Physics World’s festive puzzle: solution

By Louise Mayor

Did you manage to solve Physics World’s festive puzzle, published last month? In case you missed it, take a look at part 1 and part 2 and see how you fare. The puzzle was created for Physics World by Colin of the UK’s Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), whose full identity cannot be revealed.

Spoiler alert: the solution in full is posted below.

Solution to part 1


The message above lacks certain letters, which when added correct the spelling. For example, the word “immdiatey” when spelt correctly would read “immediately”; here the missing letters are e and l. There are 20 missing letters in total, which in order are:

noelareatsdeveopthee

This too is a message from which some letters are missing. The full message is:

nobel laureates developed these

The additional eight letters spell out the eight-letter solution:

blueleds

Indeed, last year’s winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics were awarded the prize for developing blue LEDs.

Solution to part 2

As for part 1, the message above only makes sense when extra letters are inserted. The missing letters are, in order:

hrohianoshjinmura

Again, this is a message from which some letters are missing. The message relates to part 1 – if you look up the Nobel laureates who developed blue LEDs, you will see that they were Hiroshi Amano, Shuji Nakamura and Isamu Akasaki. Adding eight additional letters to the string above spells out two of these names:

hiroshi amano shuji nakamura

The eight additonal letters are:

isamu aka

Missing from these are another four letters, which when added give the name of the remaining laureate:

isamu akasaki

The solution is therefore “saki”. This is a tetragram (which means a word consisting of four characters) that sounds like a drink (sake) that the three laureates, all being of Japanese descent, might enjoy.