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Clues by Qaos and Grid by Mang
Theme: Thermodynamics
The winner of the August Extra puzzle was Andrew Wyss of Leeds.
[Because I designed this grid, I asked Nick Inglis, half of the grid designing team etc, and one of our 3D editorial team, if he could review it. – Alan]
This puzzle has a seven dials grid designed by Mang with clues set by Qaos. We’re told that it marks the 156th anniversary of a defining point in the field of Day 34 and for one thematic concept in particular. Hmm, could that be something scientific? 1865 might be right for Maxwell’s equations in electrodynamics or possibly for Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Day 33 and Day 34 are the only clues marked as thematic, so enlightenment may have to wait.
A novel aspect of this crossword is that five of the clues contain an adjacent pair of surplus words which should be removed before solving. Each pair of surplus words provides one of five thematic anagrams labelled as A1 to A5.
As residents of Yorkshire we were quickly onto AIRER, we hoped that AULA would be an old word for hall (and were gratified to see this confirmed) and as a mathematician, I was all over AZIMUTH (nicely appropriate surface!). The next clue looked likely to be an anagram of CHEMISTRY minus the letters of STIR, but we couldn’t see the answer. Could chemistry be the field mentioned in the rubric?
At Day 5, protective covering in sight made us think of CORNEA and this was an anagram of RACE + NO, which suggested that DO RIDERS was the first of our surplus pairs. We couldn’t see the anagram, so continued. Day 6 proved beyond us, but we made steady progress with DIRGE, EAR (another splendid surface) and HAVEN’T. Day 10 clearly seemed to be HAYLE which we deduced to be a variant spelling of HALE (damn you Spenser!) and Day 11 had to be IND. The next few fell fairly easily, but Day 15 took some thought. We knew that a German federated state is a LAND, plural LÄNDER, but that only has six letters. Aha, could it also be written as LAENDER? (yes and that’s a V removed from LAVENDER – nice). Day 16 also caused some trouble: L?E?? – could it be LEAR (king) with an E for Spain in it? Yes it could: LEEAR is indeed a Scottish version of LIAR. This means we have another surplus pair: MEET RAPTURE. Still no obvious anagram.
Day 17 yielded LIPOMA. Then Day 18 mentioned 1960s youth. TED maybe? No, MOD embracing P.E. for MOPED. Here RICKETY ENGINE seemed superfluous and this time the initial letter K from KNOWN helps KINETIC ENERGY appear. Aha! Maybe we are in the realm of physics.
The next two proved tricky, but then we were on a run of solvable clues with only Day 24 fighting back.
A huge anagram for Day 33 proved to be THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY and Day 34 emerged as THERMODYNAMICS. Not entirely familiar ground, but we could always fall back on Flanders and Swann.
As usual a few unusual words (TUNKU, YMOLT, ZAYIN) to finish off the alphabet and then back to the thematic anagrams. By this stage we could see the letters of ENTROPY jumbled (appropriately) in the central column and on a second look DISORDER emerged as an anagram of DO RIDERS. Similarly TEMPERATURE from MEET RAPTURE. Back to the start and two pairs of surplus words to find.
These revealed themselves to be PER USERS from Day 19 giving PRESSURE and THEY PLAN from Day 24 giving ENTHALPY.
After polishing off the remaining clues our final task was the anagram of the bold/orange cells, appropriately giving us CHAOS (or should that be QAOS?).
Many thanks to Qaos and Mang for this welcome work-out from the world of physics. The surplus word anagram innovation worked well and could usefully be repeated in future puzzles.
Grid solution
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