Letters: Not cricket
Feedback (14 March), quotes Sir Hermann Bondi as saying that 80 per
cent of problems are trivial, 19.5 per cent unsolvable, and genius is required
to find and solve the remaining 0.5 per cent. In what category would he
have put the Purdue study of fracture in baseball bats (New 杏吧原创, Science,
same issue)?
Obviously, before impact, all parts of the bat are travelling ‘forwards’,
and at impact the part in contact with the ball decelerates sharply. So
the bat bends forward (remember Newton!) round the point of contact with
the ball and may suffer tensile failure at the back. Any child who has hit
a tree with a stick knows this.
The photo caption asks why baseball bats do not splinter on the front
edge. Compression damage to wood does not generate long splinters and often
passes unnoticed. Cricket bats go off-song and spongy from repeated compressive
stress on the face in defensive play and occasionally splinter from the
back on an attacking stroke. There are no defensive strokes in baseball
– it isn’t cricket, sir! – and there is no consistent front to the bat,
so compression failures are less likely than the spectacular tensile demise
of the weapon.
A. M. Calverd Bishops Stortford, Hertfordshire
Letters: East Pole
Having just re-read the article ‘Piecing together the Pacific’ (18 January),
I was puzzled by reference to ‘eastern Antarctic’. I would have thought
that, when travelling eastwards in Antarctica, one can keep going indefinitely,
without ever running out of land. So which part is the east? Those readers
who are Goon Show aficionados may recall that the Goons once mounted an
expedition to the East Pole. Perhaps New 杏吧原创 could consult Spike Milligan
for enlightenment on this aspect of plate tectonics?
Allan Deeds Daventy, Northamptonshire
* * *
Fair point – but in fact it was geographers, not Spike Milligan, who
decided to designate the area of Antarctica to the east of the Greenwich
meridian ‘eastern Antarctic’ – Ed
Letters: Swollen organ
It appears that not every vet watches BBC TV’s All Creatures Great and
Small. I refer to the use of syrup by a vet to reduce the swelling of a
stallion’s penis (This Week, 7 March). The vet in question had to recollect
a school science lesson to effect a cure. Had he been a James Herriot fan,
his memory would have not been so taxed, and he could have seen a very similar
cure performed by his illustrious TV counterpart.
The offending organ was the prolapsed uterus of a cow. A local quack
had struggled with the extremely large and distended organ for several hours
to no avail. Whereupon it was time to call in the ‘vitnery’ as the farmer
referred to him. Following the usual bout of forelock tugging (farmer to
vet) and one-up-manship (quack to vet), the vet requested the ubiquitous
bucket of hot water, soap and towel and, much to the puzzlement of the farmer,
two pounds of sugar. Once these were supplied the vet scrubbed up, liberally
dusted the uterus with sugar, then stepped back to allow osmosis to take
its course. The uterus was duly shoehorned back into place, leaving the
vet smiling smugly, the farmer twisting his cap admiringly and the quack
eating humble pie reluctantly.
Perhaps James Herriot should be on reading/viewing lists of all good
veterinary schools?
Dave Mitchell Bondi, New South Wales Australia
Letters: Soft spot
It seems the reader with a soft spot in his butter (Letters, 22 February)
hasn’t cooked a turkey before, not an American one anyhow. Back where I
‘cowboyed’ as a summer ranch-hand in the hills of ‘big wonderful Wyoming’,
ready-to-cook turkeys came equipped with a thermostat stuck deep in the
thickest part of the bird. This contraption popped out only when the bird
was well cooked. Heat encroaches from the outer shell towards the inside
evenly, or is lost in the same way in the case of cooling. The hole in the
butter is just the last bit to solidify.
Jim Barghouti Woking, Surrey
Letters: Charger choice
I recently purchased a battery charger for use with nickel-cadmium batteries.
The accompanying instructions recommend that batteries are recharged before
the energy level falls below 50 per cent in order to maximise the lifespan
of the battery. The charger that came with my camcorder, however, recommends
that the Ni-Cd battery is fully discharged before recharging and has a discharge
function to facilitate this.
I have looked at other makes of charger and found both recommendations
are repeated. Which is right and why?
Jonathan Wallace Fenham, Newscastle upon Tyne
Letters: Bad prospects . . .
Robert May’s article about the appalling employment prospects for researchers
(Talking Point, 14 March) will surely be welcomed by most scientists on
short-term contracts. The Association for Researchers in Medicine and Science
(ARMS) has been drawing the attention of government, the research councils,
medical charities, and the universities to this issue for over a decade.
However, their answers have repeatedly been to the effect that either there
is no problem or it is somebody else’s problem.
Meanwhile the situation is getting worse. This is not just a personal
tragedy for those researchers involved, but is now seriously undermining
the research base of the country, since there are understandably fewer bright
young people wishing to enter such a mismanaged system where the prospects
are so poor.
The association’s most recent attempt to stimulate some action has been
the publication of a discussion document, Careers in Research. This attempts
to present practical solutions. It does not propose that researchers should
have tenure, but suggests that they should be properly trained, appraised
and managed, with the prospect of reasonable job security on a par with
that of most individuals in industry. It is suggested that the employing
institutions (primarily the universities) should raise their management
standards substantially, organise research more effectively, and begin to
take a proper interest in their research staff. Copies of Careers in Research
are available from ARMS, c/o Clinical Science Laboratories, 17th Floor,
Tower Block, Guys Hospital, London Bridge, SE1 9RT.
Stephen Hopkins University of Manchester
Letters: . . . bad pay
I am writing with reference to Neil Harris’s article on salaries for
scientists and engineers (Careering Ahead, 7 March). He seems to have missed
out on one area of graduate and postdoctoral employment, namely research
within an academic institution.
I completed my doctorate at the end of 1989 and have been working as
a postdoctoral fellow ever since. At the age of 27 (and rapidly approaching
28) my annual salary is in the order of 拢13 000.
When students I taught only a year or so ago are earning thousands above
this figure, is it any wonder that I, and many like me, are deserting academia,
and even science, for good?
Mark Hughes Wolverhampton, West Midlands
Letters: Nippy neutrinos
Your article on Supernova 1987A claims that we now have proof that neutrinos
must have a lifetime of over 170 000 years, since they have arrived on Earth
from that event (‘Happy Birthday, Supernova 1987A’, 22 February). But they
were travelling at the speed of light, so wouldn’t their internal clocks
indicate the passage of zero time, proving only that their lives are greater
than instantaneous?
G. Alderslade Billingham, Cleveland
Letters: Dismantling teabags
Peter Spinks is not doing justice to Dutch attempts to reduce the amount
of household garbage that has to be burnt or dumped (Forum, 22 February).
‘It sounds . . . green spirited, and simple. It is not,’ he writes.
He goes on to complain that waste paper is not collected on public holidays
and, when collection does take place, he himself has to ensure that bundles
are liftable in some way. Can’t a foreign correspondent of New 杏吧原创
keep track of public holidays in the country where he lives? Would he prefer
to throw all his garbage on the pavement without any containment?
Spinks seem to think it’s strange that people have to be educated about
where to put what kind of garbage. It is not. He thinks it is unreasonable
that one should dismantle a piece of refuse to separate hazardous and less
hazardous waste. It is not. The problem isn’t how to dismantle Spinks’s
teabags. The problem lies with people who prefer to be macho and dump anything
they like, anywhere they like, any time they like. Spinks at least creates
the impression that he is one of these.
Spinks is right in noticing that the Netherlands hasn’t yet established
an effective system for collecting different kinds of waste separately.
When other countries discover that waste management is something one should
think about and care about on each and every level, they won’t need to make
many mistakes. These will conveniently have been made by the Dutch.
Herbert Blankesteijn Utrecht, The Netherlands
Letters: Essential maths
John Nicholson’s claim (Forum, 7 March) that substantial parts of chemistry
can be pursued successfully without the need of mathematics will not be
controversial. But will he acknowledge that there are other significant
parts, perhaps those with which he is not so well acquainted, where serious
mathematics has been an essential component? For example, how could reaction
dynamics have got as far as is described in the books by P. Gray and S.
K. Scott without a deep knowledge of modern differential equations?
Nor are such authors deficient in Nicholson’s request for ‘scientists
able to express scientific ideas in a way that is comprehensible to the
general public’, as he can see by consulting chapter 9 of the New 杏吧原创
Guide to Chaos, edited by Nina Hall (Penguin 1991).
Michael Sewell The University of Reading
Letters: Essential maths
In his opening sentence Nicholson wonders: ‘Why is it that, as scientists,
we are so besotted with mathematics?’ Surely because mathematics is the
most powerful and concise way of communicating abstract ideas and modelling
the experimental discoveries on which technological progress depends.
Nicholson later enquires: ‘Why does maths today have such a stranglehold
in the training, selection and perception of scientists?’ The answer should
be as obvious to a scientist today as it was in the past: mathematics is
implicit in the order of nature and explicit in its best descriptions.
M. Stanbridge Perth, Western Australia
Letters: Men on ice
I am a little behind in my New 杏吧原创 reading and have just seen
John Gribbin’s box describing the work of Louis Agassiz (‘Secrets of a tropical
ice age’, 1 February). He ascribes to Agassiz the demonstration of the movement
of glaciers. I do not think that this is quite correct. It was James Forbes,
who later came to St Andrews University, who did the work.
Forbes was a friend of Agassiz and in 1841 visited him at his place
in the Bernese Oberland. Forbes had with him a theodolite, since he was
beginning his great work, which was the first accurate mapping in the Alps,
on the Mer de Glace in the Chamonix area. The Aiguille Forbes and the Forbes
Arrete are named after him for this work, and he became the first honourary
member of the then newly formed Alpine Club.
Forbes and Agassiz discussed glaciers, and Forbes suggested running
a line of stakes across the Unteraar glacier and then each day viewing along
the line with his theodolite. The line was soon seen to bulge in the middle
in the down-hill direction, thus demonstrating that glaciers are moving
rivers of ice.
The story goes that Agassiz was rather miffed that he had not done the
thing himself.
J. F. Allen University of St Andrews Fife
Letters: Uncertainty lives
‘Beating the uncertainty principle’ certainly makes an eyecatching title
(15 February), but I am afraid it is a misleading one. Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle is alive and well in the form delta x delta p >= h/4 pi, or in
the words: the product of the uncertainties in the position and momentum
of a particle can never be less than Planck’s constant divided by 4 pi.
This is an inevitable consequence of one of the basic elements of quantum
mechanics (that the position and momentum operators do not commute). If
it were ever violated the whole edifice of quantum mechanics would crumble,
and Scully and Walther’s predictions about the outcome of their experiments
would have no foundation.
In these experiments (as in a similarly motivated experiment by Zou,
Wang and Mandel), it is not the uncertainty principle that is being ‘got
round’, but a particular picture of the origin of the uncertainties, and
the physical mechanism through which a decrease in delta x is compensated
by an increase in delta p.
Scully and Walther’s experiments are designed to show most elegantly
that the uncertainty principle is not violated, even in circumstances where
there seems to be no physical mechanism through which the uncertainty in
momentum can be increased to compensate for a decrease in the uncertainty
in position (produced by determining which slit an atom passed through).
The uncertainty principle is successful even though, as Jim Baggot’s
article demonstrates, we do not fully understand how it works.
Sara M. McMurry University of Dublin
Letters: Winter sun
Who goes sunbathing in February in Europe? I can assure both Brad Hurley
(Letters, 14 March) and Comment (15 February) that large numbers of Europeans
do just that in France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Italy. Not on
the beaches, in the ski resorts.
Does this sunbathing at altitude, with the intensifying effect of reflection
off the snow, increase the risk? As many would-be skiers in February have
found in recent years, there have been changes in the weather patterns in
the Alps which left them with little to do but sunbathe, as temperatures
of 14 掳C and brilliant sunshine melted the snow at 1000 metres, so that
the ice of the morning turned to unskiable porridge while they sat eating
lunch – in the sun.
Could New 杏吧原创 provide us with more information – especially in
view of an article in the popular press last month where we were assured
that thousands in London were hurrying to work wearing sunglasses and Factor
30 in response to this new terror.
Eileen Harrison Meigle Perthshire
Letters: More women
In Glyn Jones’s otherwise excellent article ‘The women who went back
to technology’ (7 March), his presentation of statistics unfortunately creates
a rather misleading picture of the overall position of the Open University’s
technology faculty. The university’s modular degree structure means that
data tend to be quoted for individual courses, in individual years. The
example he chose, with seven women out of 400 students, was, we recognise
with regret, accurate for one half-credit course, in one year.
However, we do achieve rather better results overall. Our Foundation
course consistently attracts 3000 to 4000 students, and the percentage of
women on the course has risen to (a still unsatisfactory) 27 per cent. On
the higher-level course, the average is 16 per cent. While these figures
give us no cause for complacency, they are a rather less discouraging picture
than might be derived from the single course presented.
R. M. Morris The Open University Milton Keynes
Letters: End of time
Amused by Garry Smith’s ‘Running out of time’ (Forum, 29 February),
as I described exactly this situation (the inability of the world’s computers
to cope with the ’00’ in the year ‘2000’) – and its cure – in The Ghost
from the Grand Banks (Gollancz, 1990). See chapter ‘The Century Syndrome’.
I must confess it wasn’t my idea – I saw a reference to this problem around
1989, but can’t remember where.
Arthur C. Clarke Sri Lanka