A Philosophical Investigation

Начало книги

‘The unfortunate victim, twenty-five-year-old Mary Woolnoth, was found naked in the basement of the offices of the Mylae Shipping Company in Jermyn Street, where she had worked for three years as a receptionist, her face beaten in with a claw hammer.

‘So severe was the beating that her lower jaw was broken in six places, and almost all of her porcelain-capped teeth pounded loose. Disintegrated fragments of the woman’s skull and brain tissue were scattered in the neighbourhood to an extent that was consistent with their newly-acquired momentum. Having recovered the murder weapon it is possible to construct an equation which gives us the kinetic energy of the blow: this is found by multiplying the mass of the weapon by the square of the velocity and dividing the result by two. Using the kinetic energy of each hammer blow, the cranial depth of each fracture, and the angle of depression, the computer has calculated that the killer stands 1.82 metres tall and weighs approximately 85.72 kilograms.

Читать дальше →