One Thousand and One Conjectures

The backward-bending supply curve — the textbook anomaly in which workers with an income target respond to falling prices by working more, not less — is here joined to the fate of Norse Greenland. The colony's export staple was walrus ivory, and…

The gravity model of trade — flows decay with distance, and how steeply they decay depends on what the goods are worth relative to what they cost to move — is here tested on sourced ancient artifacts. Provenance science can trace both…

Baltic amber moved from its northern shores to the Mediterranean through hand-to-hand exchange, and FTIR spectroscopy can certify which finds are genuinely Baltic, giving a clean tracer of prehistoric long-range flow. Physics offers a ready model for such flow: the advection–diffusion equation,…

This joins medieval craft practice to modern acoustics. An organ builder must decide how pipe diameter should vary with pipe length across a rank — too narrow and the trebles turn thin and stringy, too wide and the basses go dull —…

This joins historical linguistics to campanology. Dialectologists map isoglosses — the boundary lines where one regional speech feature gives way to another — and those lines famously follow the channels of contact: rivers, roads, trade routes. Bell founding, the conjecture claims, worked…

This joins Viking shipbuilding to modern fracture mechanics. A clinker hull is a shell of overlapping oak planks, and its worst enemy is a running split: a crack that starts at a fastening and propagates along the grain. Fracture mechanics says such…

This joins medieval pilgrimage history to tribology, the physics of wear. Every pilgrim who crossed a church threshold removed a microscopic layer of stone, and centuries of feet turned steps into shallow basins; the missing volume is a footfall counter that no…

This joins medieval fiscal instruments to information theory. An Exchequer tally was a wooden stick notched with a debt's value and then split lengthwise, creditor and debtor each keeping half; the split's matching grain already authenticated the pair. The conjecture claims the…

This joins medieval church archaeology to geomagnetism. Churches were meant to face east, yet surveyed orientations scatter by several degrees, and the scatter is usually written off as sloppy surveying. But once the magnetic compass entered the building trades — plausibly around…

The deep blue of medieval stained glass comes from cobalt, and medieval Europe mined very little of it: the colorant travelled along long-distance routes whose ultimate sources lay far to the east. Every ore body carries a trace-element fingerprint — the ratios…