Open Questions

Open 57

Why It Is Open The anecdote is very widely told and 57 is called the Grothendieck prime because of it. Its literal veracity is disputed within mathematical folklore, and the tellings do not agree on the setting or the wording.

What Would Settle It A first-hand account from someone present, or a contemporary written record of the exchange.

Expertise Needed History of mathematics, and oral history of the Grothendieck circle.

Question posed in Comme Appele du Neant, As If Summoned from the Void: The Life of Alexandre Grothendieck, Allyn Jackson, Part 2, page 1196.

Open Uncle

Why It Is Open Lilly's catalogue of the sixth house names uncles and aunts on the father's side directly, and turning the chart from the fourth produces the same answer independently, but which of the two came first is not established here. The step may be a Hellenistic inheritance, an Arabic development, or a Latin systematisation, and the atlas has found no study that settles it. The answer matters because every derived reading of an extended relative inherits whatever assignment the parent's house is given.

What Would Settle It A textual comparison across the Hellenistic, Arabic and Latin house literature, identifying the earliest passage that derives a collateral relative from a parent house rather than simply listing that relative among a house catalogue, and dating the transmission of that step.

Expertise Needed History of astrology; Arabic and Latin manuscript studies; history of the exact sciences

Question posed in A History of Horoscopic Astrology, James Herschel Holden.

Open The Kotel Pilgrimage

Why It Is Open The atlas holds no catalogued source establishing the present division of the plaza, which forms of prayer are conducted where, or where authority over those decisions rests. The arrangements have changed more than once and are the subject of continuing public and legal argument in Israel, so a description taken from a general history would very likely be out of date and would risk asserting one party's position as settled.

What Would Settle It Cataloguing the governing Israeli instruments and any current court decisions, together with the published positions of the parties to the dispute, so that the entry can describe the arrangement and the disagreement about it from documents rather than from report.

Expertise Needed Israeli religious law and public administration, and contemporary Jewish religious sociology

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Intinction

Why It Is Open Churches suspended the common cup during the influenza pandemic of 1918 and again in the epidemics of the following century, and intinction and individual glasses spread as a result. This run deliberately made no claim about transmission risk because it could not verify one, and the relationship between what has been measured and what churches actually decided is not established here.

What Would Settle It A review of the published microbiological and epidemiological studies of the shared chalice, paired with the actual decisions of church authorities, to establish whether the evidence drove the practice or followed it.

Expertise Needed Epidemiology; liturgical studies

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Indus Valley

Why It Is Open The Indus script that labels these seals has never been deciphered, so the horned seated figure on seal M-304 and its kin cannot be read against a text that would say who or what it depicts. The proto-Shiva reading popularized in early twentieth century scholarship rests on visual resemblance to later Hindu iconography (the seated posture, the horns, the surrounding animals), not on any legible caption, and Srinivasan's own iconological re-assessment finds the identification unsupported by the seal's own details.

What Would Settle It A decipherment of the Indus script that survives scholarly scrutiny, or an independently datable bilingual inscription pairing Indus signs with a known language, would let the seals be read on their own terms rather than through later Vedic or Hindu iconography projected backward onto them.

Expertise Needed Indus Valley archaeology, epigraphy and comparative iconography

Question posed in The So-Called Proto-Siva Seal from Mohenjo-Daro: An Iconological Assessment, Doris Meth Srinivasan.

Open Shtreimel

Why It Is Open Three accounts circulate and none is documented: adoption of Polish or Russian noble dress; a decree said to have required Jews to wear an animal tail, for which no text has been produced; and the honouring of Shabbat with the best available in a cold climate. Jewish law neither requires nor mentions the garment, so there is no legal literature to trace it through, and it was written about only long after it was in use.

What Would Settle It Dated communal records, sumptuary or discriminatory legislation from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Russian Empire naming a fur headcovering for Jews, rabbinic responsa or communal takkanot referring to it, portraiture or inventories from the eighteenth century, and dress-history comparison with the szlachta kolpak.

Expertise Needed Jewish social history of eastern Europe; dress history; archival research in Polish, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish sources

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Archaeochemistry

Why It Is Open Chemical analysis of archaeological material goes back to the French chemist Marcelin Berthelot's survey of about 150 Egyptian and Near Eastern artifacts in the late nineteenth century, and continued through Earle Caley's American work from the late 1930s onward, but nobody appears to have fixed a single moment when the practice became a named field rather than a recurring collaboration between two older disciplines. Caley's own retrospective papers describe a history rather than announce a founding.

What Would Settle It A dedicated historiographic study of archaeological chemistry's own institutional history, comparable to the histories that exist for archaeometry (dated to the 1958 founding of the Oxford Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art) or radiocarbon dating (dated to Willard Libby's 1949 paper). No such study of archaeochemistry specifically has been identified; one would need to trace when practitioners first identified as archaeochemists rather than as chemists who occasionally worked on archaeological material.

Expertise Needed History of chemistry and history of archaeology, tracing when chemical analysis of archaeological material stopped being an occasional collaboration and became a named, self-identified subfield.

Question posed in The Early History of Chemistry in the Service of Archaeology (Caley, Journal of Chemical Education, 1967), Earle R. Caley.

Open Nanak Shah Fakir (2015)

Why It Is Open In April 2018 the Akal Takht declared the film banned and excommunicated producer Harinder Singh Sikka for proceeding with its re-release regardless. Every source consulted for this entry stops there: none records whether the ban or the excommunication were later upheld, formally lifted, or quietly left unaddressed by Sikh religious authority.

What Would Settle It A later Akal Takht or SGPC statement, resolution or press record addressing either the ban or Sikka's excommunication after April 2018, or a current interview or public record confirming Sikka's present standing within the Sikh religious community.

Expertise Needed Contemporary Sikh institutional history, South Asian religion journalism

Question posed in SBS Punjabi, "Controversial Movie 'Nanak Shah Fakir' to Be Released Despite Protests," 2018, Paramjit Singh Sona.