According to the cover, this is ‘an astonishing and fascinating tale
of scientific heroism’. Had this ended three words short I would agree.
A racy read without doubt but in my view not much evidence of scientific
achievement or heroism. It is about a group of young postgraduate technologists
in the US who set out to beat casinos at roulette. An aim which all gamblers
would surely applaud.

Their scheme was to conceal in their shoes a pre-programmed toe-operated
computer of sufficient power to predict the area of the roulette wheel in
which the ball would settle. This could raise their chances of a win to
about 40 per cent. The computer was laboriously set up with algorithms relating
to velocities of the ball and rotor wheel and other relevant variables.
These were determined by lengthy experiments with various roulette wheels
in the group’s ‘laboratories’ and observations made in casinos. The wearer
of the loaded shoe toe-tapped in information obtained directly by his –
or her – observations of ball and rotor velocities in the casino after a
game had started. An accomplice who was to place the bets, also had concealed
equipment to receive messages from the computer. This was done via magnetic
loop induction or radio link. These messages showed up as mechanical pulses
on the skin from solenoids attached to a bodybelt. These messages enabled
the accomplice to select bets from four or five favoured numbers on the
rotor. All most ingenious and no doubt within the realms of possibility
but it does not seems to stand up.

All the visual observations needed to tap in the computer instructions,
the actual toe-tapping, receipt of messages and the physical placing of
bets had to take place in the time between the croupier spinning the wheel
and calling ‘Rien ne va plus’.

Nowhere is there any hard evidence their system ever worked. If they
made a sizeable amount of money, it is certainly not documented. Their few
gains recorded could have come from an occasional lucky break.

I found the science as recounted is suspect in many places. A few of
the references I found dubious are: to measuring voltages with an ohmmeter,
electric shocks coming from circuits powered by 15-volt batteries (no mention
of induction coils) and claiming to boost the power of a computer – after
two years of ‘refining’ it – by simply ‘soldering in another capacitor’.

Nevertheless, the adventures and efforts of the would-be bank-breakers
makes the tale of The Newtonian Casino entertaining. Gamblers particularly
– probably most of us – will enjoy it but the more sceptical should keep
the salt cellar handy.

Peter Wymer is a science writer.

One of the wonders of the modern world is surely that anyone with access
to a telephone can make a call to 700 million other phones round the globe.
Peter Young’s exhaustively researched and most readable social history of
the telephone’s development is aptly titled.

Although others had voiced the idea earlier – notably Philip Reis in
Germany – the story of the telephone effectively began in 1876, the year
that Alexander Graham Bell invented what was then called ‘the electric speaking
telephone’. The first, now legendary, words spoken via this medium were
‘Mr Watson, come here, I want you,’ as Bell summoned his assistant from
a distant room.

Person to Person takes us from these early days up to the present, when
telephony is accepted as a necessity for social and business life. While
advances in techniques and their impact are fully covered, Young’s is not
a technical story. Instead, it is an always absorbing, sometimes surprising
and frequently hilarious account of society’s reaction to, and utilisation
of, the device over more than a century of development. The author’s thorough
treatment of his subject provides illuminating comment on the changes in
social attitudes over the years. comment on the changes in social attitudes
over the years.

It was a sluggish beginning. When Bell’s financial backer offered all
rights in the invention to Western Union in 1877, their president turned
it down, asking ‘What use could this company make of an electrical toy?’
The Bell Telephone company was formed later that year and opened the first
public exchange in Britain in 1879. Usage grew rapidly in the US after the
slow start and Western Union mourned its decision.

Britain’s lethargic General Post Office did not rush into things. Of
course, it had an incredibly efficient postal service but it was burdened
by losses in the telegraph service which it had taken over in 1870. This
did not stop private telephone companies starting up, and competition became
fierce. The private firms were eventually nationalised – with the exception
of the municipal service in Hull which is still going – and the GPO took
over from 1912. The first automatic exchange in Britain opened in Epsom,
Surrey, in the same year but the country lagged behind Germany, Scandinavia
and the Antipodes, as well as the US.

Opportunists quickly realised the possibilities of the phone for entertainment.
Theatre plays, operas and even church services were relayed to subscribers.
A service of this type in Budapest had 6000 subscribers by the turn of the
century, and the similar UK Electrophone service lasted until 1938, although
no new installations were made after 1926.

Betting over the phone became legal in 1894 and passing on racing results
became an unofficial part of the help that British operators were expected
to provide. An early – if not the first – call-girl service was established
in Melbourne in 1891 when the city’s leading brothels joined the network.
A gloomier use was envisaged by a rich farmer in Louisiana, who in 1908
had a telephone installed in her tomb-to-be connected with a cemetery keeper
in case she woke up after burial.

Not surprisingly, professional and business subscribers predominated
in the early years. I was surprised to discover that this trend persisted
– in Britain at least – until 1940. Nowadays nearly three-quarters of the
telephones are in people’s homes. No doubt the cost deterred people. Others
may have been frightened by the alarms surrounding the new technology, such
as the risk of catching diseases from a phone’s mouthpiece (remember the
Phonotas girls?), invasion of privacy and the possibility of electric shock.
Some fears persist: we are told that in 1976 the German magazine Quick claimed
that bone and kidney inflammation could be transmitted by a phone’s mouthpiece.

That not much is new under the sun is shown by the report of 1882 in
London that a suburban resident ‘has had his letters read to him from his
office, dictated his replies to a shorthand writer at the City, communicated
with his broker, solicitor or banker, and all without leaving his bedroom’.
The first telecommuter?

My only criticism of this easy read is that the anecdotal style sometimes
messes up the chronology. On the other hand, this is the property that makes
Young’s book just as suitable for dipping into as for reading from cover
to cover. I recommend it, however you plan to read it.

Peter Wymer is a freelance writer.

One Hundred Problems in Elementary Mathematics by Hugo Steinhaus, Dover,
£3.70 pbk

Mathematics develops and extends its frontiers, rather than changing
its basic concepts so Dover’s reissue of The Enjoyment of Mathematics, which
was first published in German 90 years ago and first translated into English
in 1957 by H. S. Zuckerman, appears none the worse for its age.

The authors claim that if the aversion towards mathematics that many
acquire from childhood experiences could be eliminated, then as many people
as enjoy music without any particular musical ability would also appreciate
simple mathematical ideas. Be that as it may, a fair degree of concentration,
and possession – or recall – of your secondary school maths is needed to
follow the wide range of topics. Not quite like relaxed listening to music.

But this worthy little book will repay those with the requisite patience
who wish to extend their mathematical ideas to some of the properties of
numbers, and concepts such as sets and curves of constant breadth (for example,
the perimeter of a 50p piece). They will also begin to appreciate the extraordinary
intellectual contribution of some early mathematicians.

One Hundred Problems in Elementary Mathematics also requires study for
appreciation but may have a wider appeal from the challenge of solving problems.
It bears the accolade of a laudatory preface by Martin Gardiner (written
for the original English translation in 1964), who needs no introduction
for aficionados of mathematical problems. Problems of the purely mathematical
type on numbers, inequalities and geometrical concepts are leavened with
others dealing with more day-to-day matters. The clarity and completeness
of the solutions provide a mathematical learning process in themselves and,
as Gardiner points out, anyone who does no more than turn immediately to
these answers can learn a great deal from them.

Peter Wymer is a science writer.

THIRTY years ago, Malcolm Lines was undergoing an oral examination in
an Oxford college. After successfully dealing with some questions relating
to Green’s functions in mathematics, he was asked by an eminent, but nonscientific
fellow of the college: ‘How would you explain one of these Green’s functions
you have been talking about to a medieval historian?’

Lines recalls this experience in the preface of Think of a Number, and
it underlines his laudable view that ‘someone who claims to understand,
and be excited by, any aspect of science – including mathematics – ought
to be able to pass on the essence of that knowledge with enthusiasm to any
reasonably intelligent layperson who is interested’. He certainly practises
what he believes in this eminently readable and thought-provoking book.

Lines is that rare author who conscientiously respects his claim ‘that
little or no prior knowledge of mathematics is required’. All that is necessary
is accepting that letters can stand for numbers, and an understanding of
the basic arithmetical operations plus the use of signs and indices. A useful
introductory chapter covers even these basic points in an intelligible way
for those who may have forgotten all their schoolwork. Some may hiccup at
the end of this chapter when – perhaps unnecessarily as it does not appear
again – but one respects the author’s trait of not ducking awkward issues
and of anticipating some of the questions that his writing stimulates.

Of course, the book does not read like a novel, and I (at least) had
to invest some mental effort to appreciate fully and follow some of the
concepts he introduces. But the author’s erudition makes this effort well
worthwhile.

Besides ‘intelligent lay persons’ the book should appeal to many mathematicallly
literate scientists and engineers. While there is a fresh look at perennial
topics such as Fibonacci numbers, statistics, map colouring, space-time
curvature and Gauss’s clock numbers, other sections deal with such matters
as hailstone numbers, cryptography and computer security problems, Golomb’s
rulers, chaos theory and fractals.

The author, a solid-state physicist who has worked on computers at Bell
Labs, is also fas cinated by what ‘number crunching’ with computers has
done for some previously intractable mathematical problems, and how it has
opened up new lines of research.

Peter Wymer is a freelance science writer.

THERE is a single unambiguous message in Physics and Psychics. It is
that there is no scientific basis for a Universe other than one composed
of observable matter. It is doubtful, though, whether the logic, clarity
and powerful intellectual force of the arguments will convince the multitudes
who illustrate, also perhaps convincingly, people’s desire, if not need,
for faith in the supernatural. Indeed, the book advances an ingenious argument
for a possible genetic determination for such belief.

The author, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of
Hawaii, never suggests other than that there is, and is always likely to
be, much that we do not, and perhaps cannot, understand. However, Victor
Stenger does not want us to live under the assumption that supernatural
forces in large measure determine our destiny, even if we have a desire
to believe in the nonmaterial. In his view, ‘the supernatural has been a
yoke on the neck of humanity since we first began to think and dream’.

The book makes quite clear what scientific method is, and is not, in
elegant and crisp prose. For this alone, it should be compulsory reading
for everyone over the age of 11.

Stenger describes, or at least as much as it is possible for the nonexpert
to follow, what in nuclear physics is termed the Standard Product: that
is, what we know so far of the fundamental nature of the stuff of which
we, and the observable Universe, are made. He points out that none of this
ever-increasing knowledge and understanding has, so far at least, indicated
that the Universe is more than matter. Readers might, though, feel a slight
unease at accepting the big bang as ‘the violent explosion that began the
Universe’. While many measurements fit in with that theory, it is ‘an act
of faith’.

Having further established ‘that the rare and anomalous can still be
normal and natural’, Stenger goes on to discuss in detail much of what is
presented as evidence for parapsychological phenomena. He asks, surely reasonably,
that believers in psi should be willing to have their ideas and experiences
subjected to the same rigorous examination and analysis as scientific claims.
As he makes clear, the scientific establishment is rightly, and necessarily,
critical of accepting new ideas, however attractive they may seem, until
indepen dent examination replicates and verifies them.

The recent case of ‘cold fusion’ is an example that Stenger introduces
where the doubters were just as anxious as the protagonists to see the results
reproduced and vindicated so that our knowledge could be enhanced. Another
case which he examines is the work of Jacques Benveniste in Paris on the
progressive dilution of solutions of certain antibodies to imperceptible
proportions but still, Benveniste claims, having an effect on blood cells.

A plea for similar rigorous examination of psychic phenomena is, of
course, not new. What is fresh in Physics and Psychics is the methodical
analyses of many psi claims. Stenger does not dismiss them out of hand,
but ruthlessly examines each claim, and in many instances reports the attempts
to repeat the claims under controlled conditions. All the experiments are
eventually demolished like a straw house.

That is not to say that this book is merely a rebuttal of the paranormal.
The author also brings the reader up to date with stimulating and easy to
read accounts of many recent discoveries and technologies from particle
physics to parallel processing in computers. These are interspersed with
thought-provoking philosophical arguments. I am impressed, too, with the
extensive range of views quoted from relevant experts, backed by a formidable
list of references.

Those who wish to promote belief in the paranormal put forward various
key experiments in psi phemomena to back their claims. Stenger examines
these critically, and in particular he reanalyses the comments that sceptics
such as C. E. M. Hansel made on the famous experiments by J. B. Rhine at
Duke University, North Carolina, and by S. G. Soal and K. M. Goldney in
England.

Another area that comes in for lengthy and reasoned comment is whether
hallucinogens and other drugs, physical disorders, transcendental meditation
and hypnosis are possible causes of visions, out-of-the-body experiences
and the like. Stenger also tackles the issue of distinguished scientists
who have held opposing views to his – such as Sir Oliver Lodge who believed
in spiritualism – and meticulously examines the evidence.

So what does Stenger offer for readers who want to believe in a world
beyond the senses? Precious little it seems, besides what humanism can offer.
Although neither this word, nor rationalism, features in the text, this
is surely what he preaches. However, while Stenger has no time for those
who prey on the credulity of others, he understands how ‘because of the
traditional teachings of the world’s cultures, many become convinced that
a better world must exist, and they can do nothing better than help others
achieve the next one’.

Physics and Psychics deserves to be read by many, and I would wager
that those who do – whatever their beliefs or lack of them – will find it
informative, entertaining and remarkably persuasive. A tour de force.

Peter Wymer is a freelance science writer.

ALMOST everyone has an interest in games of one sort or another and
John Beasley entertainingly combines games with mathematics in this mind-exercising
and thought-provoking book. There are many works on mathematical puzzles
and the arithmetic and logic of a range of games, but here we have a fresh
look at these activities. Beasley also adds some games not usually associated
with mathematical analysis.

The author is a computer consultant and, by using the exhaustive computational
analysis now possible, he comes to some fascinating conclusions. As he states
firmly in the introduction, this is a book of results. Although he gives
mathematical derivations or proofs in some cases, the author takes pains
to ensure that, if the less mathematically minded readers decide to skip
those, they will not lose the general sense, or thread of an argument.

The chapter on the luck of the deal with cards contains the odd useful
tip or two for bridge players but the highlight of this section is an illuminating
treatment of various shuffling techniques. Beasley outlines convincingly
just what an expert manipulator of cards may be able to achieve in a ‘legal’
way without any sleight of hand tricks like dealing from the bottom of the
pack. As he says, people like this are not usually found in friendly games,
which is just as well. And readers may look at a snakes-andladders board
with a differenteye after learning that for players within 7 squares of
approaching a ladder their probability of hitting it is independent of the
position of an intervening snake. Beasley shows that a snake immediately
in front of a ladder provides the least obstacle.

We are still on familiar ground when Beasley gets on to ball games.
You might, however, argue that he assumes too much when he says that golf,
football and cricket are games which would be free from chanceeffects if
played perfectly. But some fascinating points emerge in his data taken from
scores in the Open golf championship, football league goal scores and batsmen’s
efforts in the county championships. A comprehensive analysis of the spreads
of scores enables the author to reveal the score expectations of a professional
golfer, the whys and wherefores of variations in goal scores at football
and what a batsman may reasonably expect to average. All very good stuff,
but what makes such sports so exciting, as I am sure Beasley would agree,
is that the results will always be subject to too much uncertainty to raise
our chance of, for example, winning the pools on the basis of these analyses.

A critical survey of methods of measuring skills of individual games
players and the grading of chess players will provide little comfort for
organisers of tournaments and grading secretaries as they read Beasley’s
succinct summary of the pitfalls.

Clear explanations of the reasoning behind the techniques for winning
simple games like taking a card at random from a pack and betting whether
it is a court card or not lead naturally into an amusing and detailed discussion
of bluffing. The last paragraph of this chapter neatly sums up the impracticability
of analysing complex betting games like poker: ‘Do not think that a reading
of this chapter has equipped you to take the pants off your local poker
school. Three assumptions have been made: that you can bluff without giving
any indication, that nobody is cheating, and that the winner actually gets
paid. You will not necessarily be well advised to make these assumptions
in practice.’

Although there is no general way of solving puzzles, Beasley provides
some helpful guidelines to strategy by examining and explaining some of
the mathematical techniques that you can use to help. He sheds new light
on chess problems, shuffling squares in trays to specific arrangements,
Rubik’s cube, peg solitaire and other tests of pure skill. People who enjoy
these kind of problems will also appreciate the clear way in which he explains
the application of the relevant mathematical concepts, making their elegance
plain.

Beasley also discusses the game of nim in considerable detail. To play
nim each player removes objects from several piles in turn, with the winning
plays of either forcing the last move on an opponent or retaining it. He
shows that this is the basis of all similar games of strategy whose rules
guarantee termination, and in which the same moves are available to each
player.

Even the most humble nursery games, with no opportunity for skill, such
as beggar your neighbour, come in for deep examination and are shown to
be of unexpected interest. The results of a computer simulation of the play
duration for 10,000 two-player deals provide information on such questions
as: ‘How long is a game likely to last? Can a game get into an infinite
loop – and if not can we prove this?’ This stimulating final chapter ends
with a section on Turing games, named after Alan Turing, the British mathematician
who published theoretical ideas for automatic computers in 1936. There is
a welcome change from a bare bibliography in the section on further reading
as it outlines the scope and content of several recommended books, giving
an objective review of various other sources of information.

The well chosen mixture of material substantiates the publishers’ claim
that the book will appeal to mathematicians and games players alike, but
it should be said that the latter will need an above average interest in
puzzle solving fully to appreciate most sections. A good seasonal gift for
those who like to tackle Enigma in New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ regularly.