Academic literature on the topic 'Zoo menagerie'

‘A combinatorial zoo’ presents a menagerie of combinatorial topics, ranging from the box (or pigeonhole) principle, the inclusion–exclusion principle, the derangement problem, and the Tower of Hanoi problem that uses combinatorics to determine how soon the world will end to Fibonacci numbers, the marriage theorem, generators and enumerators, and counting chessboards, which involves symmetry. The method used to average the numbers of colourings that remain unchanged by each symmetry in this latter problem is often called ‘Burnside’s lemma’. This concept has since been developed into a much more powerful result, which has been used to count a wide range of objects with a degree of symmetry, such as graphs and chemical molecules.

North American bears have had cultural significance outside the United States. This chapter explores the role of black, brown, and polar bears in Britain, focusing on the period following the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the late 1600s. Both live bears for exhibition and their products (particularly skins) are considered. The most culturally significant bearskin artifact is the bearskin cap—worn by Buckingham Palace guards—and their history is explored here. Key exhibited animals include an ancient grizzly bear called “Old Martin,” who was one of the last members of the Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London and one of the earliest inhabitants of London Zoo, and “Winnie,” the Canadian black bear who was the inspiration for Winnie-the-Pooh.

“All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” So claimed Ernest Rutherford, the British physicist who discovered the atomic nucleus in 1910, touting the explanatory power of physics over the busywork of classifying elements or planets or animals. One hundred years later, the endless variety of matter postulated by physics—within the nucleus and throughout the universe—has far surpassed the inventories of the periodic table and solar system, leading particle physicists to refer to their domain as a bestiary and one textbook to be aptly titled A Tour of the Subatomic Zoo. There are electrons and protons and neutrons, as well as quarks and positrons and neutrinos. There are also gluons and muons—the unexpected discovery of which, in 1936, led the physicist Isidor Rabi to quip, “Who ordered that?”—and potentially axions and saxions and saxinos. In this menagerie it’s not easy for a new particle, especially a hypothetical one, to get attention. The unparticle, first proposed by American physicist Howard Georgi in 2007, is therefore remarkable for garnering worldwide media attention and spurring more than a hundred scholarly papers, especially considering that there’s no experimental evidence for it, nor is it called for mathematically by any prior theory. What an unparticle is, exactly, remains vague. The strange form of matter first arose on paper when Georgi asked himself what properties a “scale-invariant” particle might have and how it might interact with the observable universe. Scale invariance is a quality of fractals, such as snowflakes and fern leaves, that makes them look essentially the same at any magnification. Georgi’s analogous idea was to imagine particles that would interact with the same force regardless of the distance between them. What he found was that such particles would have no definite mass, which would, for example, exempt them from obeying special relativity. “It’s very difficult to even find the words to describe what unparticles are,” Georgi confessed to the magazine New Scientist in 2008, “because they are so unlike what we are familiar with.” For those unprepared to follow his mathematics, the name evokes their essential foreignness.