Letter: Arm's length
Plans for the gravitational wave observatory have been the subject of
public discussion in Dundee and Fife before. As this discussion was mainly
about the environmental impact of such an observatory, many readers around
here will welcome Nigel Henbest’s explanation of the astrophysics involved
(‘Shudders in the fabric of spacetime’, 1 September).
It should, however, be known that the piece of land in Tentsmuir Forest
(not Tweedsmuir Forest), near St Andrews, is not without problems. The land
is certainly flat, but it is not accessible for building machinery without
road improvements. It has no water or electricity supply. The site is hardly
suitable for an instrument designed to detect minute vibrations: it is continuously
exposed to strong background vibrations as it is situated between one of
the busiest military airfields at Leuchars and a very active artillery shooting
range at Barry Buddon. One of the two interferometer arms cannot be extended
to the required length of 3 kilometres because the landowner has other plans
for his property.
Above all, Tentsmuir Forest is a unique habitat and an environmentally
sensitive area. More than 600 people have registered their opposition to
the 6 kilometre building. It took the district council five, at times stormy,
meetings before planning permission was given. The council’s decision was,
and still is, unpopular locally, even though the University of Glasgow is
required to restore the landscape once the programme is completed or abandoned.
Where will it then find the money it needs to honour this obligation?
We can only hope, both in the interest of the area where we live and
in the interest of gravitational wave research, that the German partners
of this project know a more suitable site.
Alisa Malcolm and Kurt Liebscher Tentsmuir Watch Campaign Tentsmuir
Forest Fife Scotland
Letter: Safe hands
Thistle Diary reports a severe shortage of polymer chemists and a ministerial
reply that the matter can safely be left to the institutions (11 August).
My research is concerned with the physical and mechanical properties of
polymers. On a study tour of Britain in 1988 my highest priorities were
visits to the chemistry departments at Lancaster, Stirling and Aberystwyth
where my reading of the literature suggested that the most relevant work
was going on. These departments have now been closed. The equipment in the
polymer laboratory at Lancaster was beyond the aspirations of an academic
laboratory in Australia.
Dalyell’s belief that individual institutions cannot be trusted to take
care of national needs is confirmed: they are not competent or equipped
to anticipate national needs. Until the 1950s, institutions which were not
quite universities called themselves university colleges. Even if there
is no trade description legislation in Britain, an institution which no
longer teaches full university degree courses in chemistry and physics should
stop calling itself a university in the interests of intellectual honesty.
P E M Allen University of Adelaide South Australia
Letter: Get well soon
I was very sorry to read that Kate Charlesworth was badly injured in
a road accident and wish her a speedy recovery. I hope to see many more
pages of ‘Life, the Universe and (almost) everything’ in New 杏吧原创,
and compliment Charlesworth on her considerable skill as an illustrator.
Kenneth Turner Doncaster South Yorkshire
Letter: Spaced out
The financial collapse of the ‘private venture’ Juno Project which aims
to put a Briton aboard the Soviet Mir space station next year to perform
micro-gravity research, is a direct consequence of the government’s failure
to establish any policy or programme for industrial space research.
Although the Soviet space agency, Glavkosmos, is doing everything possible
to keep the project alive, our astronaut candidates Timothy Mace and Helen
Sharman face an uncertain future. Having to launch Juno without government
backing was like entering a race with a self-imposed handicap and it is
hardly surprising that companies are unwilling to proceed. Industrial competitors
in France and West Germany are already well ahead in this field because
of ‘seed money’ provided by their respective governments.
At stake is a re-examination of chemistry, physics and biology under
unique conditions of microgravity in what amounts to a pilot ‘space factory’.
Although work is still in its infancy, it is likely that the outcome will
be improved semiconductor crystals for the electronics industry, high-priority
vaccines and serums, and new metal alloys and composites.
The remedy is clear. The government should declare its intention to
support Juno in conjunction with industry. The British National Space Centre
should be tasked to plan and co-ordinate an effective programme.
Kenneth Gatland Ewell Surrey
Letter: Splendid rebuke
And so to linguistic matters. The splendid Ariadne speaks of ‘waiting
in line’ at the supermarket (1 September). Henceforth, she should queue,
and leave ‘waiting in line’ to the Americans. In the same issue, the equally
splended Feedback refers to the royal ‘we’ as a second-person plural pronoun.
It’s first.
Allan Jones Newport Pagnell Buckinghamshire
Letter: Rain check
It was gratifying to read the short discussion of the paper by Dick
Monkhouse and myself regarding Britain’s recent volatile climatic conditions
(Science, 1 September). Unfortunately, the article contained a significant
error. The ratio of winter to summer rainfall during the 1980s quoted in
the ‘weather’ paper, 2 was 1:3 (not 3:1). If the winter half-years over
the last decade had really been three times as wet as the summer half-years,
the debate about the impact of climate change would be largely concluded!
Terry Marsh Institute of Hydrology Wallingford Oxfordshire
Letter: Ellipse of the sun
I was impressed by the space devoted to pre-Copernean astronomy (‘The
changing face of Chiron’, 25 August). It has been too long since we took
seriously the concept of ‘fixed’ stars, although it was unfortunate that
a Keplerism was allowed in at one point (‘Marsden found that the orbit was
elliptical’). However, reassurance that the Earth will continue in its present
orbit ‘forever’, properly ‘circling’ rather than describing any other shape,
goes some way towards reconciling the old and the new cosmologies.
Ruth Wallsgrove Milton Keynes
Letter: Shaky salaries
I was glad to see the excellent coverage you gave to engineering design
and the SERC’s Engineering Design Centres (‘Shaky start for engineering
design centres’, 1 September). However, you do rather give the impression
that the SERC is to blame for the low salaries which make it difficult to
recruit good staff, when this aspect is quite outside their control. The
blame for the depressed state of academic salaries lies entirely with government.
With the dramatic decline in the balance of trade in manufacturing,
from roughly +5 billion Pounds in 1980 to – 15 billion Pounds now, the universities
and polytechnics have a vital role to play in the economic recovery, and
it is absurd to deprive them of the good people they need by forcing uncompetitive
salaries upon them. The bootstrap theory pull hard enough on your shoelaces
you will rise into the air’) has been debunked: we must now step up our
efforts on the revival of manufacturing but we must have the means.
Michael French Lancaster University
Letter: Teaching practice
I am dismayed by Ralph Levinson’s plea that schoolchildren should spend
even less time learning science than they do at present (‘Educating with
empathy,’ Forum, 1 September). His scheme is to ‘introduce an additional
attainment target, which would be a fusion of science, history and drama.’
Children themselves will no doubt be all for it. Dressing up as Caesar
or Boadicea was always more fun than actually learning ancient history.
I remember nature rambles as more relaxing than the systematic study of
biology. The long drawn out fiasco of the ‘new math’ was undoubtedly prolonged
by the classroom popularity. As for the chores of learning that c-a-t spells
cat and of building a vocabulary, Martin Turner, the educational psychologist,
has recently assessed some of the damage to reading skills associated with
the now fashionable ‘real books’ method. Children are simply presented with
good books ‘by a teacher who shows him or herself as a role model who can
read, encouraging pupils to learn by ‘spontaneous combustion’ and pick books
that interest them.’
At present rates of remuneration for teachers, they can scarcely be
blamed if they feel that society shows so little signs of caring about what
they do that there is little reason for them to take it seriously either.
Who will blame them if they begin to substitute indoor recreations for the
immensely demanding work of training young minds? But the new fashion is
to try to present these recreations as good for the children. The self-justifying
philosophy seems to be that ‘it ain’t what you know but the way that you
feel about it.’
Transported to the classroom, the philosophy of thinking with the blood
has obvious attractions. Even an underqualified and grossly overstretched
teacher can impart and assess feelings. Too much, though, is at stake not
to recognise this for the nonsense that it is. Today’s need is that children
should learn more science. Society’s underprovision of time and facilities
entails fewer, not more, distractions.
Donald Michie Edinburgh
Letter: Dry run
I was interested in John Anderson’s difficulty with rain since I had
just such a problem of keeping dry when I was a student in Sheffield (Letters,
1 September). My problems were solved by M Stone (‘Kinematic programming
for rain’, Nature, 1966, vol 211, p 442). His arguments, based on simple
mathematical optimisation, are basically that you should lean in the general
direction from which the rain is coming, then run as fast as you can. Obviously,
the faster you run forward the further you have to lean forward. This also
gives you a minimum speed at which you have to run if the rain is coming
from behind and you do not wish to fall over backwards. Unfortunately, as
far as my maths allows, I cannot see what is the best ploy when there is
no wind. Using the limited projected area argument, you would be as dry
standing still as walking or running.
Julian Vincent University of Reading Berkshire
Letter: Forked tongue
Roger Lewin has provided a fine review of the recent conference on the
classification of American Indian languages held at the University of Colorado
(‘Ancestral voices at war,’ 16 June). A couple of points are, however, in
need of clarification. Lewin describes the debate, quite correctly, as contrasting
two different methodological approaches to language classification. Greenberg
and his followers use a top-down approach that relies on similarities in
sound and meaning to detect historically related forms (cognates). Greenberg’s
opponents, on the other hand, use a precise but painstaking method that
proceeds from the bottom up, relying on the discovery of regular sound correspondences
and reconstruction to ascertain cognates.
What Lewin fails to point out is that this latter method is so precise
that it has yet to make any contribution to liguistic taxonomy. In reality,
sound correspondences are discovered and reconstruction may begin, only
after a classifcation has been reached on other grounds. The Indo-European
family itself was discovered by Greenberg’s methods almost a century before
the preoccupation with sound correspondences and reconstruction appeared
in the late nineteenth century. In the America’s the precise bottom-up approach
advocated by Greenberg’s critics has yet to make its first discovery.
Second, the belief that the comparative method in linguistics has a
‘built-in limitation’ of 7000 years is simply a myth propagated by Indo-Europeanists
to provent Indo-European from being debased by less-worthy relatives. The
Soviet Nostratic shcool has demonstrated beyond any doubt that Indo-European
is intimately related to many other families, and Greenberg is currently
writing a book on the same topic.
Finally, the quote attributed to me that the comparative method can
take us ‘Back to the first language, the Mother Tongue,’ is something I
have never said. While I do believe that the comparative method can show
that all extant languages share a common origin (probably between 50,000
and 100,000 years ago), I do not think that this common source was in any
way ‘the first language.’ And I never use the term Mother Tongue, though
many of my colleagues do.
Merritt Ruhlen Palo Alto California, US