RUTHERFORD & FRY’S COMPLETE GUIDE TO ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING   

by Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry (Bantam £16.99, 304 pp)

After the 2010 ‘Flash Crash’ — a frenzied half-hour in which billions of dollars were wiped off the U.S. stock market by computer algorithms going into meltdown — regulators tried to piece together what had happened.

But they were defeated: the banks’ computers had bought and sold stocks tens of thousands of times a second — yet the records only showed the time of each transaction to the nearest whole second. It was impossible to tell who’d sold what to whom in which order.

This is why there is a black cable that runs beneath London’s streets. It runs from Teddington, South West London, to the National Physical Laboratory.

Dr Adam Rutherford and Dr Hannah Fry have penned a book exploring just about every area of life - including if sugary food changes the behaviour of children (file image)

Dr Adam Rutherford and Dr Hannah Fry have penned a book exploring just about every area of life – including if sugary food changes the behaviour of children (file image)

The laboratory is the UK’s ‘Master Timekeeper’, and it ‘sells’ the correct time to the country’s banks. The banks can access the cable by paying for it. They receive the correct time down to the millionth of an second. It’s the perfect example of how ‘nerdy’ science — the sort that measures things in ridiculously tiny intervals — can actually have a role to play in normal life.

Dr Adam Rutherford and Dr Hannah Fry are past masters at this sort of thing, as you’ll know if you’ve ever heard their Radio 4 series The Curious Cases Of Rutherford & Fry. Their popular brand of cleverness is now available in book format.

It touches on almost every area of human life. The next time you play peekaboo with a baby under six months old, reflect on the fact that the infant literally thinks you’ve disappeared. Until that age we have no concept of ‘object permanence’. Many animals never develop it — this is why some birds can be calmed by having a cover placed over their cage: they believe whatever was annoying them has ceased to exist.

And when that baby gets older and has friends round for a party, don’t bother trying to keep them off the sugary food.

There is no evidence to suggest it makes children behave badly: ‘The best data we have suggests children just go nuts at parties, whatever they eat.’ In fact, when kids get sugar-free food at a party, but the parents are told it contains sugar, the parents rate the kids’ behaviour as worse.

At the other end of the scale, Rutherford and Fry investigate the planets, including our own: Eratosthenes, an ancient Greek, used the lengths of different shadows to work out the Earth’s circumference (his answer was 40,000 kilometres — the accepted answer today is 40,075km).

RUTHERFORD AND FRY'S COMPLETE GUIDE TO ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING by Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry (Bantam £16.99, 304 pp)

RUTHERFORD AND FRY’S COMPLETE GUIDE TO ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING by Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry (Bantam £16.99, 304 pp)

Then there are astronauts. Their eyeballs expand in space, and they require glasses for their first few months on Earth.

Elsewhere, the book tackles what are known as the ‘four Fs of evolution — Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing and Reproduction’. Barnacles really don’t like to move once they’ve settled. This can lead to problems when mating. To help with this, the male barnacle has eight times the length of its body.

Rutherford is an avid film fan which leads to some interesting divertissements. We learn, for example, that when Dave Prowse, the actor who played Darth Vader, filmed the ‘Luke, I am your father’ scene in The Empire Strikes Back, he was told to say ‘Obi-Wan is your father’, thereby keeping the secret from the cast and crew.

It was only when James Earl Jones dubbed the character’s voice that the proper line was inserted.

Science fiction is not necessary when science facts are so compelling.

Dogs are known for their keen sense of smell. They can distinguish between their air for respiration and their air for sniffing.

Mind you, dogs’ success does depend on proper training. In one instance, dogs were trained to detect illegal cash crossing borders. Time and again in training they sniffed out the dosh — but time and again at real checkpoints they failed.

The military bosses eventually realized their mistake. The military bosses realized that the animal handlers had been carrying cash wrapped with plastic. The army hadn’t trained the dogs to smell banknotes at all. They’d trained them to smell cling film.

Rutherford & Fry will be at London’s Alexandra Palace on November 16. For all UK dates go to rutherfordandfry.co.uk.