Letter: Science and religion
I have been urged to reply to Ralph Estling’s letter on ‘science and
religion’ (Letters, 24 March). This was a polemical attack on a caricature
of religion, knit together with a series of untenable assertions and assumptions.
However, I agree that ethics is not a synonym of religion. I also reject
an antithesis between nature and supernature, apart from the view that the
only sustainable dualism is that of God versus everything else.
Estling assumes that anyone claiming to be both a scientist and a Christian
must be intellectually dishonest. This is because he is committed to the
view that science and theology are ‘two diametrically opposed and mutually
contradictory systems of thought’. Particular scientific theories and particular
theological propositions may be contradictory. As both disciplines abound
in mutually contradictory theories, competing with each other in the search
for truth, it would be surprising if it were not so. Science and theology,
however, are not opposed systems. They are complementary disciplines in
our search for truth about our total experience.
I am not being intellectually dishonest when I find the theory of evolution
to be the most satisfying conceptual framework in my biological research
and at the same time find the Christian gospel to be the most satisfying
conceptual framework with which to pursue questions relating to the purpose
of human life. As a ‘real’ scientist (by which I mean a person actively
engaged in writing scientific papers) I encounter no conflict with the gospel
I embrace. The latter I find an entirely satisfying basis for ethics, the
pursuit of justice and a vision that confers purpose by transforming life
into a pilgrimage to God. I accept that Estling rejects this gospel. I do
not, however, feel obliged to impugn his intellectual honesty, whatever
I may think with regard to his state of being mistaken, confused or ill-mannered.
R. H. L. Disney Department of Zoology University of Cambridge
Letter: Logical prediction
Chris Beckett may be in error over the meaning of the word ‘prediction’,
as used by Hawking (Forum, 24 March). This error is common, even among the
writers and publishers of science, and reinforces the popular distortion
of the scientific method held by many non-practitioners.
Most of us use the word prediction in the temporal sense, as a statement
linking the present with the future, by foretelling some event that has
yet to occur. Hawking uses ‘prediction’ in the logical sense, that is, as
used by philosophers of science.
Theories must have the ability to make predictions by which they are
subsequently tested. In this sense predictions are scientific statements
deduced from the theory in question but not expected at the time the theory
was created. These deduced statements relate to observations that have occurred
or are occurring at present, observations through which the theory may be
strengthened, modified or abandoned.
Michael Stanwick Cardiff
Letter: Mad scientists
As a software engineer with a physics degree, I believe that many of
the financial and recruitment problems now facing scientists are a result
of the poor image unwittingly presented to young people by non-scientists.
Improve this image and you at once improve the lot of the researcher.
Impressions are formed early and I can still vividly remember being
told at Sunday school that ‘Science isn’t necessarily always evil!’. The
negative feelings this created lasted until I went to grammar school and
discovered I actually enjoyed the subject.
Sunday attendances have declined and children’s television is now the
major supplier of disinformation. The real menace is the science-fiction
writer with the perennial theme of ‘mad scientist determined to rule the
world by force’. 杏吧原创s rank with sharks and vampires as evil monsters.
Why are they always so mad and so horrible? Maybe people must be a little
mad to go into science at the moment, but must they all have Einstein’s
hairstyle? Iftherearenomad accountants, lawyers or civil servants in children’s
cartoons, then surely it is because deviants in these professions are mistakenly
thought to be harmless.
The problem won’t disappear overnight but some attempt must be made
to redress the balance. Children must be gradually weaned off this rubbish
and new monsters found. If scientists wrote stories then they would certainly
ensure the villains were no longer scientists when they committed their
crimes.
I therefore recommend that scientists themselves take up the pen, perhaps
switching attention to the one truly dangerous group of people: the politicians.
For starters, how about an embittered scientist, mutating into a politician
in order to destroy her former colleagues? The story is fine but I wonder:
would it really be fiction?
Paul Gill Groby, Leicestershire
Letter: Short-term view
In her feature ‘Science advice: an abusers’ guide’ (10 March), Susan
Watts refers to the difficulty of decommissioning nuclear reactors, adding
that none of the parties had worked out the true cost of decommissioning.
The difficulties do seem to have been underestimated, but there is an economic
error. No project ever has a unique ‘true cost’: it depends when you have
to pay and where you intend to borrow the money, the very things changed
by privatisation.
Private lenders dislike long timescales and unfamiliar risks, and so
they set harder conditions. The same factors work against renewable energies,
with their high initial costs to be recovered over a period when running
costs are virtually zero: the longer the better, especially with inflation.
The mystery is that a government favouring nuclear power was so economically
innocent as not to see all this from the start. They are now keeping nuclear
reactors in public hands, but still leaving renewables to the private sector
with its preference for the short term and the familiar.
Philip Warner Newcastle upon Tyne
Letter: Who's a clever bird?
If parrots are so clever, how is it that mine seem incapable of changing
negative, potentially self-destructive, behaviour patterns (‘Who’s a clever
parrot then?’, 24 February).
Despite two years of sympathetic care a pair of African greys refuse
to allow the quietest approach without flying off to the end of their aviary.
The birds are provided with a wide variety of fresh and prepared foods,
and yet none is eaten. Instead, they subsist entirely on seeds and nuts.
The diet eaten would doubtless be nutritionally inadequate if it were not
for vitamin and mineral preparations added occasionally to their drinking
water. Surely a bird that is not locked inflexibly into stereotyped behaviour
would learn to accommodate itself to harmless and even beneficial phenomena?
A macaw has several sheets of newspaper spread over the floor of its cage.
The paper is changed at the same time as the bird is fed. It is the bird’s
custom to drop most of its food under the food pot and, a little later,
to throw the paper around. Almost invariably the food ends up under the
paper.
If left for a length of time, the bird sits around looking increasingly
sorry for itself (at least it would if it were self-aware) until the food
is uncovered for it. This ‘out-of-sight, out-of-mind’ behaviour is reminiscent
of an experiment once done with hungry lemurs. From a vantage point overlooking
inaccessible food, they struggled to get at it. When the food was then made
accessible, in the same position but no longer in direct view, they found
it only by chance.
It is easy, but dangerous, to attribute intelligence to an animal that
is tractable (at least when young), mimics speech, moves ponderously and
uses its feet as hands. In my experience, however, the only safe way to
manage parrots is to assume that their wits are as dull as their feathers
are bright!
Fabia Cooper London N7
Letter: Megabite mattresses
Readers may be reassured to know that the megabite mattress alluded
to in the caption to the photograph accompanying Paul Harvey and Robert
May’s article ‘Matrimony, mattresses and mites’ (3 March) is a fictional
phenomenon based on a misunderstanding. Dust mites occur at a rate of up
to 1000 per gram of household dust. A mattress weighs several kilograms.
However, I doubt that any reader attempts sleep on a mattress so delapidated
that it consists entirely of dust. The mite population of a normal bed is
probably less than 1000. For the authoritative text, your journalists need
look no further than Microcosmos, by Burgess, Marten and Taylor (CUP).
Jeremy Burgess Adelaide, Australia
Letter: Sense of direction
Robert Ormiston-Chant seems a little dismissive of the technique of
finding direction by pointing a wristwatch at the Sun (Letters, 3 March).
Its utility was proved to me by a driver I served with in Libya. Chased
south by Rommel’s 1941 breakthrough at Sidi Rezegh, by next morning he was
lost in the desert and without a compass. He used his watch to travel first
east then north to rejoin the 8th Army next day. The principle is the same
as for the ‘Sun-compass.’ The Sun-compass was the 8th Army’s desert navigation
instrument: basically a sun-dial, it was bolted to the vehicle bonnet. It
was the passenger’s job to direct the driver so as to keep the shadow of
the gnomon on the course set on its dial and to adjust it every 15 minutes
to allow for the movement of the Sun. It was free from magnetic influence,
so you did not have to stop every few miles, get out of your vehicle, walk
10 yards away and take a bearing on a distant object (if there was one),
as you had to do with a magnetic compass. The first Sun-compasses issued
were crude, with a bicycle spoke as a gnomon. A number of graduated paper
discs allowed for variations in latitude and so on. Later more sophisticated
instruments were of brass, adjusted by a movable base plate. Sun-compasses
are still used in the desert today.
J. W. Barnes Swansea
Letter: Negative matter
In his article ‘The power of negative matter’ (17 March), Robert Forward
writes: ‘Realistically, it is very likely that one of these days someone
will come up with a proof that negative matter is logically forbidden.’
May I suggest that the reason may be nothing more obscure than the fact
that the existence of particles with negative mass would also require regions
of zero mass or discontinuities in the energy distribution in space? Modern
theories of matter suppose that mass or mass-energy is a continuous scalar
field, and that vacuum, or the lowest possible energy state, is non-zero
at all points. If the continuity of mass or mass-energy is an absolute requirement,
then it is inconceivable that its value at any point could be negative.
Peter Rowlands University of Liverpool
Letter: Onto a winner?
Feedback (24 March) is too pessimistic about the laser gramophone. Potential
users with Pounds sterling 20 000 to spare, such as the BBC, may well be
happy to have a system which enables them to clean and play their old records
once, recording crackle-free versions onto digital audio tape (or even CD)
for future use. And if the tape ever wears out, the record can always be
brought out of the vaults and copied again.
John Gribbin Piddinghoe, East Sussex