Category: Answers that did not arrive

The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

• Maurice Allais – Nobel economist (1911–2010) who spent fifty-eight years on a pendulum and defended another man's data against the explanation that later took his own.
• The Auk – Prominent member of the Aetheric Concord remembered, all the same, by a single public moment: asked a simple question, he answered at great length and did not arrive at an answer.
• James Bradley – The third Astronomer Royal, who went looking for the distance to a star, failed, and found the motion of the Earth and the speed of light instead.
• Curved visual space – The real finding that perceived space is not Euclidean: a fact about the observer, cited as one about the light, by papers that exempt the instrument.
• Grimble's razor – A principle of economy in argument: where a proposition entails something that cannot be entertained, the entailment is set aside and the proposition retained.
• Kinematic and dynamic equivalence – Two claims about reference frames: the first true and never disputed, the second contested, the two offered as one.
• N-rays – A radiation emitted by almost everything, reported in three hundred papers, and detected throughout by looking at a faint light and deciding it had brightened.
• Newton's bucket – The last of five arguments for absolute space, now quoted alone and in support of the position it opposed.
• Max Planck – Founded quantum theory by an assumption he called an act of despair, spent years trying to undo it, and wrote the standard account of why converts are slow.
• Schrödinger's cat – A thought experiment devised in 1935 to show a reading of quantum mechanics absurd, now the emblem of the reading it was built to ridicule.
• Stellar parallax – The annual shift demanded as proof of the Earth's motion in 1543, not found for 295 years, and there the whole time.
• Vic Tandy – Traced a haunted laboratory to its extractor fan using a fencing foil, and published it in the ghost journal. The famous 19 Hz is 1,139 divided by 60.
• Vulcan – A planet announced, named, decorated and assigned an orbit to the arcminute, between Mercury and the Sun, that was never there.

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