BBC Focus

You’d feel paralysed! The only time this

has been tried was in 1970 when Robert

White transplanted the head of a monkey

onto the body of another, decapitated

monkey. This gruesome hybrid was

conscious, but paralysed from the neck

down because we can’t yet reattach

severed nerves. If we ever get past this

obstacle, body transplants will still take

a lot of getting used to. For one thing,

your brain would be exposed to a

different cocktail of hormones. LV

PHOTOS: ISTOCK X2 ILLUSTRATION: CHRIS PHILPOT

1. SIT TIGHT
   Unless the building suffers catastrophic damage,
   such a s during the World Trade Center att ack s of
   2001, lifts almost never fall. A lift has between
   six and 12 independent cables and each one is
   strong enough to support a fully loaded lift. If all
   the cables fail, brakes will automatically clamp
   onto rails lining the lift shaft.


2. DON’T JUMP
   Jumping up at the last moment, before the lift
   hits the bottom, only works in cartoons. Even
   if you were somehow strong enough to leap
   fast enough to negate your falling velocity,
   you would just smash your head against
   the lift ceiling at the same speed you had
   been falling!


3. FALL FROM THE TOP FLOOR
   In 1945 a B-25 bomber cra shed into the Empire
   State Building and damaged the lift cables. Betty
   Lou Oliver fell 75 storeys, breaking her neck, back
   and pelvis, but survived. The huge length of steel
   lift cables hanging beneath the lift car coiled into
   a springy mat at the bottom of the shaft and this
   partly cushioned her fall.

IF A LIFT IS FALLING, WHAT’S YOUR BEST CHANCE

OF STAYING ALIVE?

THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

If I put my brain in another

body, would I feel different?

ARTHUR CHAMBERS, EASTLEIGH

Can computers keep getting faster?

TOBY KRISTEN, TONBRIDGE

The laws of physics stop computers getting faster forever. Computers calculate at

the tick of an internal clock, so for many years manufacturers made transistors

smaller and clocks faster to make them perform more computations per second.

However, conventional electronics get too hot if you make them calculate too fast,

which is why we no longer see clock speeds increasing much. Instead we now have

more and more ‘cores’ – lots of processors all calculating in parallel – to let them

do more work in the same time. Scientists have calculated fundamental limits on

maximum speed and storage achievable by computers. In order to reach those

theoretical limits, you may need to use black holes as quantum computers, and

they would probably evaporate in a puff of Hawking radiation too quickly to allow

them to calculate very much. PB