50 Fun Facts About Sophie's World

In Sophie's World, which toy does a letter to Sophie praise as a way to picture Democritus's atoms?

Lego bricks, the letter argues, behave like Democritus's atoms: a few simple, solid pieces that lock together, come apart and can be reused to build anything at all.

In Sophie's World, what is the name of Alberto Knox's dog, which carries the philosophy letters to Sophie?

Hermes shares his name with the messenger of the Greek gods, a fitting choice for a dog that delivers the post. Later in the novel he even starts to speak.

In Sophie's World, Albert Knag hides a greeting to his daughter Hilde inside which unpeeled fruit?

A banana with a greeting hidden inside is one of the impossible stunts by which Knag, the author of Sophie's story, shows that he controls everything in it.

In Sophie's World, which Irish bishop's philosophy leads Sophie and Alberto to see that they are characters in a book?

George Berkeley argued that we exist only in the mind of God, which lets Sophie and Alberto work out that they exist only in the mind of Albert Knag, the man writing them.

In Sophie's World, philosophers are said to climb the fine hairs of which animal's fur to look a magician in the eye?

A rabbit pulled from a top hat is the novel's running image: most people burrow deep into its fur and get comfortable, while philosophers climb to the tips of the hairs to see the trick.

Sophie's World recounts how Socrates, condemned by an Athenian jury, died after drinking which poison?

Hemlock ended Socrates's life in 399 BC, after a jury found him guilty of impiety and corrupting the young. Friends offered to help him escape, and he refused.

In the Darwin chapter of Sophie's World, which biblical figure turns up with a picture of all the world's animals?

Noah hands Sophie a picture of his ark packed with every kind of animal, a sly prop for a lesson on the theory that upended the Bible's account of creation.

In Sophie's World, Alberto tells Sophie that her own name comes from the Greek word for what?

Wisdom is sofia in Greek, as Alberto tells her during the lesson on the Middle Ages, which makes Sophie an apt name for a girl being taught to think.

In Sophie's World, which make of car smashes into the garden party, giving Sophie and Alberto their chance to escape?

A Mercedes crashing into the garden so absorbs Albert Knag, who is busy writing about it, that he fails to notice Sophie and Alberto slipping out of his story.

In Sophie's World, in which Norwegian coastal town does Hilde Møller Knag live?

Lillesand is where Hilde lives, in a white house called Bjerkely, and where Sophie and Alberto travel, unseen, to watch her father come home.

In Sophie's World, Hilde's father Albert Knag, known as the major, works for the United Nations in which country?

Lebanon is where Knag serves with the UN and writes the postcards to Hilde that keep reaching Sophie instead, an early clue that her life is being steered from far away.

In Sophie's World, on which Scandinavian festival night do Sophie and her mother hold the philosophical garden party?

Midsummer's Eve is when the party slides into chaos: the guests shrug at one impossible event after another as Albert Knag loses his grip on the story.

In the final chapter of Sophie's World, which theory of the universe's beginning does Albert Knag explain to Hilde?

The Big Bang is Knag's last lesson: everything is made of the same material, flung outward at the start of time, so looking up at the stars means looking into the past.

The lessons in Sophie's World roughly track A History of Western Philosophy, a survey by which British philosopher?

Bertrand Russell's survey and Alberto's course share a route: both begin with the earliest Greek thinkers and march through Western thought in order.

Jostein Gaarder and his wife set up the Sophie Prize in 1997 to reward work in which field?

The environment was the cause: named after the novel, the Sophie Prize paid out $100,000 a year until 2013, when the money ran out.

Before his literary career took off, Sophie's World author Jostein Gaarder worked in Bergen in which profession?

Teaching high school was Gaarder's job after he studied Scandinavian languages and theology in Oslo, which helps explain a novel built as a course of lessons.

Which English space rock band took the title of a 1997 album from a line in Sophie's World?

Spiritualized lifted a line from the novel to name Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, the band's third studio album.

In Sophie's World, which object does Sophie take home from the major's cabin after it winks at her with both eyes?

A brass mirror hangs in the cabin, and the girl Sophie glimpses in it turns out to be Hilde, who owns the same mirror in the world outside the story.

Which director, later known for the Bourne thrillers, adapted Sophie's World for BBC television in 1995?

Paul Greengrass made the 1995 version nearly a decade before The Bourne Supremacy. A Norwegian feature film of the novel followed in 1999.

Sophie's World retells the Norse myth in which Thor dresses up as the goddess Freyja to win back which stolen item?

His hammer, in the letter's reading, was how Vikings explained bad weather: a drought meant the giants had stolen it again, and Thor would soon steal it back.

Thales of Miletus, among the first thinkers Sophie studies in Sophie's World, held that everything is made from what?

Water can be solid, liquid or gas, which made it a plausible single source for everything. Thales is also said to have predicted a solar eclipse in 585 BC.

Sophie's World describes the ancient Greek oracle of Apollo, whose priestess spoke for the god in which town?

Delphi drew Greeks who wanted to know their fate: Apollo was believed to take possession of a woman there and answer their questions in her voice.

What was the name of the school Plato founded in a grove outside Athens, as described in Sophie's World?

The Academy took its name from the grove's legendary hero, Academus, and passed it on: every academy and academic since is named after Plato's school.

In Plato's allegory retold in Sophie's World, chained prisoners mistake shadows on a wall for reality inside what?

A cave is all the prisoners have ever known. In Plato's story, the one who climbs out into daylight and comes back to tell the others is ridiculed for it.

Aristotle, who has a chapter to himself in Sophie's World, was tutor to which future conqueror in Macedon?

Alexander the Great was thirteen when Aristotle came to Pella to teach him. The empire he went on to build opens the novel's chapter on Hellenism.

Which medieval abbess, composer and visionary does Alberto introduce in the Middle Ages chapter of Sophie's World?

Hildegard of Bingen catches Sophie's ear twice over: her name echoes Hilde's, and Alberto says a female figure called Sophia appeared to her in a vision.

In Sophie's World, where does Sophie first meet Alberto Knox face to face, for a lesson on the Middle Ages?

In a church, where Alberto turns up dressed as a monk: a fitting stage for a lecture on the centuries when Christianity shaped European thought.

In Sophie's World, in what form does Alberto's lesson from the Acropolis in Athens reach Sophie?

A videotape shows Alberto pointing out the Parthenon, then the picture impossibly cuts to ancient Athens, where a young Plato steps up to the camera and sets Sophie some questions.

Which French philosopher in Sophie's World doubted everything he could, until only his own thinking was left?

René Descartes distrusted even his senses, because dreams feel just as real, and rebuilt knowledge from the one certainty that a doubting mind must exist.

After his expulsion from Amsterdam's Jewish community, how did Baruch Spinoza of Sophie's World earn his living?

Grinding lenses and building telescopes and microscopes paid for a modest, frugal life, leaving Spinoza free to write the philosophy that had got him expelled.

Which English philosopher in Sophie's World argued that the mind at birth is a blank slate, filled in by experience?

John Locke called the newborn mind a tabula rasa, with no ideas of its own, which is why he cared so much about how children are educated.

Which Scottish empiricist in Sophie's World argued that we never observe a cause, only one event following another?

David Hume, in Alberto's example, says we call lightning the cause of thunder only because one always follows the other; the link itself is a habit of mind.

In Sophie's World, what does Alberto give Sophie to wear to show how Immanuel Kant thought the mind shapes perception?

Tinted glasses let Sophie see the room while colouring all of it, Alberto's picture of Kant's claim that we only ever meet the world through the mind's own filters.

Immanuel Kant, whose ideas fill a chapter of Sophie's World, was born and spent his career in which Prussian city?

Königsberg, now the Russian city of Kaliningrad, was where Kant enrolled at the university at sixteen and later taught for the rest of his working life.

Which German philosopher in Sophie's World described ideas advancing through thesis, antithesis and synthesis?

Georg Hegel called the whole process the dialectic, and Alberto points out that even an everyday argument between two people tends to follow the same three steps.

Which thinker in Sophie's World described three stages of life: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious?

Søren Kierkegaard thought the pleasure-seeker of the first stage eventually grows weary, and counted that weariness a blessing because it pushes a person onward.

Which French existentialist, discussed beside Jean-Paul Sartre in Sophie's World, wrote The Second Sex?

Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre's lifelong companion, carried his ideas into feminism: she argued that there is no fixed female nature, any more than a fixed human one.

Jean-Paul Sartre, whose existentialism closes Alberto's course in Sophie's World, turned down which honour in 1964?

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Sartre anyway, though he had written ahead to refuse it, saying he always declined official honours.

Charles Darwin, the subject of a chapter in Sophie's World, spent five years sailing round the world aboard which ship?

HMS Beagle was a survey ship on which Darwin held a self-funded place as a gentleman naturalist. The travel journal he published afterwards made him a popular author.

Sophie's World tells how Charles Darwin saw tortoises and birds vary from island to island in which Pacific group?

The Galápagos specimens paid off back home, when an ornithologist told Darwin that birds he had taken for a mixed bag were in fact twelve distinct kinds of finch.

In which 1859 book, discussed in Sophie's World, did Charles Darwin publish his theory of evolution?

On the Origin of Species sold out at once: its whole first printing of 1,250 copies was oversubscribed the day it was offered to booksellers.

As Sophie's World explains, which economist's essay on population gave Charles Darwin the idea of a struggle for food?

Thomas Malthus argued that population always outruns the food supply. Darwin read him in 1838 and saw that in such a contest favourable variations would be preserved.

What did Charles Darwin call the process, taught in Sophie's World, by which the best-adapted animals survive and breed?

Natural selection needs no designer: animals compete for scarce food and shelter, and those whose small differences help them stay alive pass those differences on.

Charles Darwin, whose theory fills a chapter of Sophie's World, went to Cambridge to prepare for which career?

Anglican parson was the future his father picked for him after Darwin neglected his medical studies; an invitation to sail as a naturalist changed the plan.

In Sigmund Freud's model of the mind, as taught in Sophie's World, which part drives a person to pursue pleasure?

The id is the pleasure-seeking source of our impulses. In Freud's scheme a second part reins it in, while a third, concerned with right and wrong, plays the conscience.

In Sophie's World, which trees ring the garden of Hilde's family home and give the house its name?

Birch trees are bjørketrær in Norwegian, hence Bjerkely. A painting of the white house hangs in the major's cabin long before Sophie learns who lives there.

In Sophie's World, Sophie's father is away from home for long stretches as the captain of what?

An oil tanker keeps him at sea for most of the year, so when a strange postcard arrives Sophie's first guess is her father, until she sees the handwriting isn't his.

In Sophie's World, at which city's airport does Albert Knag find a trail of notes from Hilde on his way home?

Copenhagen is where Hilde turns the tables: with help from friends there, she has messages waiting for her father so that he feels watched, as his characters did.

In Sophie's World, at which best friend's house does Sophie sleep over so she can slip out to meet Alberto?

Joanna is the friend whose after-school card games lose their appeal once the mysterious letters begin; she later follows Sophie to the major's cabin and reads the postcards with her.

At the end of Sophie's World, which object does the invisible Sophie manage to untie, against Alberto's expectations?

A rowboat should be beyond her, since fictional beings cannot move real objects, yet it works loose from its mooring and Hilde and her father have to swim out to fetch it.