The Ascent of Science

Our modern understanding of sea level rise can be traced back to Dipsomedes. Like his cousin Archimedes, Dipsomedes was fond of taking baths, in his case mostly because he was so filthy all the time. On one occasion he had stepped out of the bath and was whistling as he dried himself off. He didn't know how to whistle, but the passage of a draught through his wet rolls of fat produced a whistle Otis Redding would be proud of.

He glanced back at the bath and noticed the high water mark, defined by a thick sheen of darkened grease and the rainbow coloured streaks of waterproof crayons he liked to draw in the bath with. Dipsomedes immediately shouted out a catchphrase that was later to be made famous by his cousin: Zeus on a gyro! This was subsequently recorded in history books in the original Greek, so few scientists that utter Eureka today are aware of its theological yet mouthwatering origins.

Although the exact details were not fully worked out for over 2,500 years, Dipsomedes' intuition was essentially correct - sea levels are not fixed, and may wax and wane over the course of a bath, or indeed millenia. Dipsomedes expounded his theory in the needlessly long On the Dermal Expansion of the Seas. Today the treatise is of purely gastronomic significance, containing as it does his mother's recipe for baklava on the back of each page, almost certainly due to a photocopying error.

This story illustrates nicely how many of science's greatest discoveries have been made - in the nude. Charles Darwin successfully cultivated the image of a gentleman scientist, yet those who journeyed with him confessed off the record that his expeditions were little more than trumped up P&O style party cruises. It is said that there wasn't a woman within three hundred nautical miles of the Galapagos that hadn't succumbed to Darwin's famed oratory prowess, and although scant evidence remains, few doubt that Darwin conferred a lot more than just his name upon many of the beautiful finches of the islands.

Then there was Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist who helped usher in the stranger than fiction world of quantum theory. Bohr was also a vociferous campaigner for the rights of marmosets, and he famously spent the last ten minutes of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech decrying the plight of our evolutionary second cousins. "So they don't have prehensile tails," he would say, "does that give us the right to destroy their habitat? Even I, a genius, have no prehensile tail!" Bohr then dropped his trousers to prove his point, causing many in the Nobel Committee to question the existence of an objective reality.

Bohr would go on to host a biennial man-marmoset three-legged race in the backstreets of his hometown Copenhagen, at which the shared history and future of these two species was underlined by the strict requirement of all participants to fully disrobe. The event was later wound up by angry administrators who claimed Bohr's grandson Tyler was diverting funds to Barbary apes, rhesus monkeys and other members of the macaque family.