Harkin James - 1,411 QI Facts To Knock You Sideways

They also dont last. Unlike buildings, facts arent set in stone. Like milk or meat, they have a sell-by date. In 2013, a Harvard mathematician called Samuel Arbesman wrote a book called The Half-Life of Facts, in which he compares facts to uranium atoms. Individually, their lifespan is unpredictable, but lumped together we can accurately predict that half the atoms will decay within 4.47 billion years the so-called half-life of uranium 238. Facts, it turns out, also have a half-life, and most of them dont last nearly as long.

For example, its only a few hundred years since everybody agreed that the Sun went round the Earth. Only half a century ago, doctors thought smoking was good for you. Only eight years ago, it was a fact that Pluto was a planet, until it was downgraded by the International Astronomical Union in 2006. Arbesman is an expert in scientometrics the science of science and he has shown that the time it takes to overturn half of any given body of knowledge can be measured. The subject with the longest half-life is mathematics, much of which, alone among human knowledge, appears to be immortal. Alarmingly, one of the shortest-lived disciplines is medicine where it can be shown that half of what doctors believe to be true will be proven wrong within 45 years.

The problem is, of course, they dont know which half. Information is fleeting. Human records are broken; new particles are discovered; fresh historical documents come to light. Dinosaurs turn out not to be giant grey iguanas after all, but multicoloured feathery proto-birds of all shapes and sizes. Right now, even the daddy of all facts, the Big Bang theory, is looking wobbly. Almost all that is now obvious will one day be seen as ludicrous.

So what you hold in your hands isnt really a fact book at all; its a situation report on what we think we know at this particular moment in time. And thats fine with us. We like facts not so we can boast about them, but because they make us think. Because they challenge our preconceptions, not reinforce them. So we hope you enjoy reading these facts as much as weve enjoyed finding them. But dont dawdle you dont know how long they have left to live.

JOHN LLOYD, JOHN MITCHINSON & JAMES HARKIN Those who love wisdom must investigate many things. HERACLITUS (c.535c.475 BC )

There are 1,411 tigers left in India. The Greek for left-handed also means better. The Heil Hitler salute is legal in Switzerland as long as its an expression of personal opinion. Qatar is the only country that begins with a Q and Iraq is the only country that ends with one.

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The letter Q was illegal in Turkey for 85 years. Dildos are illegal in Texas.

Snake charming is illegal in India. In New Zealand, snakes of any kind are illegal.

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In the Second World War, the Allies had a plan to drop boxes of poisonous snakes on enemy troops. On D-Day, J. D. Salinger fought with six chapters of The Catcher in the Rye in his backpack.

Charles Darwin let his children use the original manuscript of On the Origin of Species as drawing paper. Charles Dickenss family had a cat, seven dogs, two ravens, a canary called Dick and a pony called Newman Noggs.

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Theodore Roosevelt had guinea pigs called Admiral Dewey, Bishop Doane, Dr Johnson, Father OGrady and Fighting Bob Evans, and a small bear called Jonathan Edwards. Anton Chekhov had a pet mongoose. In 1849, the Viceroy of Egypt gave London Zoo a hippo in exchange for a greyhound.

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There are more statues of lions in the world than there are real lions.

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There are more statues of lions in the world than there are real lions.

Two-thirds of the worlds polar bears live in Canada. When Canada held a competition to design its national flag, more than 10% of the entries featured a beaver. The biggest dam built by beavers is twice as long as the Hoover Dam.

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There is enough concrete in the Hoover Dam to build a road across the US from coast to coast. The first motor insurance policy issued by Lloyds of London described the car as a ship navigating on land. 6% of drivers deliberately swerve to kill animals.

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You are 20 times more likely to die in an accident at home than you are to win the National Lottery.

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You are 20 times more likely to die in an accident at home than you are to win the National Lottery.

In 2007, 210,000 Americans were injured by lawnmowers. The lawnmower is the most dangerous item in the garden. The second most dangerous is the flowerpot. When Edwin Beard Budding invented the lawnmower, he tested it at night so no one would think he was mad.

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Using a petrol-driven lawnmower for one hour produces as much air pollution as a 100-mile car trip. It is illegal in Chicago for lawns to have weeds more than 10 inches tall.

Plants suffer from sexually transmitted diseases. Orchids can get jet lag.

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In Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, there is only one flower shop. There is only one stop sign in the whole of Paris. The name sign of the town of Lost in Aberdeenshire is the only one in Britain that is welded to its pole.

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A male capuchin monkey will have sex with any female that throws a stone at him.

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A male capuchin monkey will have sex with any female that throws a stone at him.