Physics and the "Lord of the Flies"

(Written in February 2006). See the ratings of other books and more reviews here.

William Golding got a Nobel Prize for this book and it is indeed a very good piece on human behavior. But having studied physics, the book always troubled me. One of the key plots in the book revolves around the spectacles worn by Piggy.

The other boys want Piggy's glasses to create fire. But the problem is that Piggy is short-sighted and wears concave lenses. You can only create a fire with convex lenses. This point was very distracting when reading about the struggles by the boys over the lenses. Piggy is killed finally.

Having noticed this, I Googled and found this mentioned as goofs on IMDB and other websites. In fact, one interesting website has an experiment to see if this was indeed possible. Obviously not!