If you thought I was a nitpicker when I went after science errors in children's books that were trying to be realistic, you'll have a conniption about this: some of bloggers over at scienceblogs.com have started taking on fairy tales: the thermodynamics of cooling porridge in Goldliocks and the physics of hair rope-ladders in Rapunzel. (hat tip: Jake)
In each case, much like with my own post, the commenters make it all worthwhile, kibbitzing about mother bear's potential drinking habit (adding whiskey cooled her porridge down faster) and whether it matters if the hair ladder would hold if it would take 180 years to grow.
Of course there is the question of where do we start to critique fairy tales. I'll admit (or brag) that I'm nerdy enough to have noticed and been bothered by the porridge cooling anomaly myself on one Goldilocks-reading marathon. ("Again!") Likewise the wolf falling into a pot of boiling water at the end of Three Little Pigs and just being hurt enough to be mad and jump up and run out the door howling. (Granted the Richard Scarry tome I'm working from clearly contains cleaned up versions for kids, not the originals.)
Matt Springer, who wrote about Rapunzel, says "Suspension of disbelief requires that we grant the story the ability to
say wild things so long as it does so in an internally consistent way." I agree.
They are internally consistent in that animals talk, for example, and we don't complain about that. But even before you get to the laws of physics, there's a whole lot of non-hard science issues in fairy tales to deep breathe through: In the Wolf and the Seven Kids, the kids are fooled into mistaking a wolf paw for their mother's hoof because he gets it dusted in flour? How does that work? It's a paw. In the Three Little Pigs, how is it that the bricklayer just gives away a house's worth of bricks?
In the end, of course, I do (mostly) suspend disbelief when we're in the realm of fairy tales. I know the value of a metaphor and an archtypal story line. But sometimes it does feel good to step back with other nitpickers and catalog the bites on our tongues.
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