Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

many thanks djawhufc all done now, though as these seem unjumbled, I am apparently missing a couple of jumblies. I'll look again later, I've doubtless made errors somewhere.

Hi DJA, I loved the description you gave for 8D. By all accounts quite a dangerous pursuit.

Hi Planks, the jumblies are 19A, 43A, 2D & 26D. The same equation governing entry applies to all of them. Though I think I'm struggling to see how replacing 2c is the same as replacing c²...

Thanks meursault, all found now. I'd made an error in 43a and overlooked a jumble that I had correctly done. That was a toughie, but a nice challenge.

Meursault, C squared is the same as CC.

Thank you xij. If the 'c's are adjacent then perhaps what you suggest works. So, for 26D, ACCOMPTED, but for the others it doesn't work. How can CAMBRIC possibly represent cc ? Surely it is 2 separate occurences of c ? There is no mention in the preamble that we must ignore the rest of the answer before deciding what the thematic equivalence is. I think really my point is unanswered. If you have 2 separate occurrences of the letter 'c' in an answer, then mathematically that is 2c. Arguably even adjacent occurrences of c in the answer is still just 2c.

I can see where you are coming from Meursault and as a rule I can be (and often am) as picky as the next man but here I didn't find any ambiguity with reconciling the jumblies even with them being C+C as opposed to C-squared - at least once you solved one the other three all played by the same rules. Given the toughness of many of the clues I for one was grateful for that!

As a Classicist/Historian I was glad I could solve a puzzle that had anything to do with science.

Hi S_Pugh, I'll save my breath. But there were over 100,000 Japanese civilians who would have been happy with 2c...did you ever visit one of the memorials ?

Meursault - yes I agree you are correct in principle. Indeed to be mathematically accurate all three letters, including the M, would need to be next to each other. There are very few if any words which satisfy this requirement.
A good puzzle though, albeit “relatively” difficult, so perhaps we can give tnap some licence.
Worth it just for the clever title.

I agree that the implementation is very loose, which is a likely result of representing a complex idea in a crossword. One could get round the problem raised by Meursault by jumbling each answer first in a particular sequence so the thematic letters are adjacent and in order, then replacing theme with the other half of the equation, but that is not what the preamble says.

As for the other thematic entries, while I could see that a reduction of L's could represent the contraction of length predicted by the theory, I couldn't really see how added T's could signify the slowing down of time at high acceleration. I'm no scientist, so perhaps I've got that wrong.

I'm happy to grant the setter some licence and credit for an ambitious and unusual theme, but my feeling reading comments here and elsewhere is that he has a left quite a few solvers a bit perplexed.