When I set about creating The Nestlings Set Fourth, a fourth collection of my comic strip Nestlings, I wanted to add something new. Inspired by cartoonists such as Garry Trudeau, Berke Breathed and Bill Watterson, who annotated their many compilations, I wrote a couple of lines under certain strips to comment on the action or to note mistakes I made.

But I ran into trouble with one strip, in which Theodore called nestmate Robin ridiculous for wondering how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. (That medieval notion has also been expressed as angels dancing on the head of a pin.) A few years ago, when I compiled the true-odd-facts book It’s Been All Downhill Since the Dinosaurs, I had come upon a relevant New York Times clipping from Nov. 11, 1997, written C. Claiborne Ray, I didn’t use the clipping in Dinosaurs. Could I find the clipping in time for publication date of The Nestlings Set Fourth? No.

Well, I just found it. Dr. Phil Schewe, spokesman for the American Institute of Physics, tackled the angel/pin question in a 1995 meeting of the Society for Literature and Science. He relied on superstring physics to figure out the smallest possible space an angel might take up, and used a microscope to calculate the size of a pinpoint.

“The point is, say, an angstrom across, so you divide something that’s 10 to the minus 10^th power metres by something that’s 10 to the minus 35^th power, so the answer is 10 to the 25^th power angels can fit on the head of a pin.”

And there you have it. In my strip, Robin cheated by using actual angels, but you can do that in a comic strip.