Futility Closet - 340-A Vanished Physicist

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 11,000 quirky curiosities from Washington's ceiling to a vegetable orchestra. This is episode 340. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1938, Italian physicist Ettore Majorana vanished after taking a sudden sea journey. At first, it was feared that he'd ended his life, but the perplexing circumstances left the truth uncertain.

Starting point is 00:00:39 In today's show, we'll review the facts of Majorana's disappearance, its meaning for physics, and a surprising modern postscript. We'll also dither over pronunciation and puzzle over why it will take three days to catch a murderer. Ettore Majorana was born to a well-to-do family in Sicily in 1906. He was a shy child, but from the beginning his brilliance was obvious. His family said that he could soon multiply three-digit numbers and extract cube roots in his head, disappearing under a table to do the calculations. He also excelled at chess. He was educated in a Jesuit institution in Rome,

Starting point is 00:01:20 and after graduating he pursued studies in engineering. But he didn't finish because a friend convinced him that his future lay in physics. This was quickly borne out. He started in the physics program at the University of Rome in 1928 under Enrico Fermi, and his thesis was accepted with a grade of 110 out of 110 with distinction. When he pursued a university teaching diploma, the examination board recommended him unanimously, praising what it called his complete mastery of theoretical physics. By 1933, at age 27, he was traveling to Leipzig and Copenhagen to work with Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. Bruno Pontecorvo, a younger colleague of Majorana at Fermi's Institute of Physics in Rome, wrote,

Starting point is 00:02:00 Sometime after joining the Fermi group, Majorana already had such an erudition and reached such a high level of comprehension of physics that he was able to discuss with Fermi about scientific problems. Fermi himself held him to be the greatest theoretical physicist of our time. He often was astounded. I remember exactly these words that Fermi spoke. Once a problem has already been posed, no one in the world is able of solving it better than Majorana. In 1937, a new chair of theoretical physics was created for him at the University of Naples in light of what the board of examiners called his high and well-deserved fame, and in January 1938, he began teaching there.

Starting point is 00:02:38 He spent 11 seemingly untroubled weeks giving lessons in the morning and walking the city in the afternoon. During this period, he didn't touch his salary, which was deposited into a bank account in Naples, but in late March, he took all this money out of the bank, and on March 25th, he wrote a letter to Antonio Carelli, the director of the Naples Physics Institute. It said, Dear Carelli, I made a decision that has become unavoidable. There isn't a bit of selfishness in it, but I realize what trouble my sudden disappearance will cause you and the students. For this as well, I beg your forgiveness, but especially for betraying the trust, the

Starting point is 00:03:12 sincere friendship, and the sympathy you gave me over the past months. I ask you to remind me to all those I learned to know and appreciate in your institute, especially Suti. That's a student of his. I will keep a fond memory of them all at least until 11 p.m. tonight, possibly later too. He posted this letter at 5 p.m. It appears that around 10.30 p.m. he boarded a steamship bound for Palermo, but when he reached that destination, it appears he changed his mind. He took a room in the Grand Hotel Soleil, and the next day telegraphed a second message to

Starting point is 00:03:42 Corelli. It said, Dear Corelli, I hope you got my telegram and my letter at the same time. The sea rejected me and I'll be back tomorrow at the Hotel Bologna, traveling perhaps with this letter. However, I have the intention of giving up teaching. Don't think I'm like an Ibsen heroine because the case is different. I'm at your disposal for further details. And he telegraphed his hotel in Naples, asking them to keep his room, which contained his clothes and papers. Carelli received both the telegram and the letter that

Starting point is 00:04:10 weekend and waited anxiously for Majorana until Monday, when by that time he hadn't appeared at either the institute or the hotel. Carelli called Enrico Fermi in Rome and read him the letter. Fermi called the Majorana family and word began to spread. Majorana's brothers left for Naples on Tuesday, and with Carelli they went to the hotel. There they found a letter that Majorana had written on the day of his departure. It was headed to my family, and it read, I have only one wish. Do not wear black. If you must conform to custom, just wear some emblem of mourning, but not for more than three days. After that, remember me in your hearts if you can and forgive me. The brothers searched Naples and Palermo for months

Starting point is 00:04:50 and found nothing. Carelli informed the police and the rector of the University of Naples, who later wrote to the minister of education in Rome. Police investigations began four days after the disappearance. The ministry of interior was informed of the facts, and the head of police sent a telegraphic dispatch to all the police offices in the Kingdom of Italy. Eventually, it was discovered that Majorana had been seen sleeping in a cabin on the return journey from Palermo back to Naples, and at the beginning of April, a nurse who knew him said she'd seen him walking in Naples. But after that, no trace was found, even after the family had offered a reward of 30,000 lira and published appeals in newspapers and magazines.

Starting point is 00:05:28 A number of theories were put forward to explain the disappearance. None was ever proven conclusively. The first is suicide, that he jumped into the Mediterranean during the voyage from Palermo back to Naples. This is certainly suggested by the tone of his letters to Corelli and to his family, and by the tone of a conversation he'd had on January 18th with the experimental physicist Giuseppe Aucchialini, who had just returned from a journey to Brazil. Aucchialini wrote later, It's strange, I told him, that having wanted to meet you for so long when living in Florence, this meeting has only been possible by going to Sao Paulo and back. Answer, you have made it just in time, because if you had come a few weeks later, you wouldn't have met me.

Starting point is 00:06:10 I sensed, I understood at once from the tone of his voice, from his gaze, what he was talking about. He was talking about something I knew very well. So I said, this answer of yours makes you even more interesting to my eyes, because I too, since I was 18, have been repeating words like these to myself. I have been walking the same path. And he, dear Occhialini, there are people who talk about it and people who do it. That's why I repeat that if you had arrived a few weeks later, you wouldn't have seen me. But those who knew Majorana well discounted the possibility that he had taken his own life. His mother wrote to Mussolini on July 27th, quote, he was always wise

Starting point is 00:06:39 and balanced, and the tragedy of his soul and nerves remains a mystery. But one thing is sure, and it is firmly attested by all his friends, his family, and myself, his own mother, no clinical or moral precedents were ever noted which might point at suicide. Majorana was a defout Catholic, and his confessor, Monsignor Riccieri, told the Italian physicist Antonino Zicchichi that Majorana had experienced mystical crises but that he felt suicide should be excluded as a possibility. He couldn't say more as he was bound by the sanctity of the confessional. Zichichi eventually met Majorana's whole family and said that, quote, no one ever believed it was suicide. Further, Majorana's brother Luciano noted that a battalion of

Starting point is 00:07:19 veterans from Africa had been traveling on the ship so that its deck was crowded. If a man had fallen into the sea, he said, they would have seen him. And Majorana had withdrawn a large sum of money from the bank shortly before the disappearance. He was carrying about 10,000 lira, which was nearly half a typical annual income at the time, and it appears he had taken his passport as well. A second theory is that he'd withdrawn to a monastery, perhaps impelled by a spiritual crisis. Zikiki says that this belief was shared by Majorana's family and acquaintances, including Enrico Fermi's wife, Laura. It's backed up anecdotally by reports that a few days before Majorana had sailed for Palermo,

Starting point is 00:07:55 a young man matching his description had appeared at the Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo near Majorana's hotel in Naples and asked to go into retreat. When he was told that a long-term accommodation was necessary before he could join the novitiate, he had thanked the brothers and left. And on April 12th, another young man was received at the Convento di San Pasquale in Portici, just outside Naples, and asked to be admitted to the Holy Order there. He, likewise, was refused and turned away. The Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia suggested that Majorana may have chosen deliberately to disappear because he could foresee the uses to which atomic research

Starting point is 00:08:30 would shortly be put. Zichichi said that it would have been nearly impossible for most physicists to see that far ahead in 1938, but conceivably not for a genius of Majorana's caliber. Another theory is that perhaps he left Italy for reasons of his own. In the four days following his disappearance, 12 ships departed Naples for foreign destinations, ranging from Boston to Yokohama. In particular, there was a report that a person named Maya Rana had checked into a hotel in Buenos Aires, but when detectives arrived to investigate, the page was missing from the hotel register. I'll come back to that later. Going increasingly further afield, maybe he was working secretly on the atomic bomb, maybe he was working secretly on the atomic bomb. Maybe he went to Germany to work on a secret weapon for Hitler. Maybe he was

Starting point is 00:09:09 murdered by Nazi agents in some political intrigue related to the approaching war. Maybe he tried to join the Nazis, but they turned him away as a crackpot and he sold himself to the Soviets. Maybe he became a beggar in Naples. There are reports of a disheveled person helping local students with mathematics. Maybe he wound up in a mental hospital, and one of my favorites, the Ukrainian physicist Oleg Zaslavsky suggested that Majorana had contrived the whole mystery deliberately in order to demonstrate the principle of quantum superposition. That is, Majorana had written to Corelli saying that he hoped he'd received his letter and his telegram at the same time. Whatever the case, Majorana could not be found.

Starting point is 00:09:46 On December 6, 1938, he was considered to have resigned from his public office, and the following April, the search was ended and the case filed as a suicide. The loss to physics was profound. Shortly after the disappearance, Enrico Fermi had told a young physicist in his lab, In the world, there are various categories of scientists. There are people of a secondary or tertiary standing who do their best but do not go very far. There are also those of high standing who come to discoveries of great importance, fundamental to the development of science. But then there are geniuses, like Galileo and Newton. Well, Ettore was one of them.

Starting point is 00:10:19 Majorana had what no one else in the world had. During the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer recalled that once when a critical problem arose, Fermi turned to Eugene Wigner and said, if only Ettore were here. At another time, he said, this calls for Ettore. Leslie Groves, the director of the project, asked who this was, and Fermi told him it was Majorana. Groves asked where he was so that they could bring him to work on the project, and Wigner said, unfortunately, he disappeared many years ago. There the matter rested until the 1950s, when the Chilean physicist Carlos Rivera Cruchaga claimed to have had two odd brushes with purported acquaintances of Majorana in Buenos Aires. In March 1950, on their way to Europe, Cruchaga and his wife were staying at a

Starting point is 00:11:00 pension directed by a woman named Frances Talbert. On the day before their departure, Rivera was studying Majorana's model of nuclear forces, and Talbert saw his name on some papers on the table. She asked whether this was the name of a famous Italian physicist. This was 12 years and 11,000 kilometers from Majorana's last sighting. She said that Ettore Majorana was a friend of her son, an electrical engineer. She said Majorana no longer dealt with physics, but had turned to engineering. Rivera wondered whether they were talking about the same person, so he showed her a photo of Majorana with Heisenberg in the 1930s. She recognized him immediately, though he was very young in the picture. Rivera wanted to press the matter,

Starting point is 00:11:38 but their conversation was interrupted and he had to depart the next day. Four years later, in January 1954, Rivera returned to South America and found the door of Talbert's house nailed shut. The neighbors said that mother and son had disappeared. Mrs. Talbert had openly opposed Perón, and Rivera thought that perhaps she and her son had been eliminated by the police or had fled Argentina. In 1961, Rivera returned to Buenos Aires and stayed at the Hotel Continental. One day in the restaurant, a waiter noticed him writing formulas on a napkin and mentioned that another guest used to do the same thing, a physicist who had fled Italy many years earlier, before 1950.

Starting point is 00:12:14 Rivera produced a newspaper clipping with a photograph and said, Do you know this man? The waiter said, Ettore Majorana. And Rivera said, Yes. Those leads are tenuous and impossible to confirm, but a more substantial connection occurred in 2008, when a man named Roberto Fasani called the missing person's television show Who Has Seen Him? Fasani said that in 1955, he'd been traveling in Venezuela,

Starting point is 00:12:35 and in the city of Valencia had met a Sicilian friend who introduced him to a Mr. Beanie. Beanie had white hair and an aristocratic bearing, but was shy and melancholy and lived modestly. Someone told him Bini's real name was Majorano. Bini was camera shy, but he allowed Fasani to take one photograph. Fasani lost the photo for a time, but when he recovered it and sent it to the Italian authorities, the police reopened the case. In comparing Bini's face and those of Majorano's father and brother, they found 10 points of correspondence. The new investigation altered the disposition of the case. In 2015, the attorney's office in Rome declared that Ettore Majorana had been alive between 1955 and 1959 and living in Valencia, Venezuela, under the assumed surname of Bini. The prosecutor declared the case again

Starting point is 00:13:21 closed as there was no evidence of a crime connected with the disappearance. Majorana had gone to South America for reasons of his own, and presumably had died there. If he were still alive today, he'd be 114. That's really all that's known. Majorana was 31 years old at the time of his disappearance, and in his brief, brilliant career, he published only nine papers. But his name still appears today at the frontier of the discipline in areas ranging from elementary particle physics to applied condensed matter to mathematical physics. If he elected to withdraw and begin a new life elsewhere, the reasons will probably never be

Starting point is 00:13:54 known, but his success in doing so is not surprising. When he was reported missing in 1938, Enrico Fermi had said to his wife, Ettore was too intelligent. If he has decided to disappear, no one will be able to find him. We received a fair amount of follow-up to our discussion on escalators from episode 333. In that episode, I had mentioned how the early escalators in London were kind of a big deal at the time, around the turn of the 20th century. Apparently, escalators are still a big deal when they first come to an area, even in the 21st century. Jules Redding in Norwich, UK wrote, Regarding escalators, I lived in New Delhi, India around the turn of the century, and a shopping mall opened with what I think was the third escalator I'd seen in the whole city.

Starting point is 00:14:51 The airport and the science museum were the others. Watching some local teenagers daring each other to step onto it and screaming when they couldn't work out the timing was hilarious to my 10-year-old eyes. I've not been back in nearly 20 years, but with the rate of industrialization in that fine country, I imagine escalators are much more commonplace there now. And Stuart Baker wrote, I'm a few weeks behind on the podcast, but yesterday listened to episode 333, where you discussed escalators. I grew up in the UK near London, but moved to Napier, New Zealand as a teenager in the mid-2000s.

Starting point is 00:15:26 Located in Hawke's Bay, by New Zealand standards, Napier is a large city. Its current population of about 65,000 people puts it in the 10 largest New Zealand cities, and when combined with its sister city of Hastings, about 20 minutes away by car, it's not small by New Zealand standards. way by car, it's not small by New Zealand standards. I bring this up because in 2012, Farmers, a New Zealand department store, opened a new premises in Napier. I was mystified when people told me they were driving over from Hastings to visit the new Farmers store in Napier. Hastings has its own Farmers store, and although people often shop at the other city, it's not usually to visit one specific store that already exists in the city they live in. I was bemused to then be told it was to ride the escalator. I have plenty

Starting point is 00:16:11 of anecdotal evidence of this, some of which I'm sure is exaggerated, but I also remember watching families ride the escalator, not just the small children, and the escalator itself is mentioned in every article I could find about the store opening. And Stewart quotes from an article in the New Zealand Herald, an escalator in the development is a hawk's bay first, more than 100 years after they were invented. And Stewart then says, the press release even mentioned the escalator in its first line above the new brands available, air conditioning, and the focus on keeping the Art Deco style of the building intact, and quotes the press release,

Starting point is 00:16:48 Stewart continues, As an aside, the Art Deco nature of Napier is something quite interesting itself. There was a large earthquake in the 30s that demolished the city, and so almost the entire city is in an Art Deco style, even the McDonald's. Anyway, I thought you might find it interesting to know that some places, even large cities, can still be quaint in odd little ways, and something as simple as riding an escalator can be a fun day out for a family. and something as simple as riding an escalator can be a fun day out for a family. I'm sure the London Tubes escalator caused as much fun and bemusement to people new to the technology many years after it was introduced. Best wishes and thanks for the podcast. I always enjoy listening to it. I don't remember the first time I saw an escalator, but I think it must have been impressive.

Starting point is 00:17:42 I think that would impress anybody, moving stairs, you know? And it seemed a little intimidating to get the timing right and figure out how you're supposed to get on and off without hurting yourself. But maybe for a lot of city dwellers, it happens at such a young age that you just don't remember the direction it made on you. Yeah. And speaking of places not having escalators, Greg let me know that he thought that there are actually only two escalators in the whole state of Wyoming, which I looked into and found that that does seem to be the case, both of them in the city of Casper and both in banks. Although some point out that there are actually two sets of escalators with an up escalator and a down escalator in each set. So for example, NPR interviewed Jeremy Fugelberg, the self-proclaimed escalator editor of the Casper

Starting point is 00:18:23 Star Tribune, while he was riding on an escalator in the First International Bank in Casper, who maintains that the escalators should all be counted individually, thus giving his state four escalators. The whole piece is rather tongue-in-cheek, but he also says, Wyoming is very proud of its ability to get from floor to floor in some form other than escalators. Believe it or not, Wyoming is jam-packed with stairs and elevators that are very popular and used all the time. But self-proclaimed escalator editors aside, many quote the statistic as Wyoming having two escalators. And with their estimated population in 2019 being 578,759, that works out to fewer than 0.00004 escalators per capita, which is reported to be

Starting point is 00:19:09 a national low. Though, as the Atlantic reported in 2013, when the governor's office was asked about the small number of escalators there, they said, it is widely assumed that there are no escalators in Wyoming. And there are various possible reasons why there might be so few escalators in Wyoming. For one, land is often cheaper in that part of the country, so buildings might often spread out rather than build up, obviating the need for escalators. It's reported that nearby South Dakota and Montana also have fairly low numbers of escalators, though they do beat Wyoming. Escalators are generally more expensive and complicated to install and maintain than stairs, and there are building code issues with escalators that stairs and elevators don't have. And this is something that I'd never considered before, but escalators

Starting point is 00:19:54 can be much more of a fire hazard than either stairs or elevators, as they can be in enclosed spaces. Unprotected openings between floors can be a fire risk, and a moving stairway that has caught fire could transport it from one floor to another. And there might just be a regional personality factor involved. Reader's Digest reports that on this topic, someone posted on Reddit, I've been to Wyoming once. There's a kind of no-nonsense, why-the-hell-would-we-need-moving-stairs vibe blowing over the rough terrain out there? To which another user replied, as a Wyomingite, I'd say you read our vibe well. That's a good point about the fires. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, I hadn't at all thought about that, that they're much more

Starting point is 00:20:33 of a fire hazard. Even if the escalator itself isn't burning, it could carry burning material from one floor to another. Yeah. And following on our discussion from episode 333 about which side of escalators people tend to stand on, David Neal wrote from Australia to say that while they drive on the left side there and tend to follow a keep left convention on stairs and escalators, the iconic spiral staircase at Melbourne University's Bailey U Library has signs that say keep right. David says, I'm not sure why. One explanation might be that a majority of people are right-handed and therefore would grasp the banister with that dominant hand if needed. Too bad for the lefties. It's also noted that winding or spiral staircases

Starting point is 00:21:16 have diminishing tread width on the inside of the curve, making it the dangerous side for descending persons having less real estate to step on. Ann wonders, is there such a thing as a spiral escalator? And I don't have any definitive answers about why you should walk on a particular side on spiral staircases, but I can say that yes, there are spiral escalators. There was at least one abandoned early attempt at a spiral escalator back in 1906, but the existing ones these days have all been made by Mitsubishi, who has been making spiral escalators since 1985. Atlas Obscura says that the company has installed a little over 100 of them since the mid-90s, with about 40 of those in Japan. It appears that there are a few

Starting point is 00:21:56 also in China and some other Asian countries, and a small number in the U.S., such as in a shopping mall in San Francisco and in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and I found a mention of at least one of them in Canada and one in Mexico. Apparently, the only advantages of spiral escalators is that they look kind of cool and give you a more panoramic view as you ride them, but they take up more floor space, are at least four times more expensive to construct than a standard escalator, and as Atlas Obscura says, from a technical perspective, they are stupidly twiddly, meaning that there are many more things that can go wrong with them and that are just more challenging to get right in the first place, such as that the

Starting point is 00:22:34 inside of a step has to move more slowly and a shorter distance compared to the outside of the step, all while remaining in sync. So the spiral versions probably aren't going to replace regular escalators in general anytime soon. And I aren't going to replace regular escalators in general anytime soon. And I didn't happen to see any mention of what side of a spiral escalator people should stand on. I'd like to see one of those. For some reason, I can't even picture that in my head, what that would look like, a spiral escalator. I'll find a video somewhere. Well, in my links, I think there are photos. So I don't have a video though. David also commented on my pronunciation of the slang term for Australians, saying,

Starting point is 00:23:10 we would pronounce that Aussies, although I've noticed Sharon often says Aussies, which is charmingly out of town. So I hadn't even realized that this word had different pronunciations. I just figured as it was short for Australians, it would be Aussies, especially given the spelling. But Wikipedia notes the two different pronunciations, saying that Americans often pronounce it the way that I have been, while people in many of the other English-speaking countries pronounce it as Aussies. And this is actually a good example of something that we wrestle with fairly frequently on the show, which is which pronunciation should we use when a word or place

Starting point is 00:23:45 name has multiple ones? Like, I think it would probably sound a little odd for me to say Mexico instead of Mexico, although I do respect that Mexicans might prefer a different pronunciation than what I would tend to use. But we struggle a bit with whether to say, as one of lots of examples, the more Australian Melbourne or the more American Melbourne for the Australian city. So we haven't managed to come up with any hard and fast rules about how to handle this. And I realized that we're probably not even always consistent with what we end up going with. But we are usually aware of the issue, even if we're not always sure how to best deal with it. I was going to say that I guess the radio industry has been dealing with questions like

Starting point is 00:24:23 this for most of 100 years, but they weren't all broadcasting internationally until the trailer. You know, it's like the world's gotten so small just lately that this kind of thing comes up a lot more. Maybe it does. Yeah. And Aussies is also actually an example of how we sometimes run into trouble when a word or name isn't pronounced how it really looks like it should be. trouble when a word or name isn't pronounced how it really looks like it should be. So in episode 333, when Greg told the story of two German airmen who were stranded in northwestern Australia, he mentioned that they were trying to get to Port Cockburn. Given that the name is spelled C-O-C-K-B-U-R-N, this seemed like a rather obvious pronunciation. But a few of our listeners let us

Starting point is 00:25:03 know that obvious looking or not, it wasn't correct and should be pronounced Coburn. For example, Brendan A. explained to us that all the uses of Coburn in Western Australia seem to be named after one Admiral Sir George Coburn, a British Royal Navy officer born in 1772 that Brendan helpfully sent a Wikipedia link for. Wikipedia says that Coburn Sound in Western Australia was named after Admiral Coburn by Captain James Sterling in 1827. And the City of Coburn Western Australia website gives the same attribution for the naming of their city. Wikipedia says that Coburn Island on the Antarctic Peninsula

Starting point is 00:25:40 and Cape Coburn and Coburn Bay on the west coast of Canada were also named after him. And I guess I would guess that they also caused some confusion for people not familiar with the name. I'll get it right next time. I made the same mistake years ago now. I called Placerville, California, Placerville. This is like episode 70-something. Yeah, because that's so what it looked like it should be pronounced. You just never know with names. No, but we learn. We learn. We try.

Starting point is 00:26:07 Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We're always sorry that we can't read all the email that we get on the show, but we really do appreciate your comments and follow-ups. So if you have anything you'd like to add, please send that to podcast at futilitycloset.com. And if you have a potentially mispronounceable name, you can help us out by telling us how you like it said. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to give him an odd sounding situation, and he's going to try to guess what's going on by asking yes or no

Starting point is 00:26:43 questions. This puzzle comes from the book How Come? A Book of Riddles by Agnes Rogers from 1953 that we discussed in episode 306, and I have condensed this puzzle a bit. And yes, of course, it is another fatal puzzle. On an island off the North Atlantic coast, a resident thought he heard groans one dark night. Early next morning, he reported his suspicions to the police, who undertook a thorough search and discovered a corpse, which had been shoved into the underbrush some yards from the main road. It was clearly a case of murder. The police chief immediately ordered that the ferry, the only means of communication with the mainland, be stopped.

Starting point is 00:27:24 ordered that the ferry, the only means of communication with the mainland, be stopped. Nobody's going to leave the island for three days, he declared, and by then I believe we'll have the murderer. When the three days were up, the murderer was caught. How come? Okay, you said this was off the North Atlantic? Coast, yes. Is that important? It's just on an island so that you can trap everybody on it, right? Okay, so there's an island off a coast and there's a ferry that serves the island. Yes.

Starting point is 00:27:49 And they stop the ferry. Right. So nobody can leave the island, basically. And doing that reveals the murderer. The police chief says that when the three days are up, he believes they'll have the murderer. Okay. And that happens. And that happens. Is the murderer caught on the island? Yes. Is the murderer. Okay. And that happens? And that happens.

Starting point is 00:28:06 Is the murderer caught on the island? Yes. Is the murderer on the island when he's caught? Yes. Is it a human being? Yes. Okay. If the ferry had been running, he would have escaped, I guess.

Starting point is 00:28:16 Yes. Using the ferry. Yes. But that's not enough to catch him. He's just on the island somewhere. Right. How can he be caught just by letting three days go by? Okay.

Starting point is 00:28:28 Is the method of the murder important, like the weapon or something? No. Really? Just a dead body in some bushes? Yes. Is the victim's identity important? No. Is the victim's relationship to the murderer?

Starting point is 00:28:39 No. Wow, really? No. Really, all you're trying to solve here is how did, why was the police chief so confident that if he kept everybody on the island for three days, he'd be able to know who the murderer was? Okay. Is the point that he knew that the murderer would normally otherwise have to leave within three days? No. Somehow, for some reason. No, no. And would give himself up trying to get away? No. Within the puzzle,

Starting point is 00:29:05 is the three days figure sort of arbitrary? Could he have equally said five days or something? He could have said five days, but he believed three days is what he would need. Are there other people involved

Starting point is 00:29:15 besides the ones you mentioned? No. All right. So a guy kills a guy and I don't need to know any more about the murder. You do not. A guy kills a guy

Starting point is 00:29:23 and is now a fugitive murderer on an island. Yes, and can't leave. Is the murderer caught on the third day, would you say, probably? I don't know. Possibly sooner. Possibly sooner, yes. Actually, yes, I would say possibly sooner. That's such a simple simple puzzle then. Yes. The police chief believes that if he just has some time, he's going to be sure that he's going to know who the murderer was. Does the police chief take some action in the interim? No. No.

Starting point is 00:30:03 So like if the guy's a werewolf and they know that a full moon, you know what I mean? Right, exactly. You just have to wait for somebody to turn into a werewolf, right. Is it something like that? Yes. All right, but that'd be a really good puzzle. I like that. We have to make up a lateral thinking puzzle like that now. All right, so all I have to figure out then is what would reveal itself about you.

Starting point is 00:30:20 Yes. But if the police chief doesn't know who this guy is, how does he know? He does not, but that's the point. How does he know? He does know, though. He has no idea who the murderer is ahead of time. Oh, he doesn't. So there's not some clue on the body or elsewhere that tells him something about the person's identity.

Starting point is 00:30:39 That is correct. That is correct. What you just said is correct. Wow. So all he knows is that this guy's, there's a killer somewhere on the island. He knows something more than that by looking at the crime scene. Okay. Something you've told me or something?

Starting point is 00:30:50 No. Okay. Something I've hinted at, but nothing that I've told you. But the police chief sees something important at the crime scene that he knows, similar to like if somehow it revealed that the murderer was a werewolf or that he... Okay. Well, what I remember you telling me is that the witness heard groans. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:31:10 And that the body was hidden in some bushes. Is that right? In some underbrush. Mm-hmm. Did you tell me something? At night. It appeared to have happened at night. Yes.

Starting point is 00:31:19 And the body was hidden in some underbrush. Yes. Was it the murder victim who groaned? Let's assume it was. All right. That's not a clue. That's not a clue. All right. I'll tell you, it's the underbrush that yes. Was it the murder victim who groaned? Let's assume it was. All right. That's not a clue. That's not a clue. All right.

Starting point is 00:31:26 I'll tell you it's the underbrush that's the clue. And that it happened at night. Oh, poison ivy. It's poison ivy. That's really good. I jumped to that all of a sudden. The murderer hid the body in a thicket of poison ivy. Yep.

Starting point is 00:31:42 That's good. That's a good puzzle. So, right. So the police chief realized that within a few days it was going to be revealed. And's good. That's a good puzzle. So right, so the police chief realized that within a few days it was going to be revealed. And there's nothing he can do about it.

Starting point is 00:31:50 Thanks again to John Jerome for sending us this delightful book. And if anyone has a puzzle for us to try, please send that to podcast at futilitycloset.com

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Starting point is 00:32:26 closet, or see the support a section of our website at futilitycloset.com. At our website, you can also graze through Greg's collection of over 11,000 arresting esoterica. Browse the Futility Closet store, learn about the Futility Closet books, and see the show notes for the podcast with the links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, please email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was all written and performed by the inimitable Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 340-A Vanished Physicist

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