. 685-c. 657 BC) was a Lydian shepherd who, according to the story told by Plato, descended into a chasm, where he found a horse made of brass. He opened its side and found inside it the body of a man of great size. Gyges removed from the man's finger a brazen ring which, when he wore it, made him invisible. He subsequently used this ring to make himself known to the queen, marry her, and usurp the crown of Lydia's king Candaules.

What is the practical meaning of this silvery appearance which is generally absent in fishes that live in very deep and dark waters? The probable answer has been suggested several times—that the silveriness gives its possessors a Cyges' ring, a power of becoming invisible,

j . ARTHUR THOMSON Biology for Everyman, 1934

Harvey Harvey is a six-foot tall rabbit created by Mary C. Chase in her 1944 comedy Harvey and popularized in a 1950 film of the same name. Harvey is invisible to everyone except the drunken Elwood P. Dowd.

clothes remain visible, as do his footprints. The story was filmed in 1933 with Claude Rains as the scientist, and there have been numerous other film and television versions.

Between the arrogant, stretched legs of that colossus ran a stringy pattern of grey footprints stamped upon the white snow. 'Cod!' cried Angus involuntarily; 'the Invisible Man!'

c. K. CHESTERTON 'The Invisible Man' in The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911

Black faces now melted into blackness; one saw apparently empty garments walking about, as in The Invisible Man.

LAWRENCE DURRELL Mountolive, 1958

Mambrino's helmet In Ariosto's poem Orlando Furioso (1532), Mambrino is a pagan king whose golden helmet makes the wearer invisible. In Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605), Quixote sees a barber riding with his brass basin upon his head and, mistaking this for Mambrino's helmet, gets possession of it.