Series 50, episode 30

King's - London vs Imperial

I. Salt is the edible substance that links a Roman road that ran from Rome to the Adriatic coast of Italy, the mediaeval French tax known as the gabelle, and the punishment enacted upon Lot's wife.

Bonuses: on long novels

I.i. Clarissa, The History Of A Young Lady.

I.ii. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty is a novel in the Western genre that is over 800 pages long for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. Lonesome Dove is a fictional Texas border town.

II. Alexandre Dumas's D'Artagnan was based the memoirs of de Courtilz de Sandrason, loosely based on a soldier who served under Louis XIV,

Bonuses: on particle physics

II.i. Strangeness is a quantum number The Omega minus hyperon (discovered in 1964) has a value of minus three

II.ii. Colour is a quantum property posited in 1964, to explain how the three spin up strange quarks in the omega minus did not violate the Pauli Exclusion Principle?

II.iii. Strangeness is not conserved in reactions involving the weak nuclear force, which are mediated using W bosons.

III. The reigns of Henry I (35 years), Edward I (35 years) and Richard I (10 years) total eighty years.

IV. Schiehallion, a mountain in Perthshire, was chosen for its remote location and regular shape used in a 1744 experiment to estimate the density of the Earth by a team, led by Sir Nevil Maskelyne, measuring the gravitational deflection of a pendulum caused by the mountain

Bonuses: on the English language.

III.i. Middle English was the form of English that was predominant between the Norman conquest and the widespread use of the printing press from the late 15th century?

III.ii. The Great Vowel Shift was the major alteration in pronunciation towards the end of the Middle English period, the effects of which included changes in the vocalization of diphthongs?

III.iii. Grimm's Law

Matisse.