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Big bangs
Now that observations have shown our Universe to be about eight billion
years old but some of the stars within it to be as old as sixteen billion
years (New 杏吧原创, Science, 29 October), it is surely time to think again
about the big bang theory. As long as one accepts the theory of a single big
bang beginning our Universe, the co-existence of stars twice as old as the
originating event is a logical impossibility.
However, if we reject the notion that time and the entire universe began
with “the” big bang, is there not a possibility that this particular bang
might have been predated by earlier ones that generated some of the stars now
found in our Universe? More than one Universe, more than one big bang.
Quentin Deakin
Bingley, West Yorkshire
The apparent paradox about the age of the Universe and the even older stars
is resolved by assuming that big bangs occur as random events in spacetime.
The mean time interval between big bangs may be several billion years and the
mean spatial interval may be several billion light years.
This model would be even more interesting and difficult for cosmologists to
study than the single big bang theory and could keep them busy for several
years.
My guess is that the celestial objects which appear to be several billion
years older than the present Universe are indeed so, being left-overs from the
last Universe.
Prosaic entropy
Surely Anthony Badalamenti, whose computer believes the best verse to have
high information-entropy, displays little understanding of art or science,
verse or entropy (New 杏吧原创, Science, 15 October).
When we communicate face to face we use expression, we use gesture, we use
stress, we use timing and only incidentally do we use words. If we write
prose, words are all that we have and we must use a great many of them to
compensate for the other media that we have lost. The result is a high word-
to-signal ratio, which would normally be considered a high-entropy state.
As soon as we try verse, even only metric blank verse, we partially restore
the powers of stress and timing. It is therefore possible to use fewer words
unless we pile metaphor upon simile as poetasters do. This, surely, is lower
entropy.
All forms of verse are more highly structured than prose, and rigid
structures mean reduced entropy. They also demand that, to shape our thoughts
to the form, we must ransack our vocabulary. This means that poets may,
indeed, use a wide array of words, but it is imposed upon them by the form in
which they write at the time, not by their psyches. Nor is wide vocabulary the
sign of great verse; were it so there would be many English poets far greater
than Shakespeare: Browning and Byron to name but two.
The computer-correlated criteria of Dodgson the mathematician, Carroll the
storyteller and the author of The Hunting of the Snark might lead the Nathan
Kline Institute to proclaim them different people, for they worked in
different forms. And, even poetically, it has long been remarked that there
are two Wordsworths. But I suspect that Badalamenti did not input any
Wordsworth in his “Poetry for the People” phase.
Nothing buttery
Susan Blackmore mentions the view that as far as what we call “mind” or
“consciousness” is concerned, there are only neurons and their connections
(Review, 1 October, and Letters 29 October). In particular she refers to
Francis Crick who believes that “our joys, sorrows, ambitions and even free
will are nothing more than the behaviour of those neurons”.
Such arguments seem to me to be analogous to saying that, for example, the
differential equations of physics are nothing more than the behaviour of the
circuits and chips within the computer solving them. The counterpart of “Your
mind is nothing but a pack of neurons” is “Computation is nothing but a pack
of chips”.
Both are examples of what the late Donald Mackay used to call “nothing-
buttery” or, more formally, metaphysical reductionism: the doctrine that if
something can be explained by reducing it to its elements at some particular
level then it can be dismissed as “nothing but” the activity of those
elements.
Unnuk us toomd
At a dinner party the other day the following was written down – “Unnuk us
toomda zaiyamt oop ubbliqs pea king” – to make some point or other, but when
it was given to someone to read, he could not understand it at all, even when
he read it out loud. The funny thing was that those around him could
understand what he was saying, and the more he said it, the clearer it sounded
to those around, and the more confused he seemed to become.
This, surely, says something about the way our ears see and our eyes hear
and how our brains process and understand the various data input formats
(under various levels of chardonnays). Much later we typed the phrase into an
Apple computer capable of speaking the written word, and sure enough the
computer made absolute sense – mind you, to be fair, the computer hadn’t had a
drop all evening.
Centipede's dilemma
Maybe Jim Collins and Ian Stewart should not pursue their research too far
(“The mathematical springs in insect steps”, 8 October). As I recall from
about 1920:
The centipede was happy quite Until the frog (for fun) Said “Pray, which
leg goes after which?”
This wrought his mind to such a pitch
He lay distracted in the ditch Considering how to run.
J. D. H. Iles
Orillia Ontario, Canada
Toothless agencies
Fred Pearce should note that Part I of the government’s draft bill setting
up an Environment Agency (This Week, 22 October) describes the proposed
Environment Agency for England and Wales, while Part II sets out the proposals
for a Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) combining the functions
presently carried out by the River Purification Authorities, Her Majesty’s
Industrial Pollution Inspectorate and those functions carried out by District
Councils relating to clean air and waste regulation.
As one who welcomed the government’s original proposals for SEPA when these
were published in 1993, I am deeply disappointed by the draft legislation.
Having worked for 46 years in the water industry, including 27 in water
pollution control, I firmly believe that the new agencies need to have
stronger powers, not weaker, than in the past – and that, if the new clauses
mentioned in your article are retained in the legislation, the new agencies
will be handicapped from their very inception.
This government announced its adoption not so long ago of two important
principles, firstly that the polluter shall pay, and secondly, the
precautionary principle that, even where the scientific evidence is not
complete, new potentially hazardous substances should be subject to stringent
control. Now it is clear that it has largely forgotten its commitments given
at the time of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and that the environment
must once again take second place to wealth creation and economic
development.
Those of us who are concerned about the state of the environment should
make it abundantly clear that, having largely rid this country of much of the
visible gross pollution of air and water, the next phase will require more
strenuous efforts in order to reduce the inputs of a vast range of organic
micropollutants, trace metals and new hazards such as oestrogen-mimicking
compounds, all of which are invisible to the eye and only detectable by
sophisticated methods of analysis. Unfortunately, this legislation will send
out the wrong signals to industrialists and developers.
Desmond Hammerton
Clyde River Purification Board
East Kilbride, Glasgow
I wouldn’t necessarily ascribe pure motives to the government, but I do
welcome the requirement that the agency should “have regard” to the costs and
benefits of its actions.
For any environmental problem, there will be a range of policy options
which will be more or less efficient as a solution. For example, a 10 per cent
annual increase in the cost of petrol is an inefficient way of dealing with
urban traffic congestion and air pollution. This would impose very significant
costs on the whole economy, leading to higher unemployment, and would probably
have very little impact on the urban problem.
An efficient solution might be congestion-based urban road pricing,
combined with a significant increase in public transport investment. It is
possible that this combination would lead to a net macroeconomic gain, as the
拢10 billion annual cost of congestion is relieved, as well as having a
significant impact on the environmental problem.
So what’s so bad about “having regard” to the costs and benefits?
Duncan Goldie-Scot
Lifespan
Banbury, Oxfordshire
Low risk
Re: Margaret Mellon’s letter (1 October) regarding the vaccinia virus
recombinant vaccine for rinderpest (vRVFH) developed in my laboratory under
USAID sponsorship: Mellon states that the testing protocols submitted to the
Rinderpest Biosafety Committee in 1991 were of “flawed design and incomplete”.
However, it is important to realise that testing protocols approved by the
second biosafety committee meeting in 1993 were not revised: they were the
original procedures which had been outlined to the 1991 meeting. In addition,
at that time the vaccinia virus recombinant vaccine for rabies was already
being field tested in Europe.
The rabies vaccine was constructed with the more virulent Copenhagen strain
of vaccinia virus, a strain that has 200 to 300 incidents of complications per
million primary vaccinees, as compared with the Wyeth strain used for
rinderpest (2 to 6 per million primary vaccinees). Based on attenuation
experiments, we estimate insertional inactivation of TK and HA genes would
each cut the rate down to 10 per cent of the original; inactivation of both
would then cut the rate to 1 per cent.
During the smallpox eradication campaign, only 1 in 300 vaccinees spread
the agent to a nonvaccinee. Since there are no lesions associated with the
attenuated vaccine in cattle, and humans and cows do not normally live in
close proximity, the best estimates of the risk of complications in humans
accidentally exposed during the testing protocol of this severely attenuated
vaccinia virus vaccine is no more than 1 to 3 in 10 billion vaccinations, or
very close to zero.
Mellon’s expressed concern for risk to the population from this vaccine’s
importation into Kenya is condescending and uninformed. There are currently a
number of vaccinia virus recombinant vaccines under development in Kenya and
this research is being conducted by Kenyan scientists with expertise in
molecular biology and medicine. Further, she should know that vRVFH testing
has the full support of the government of Kenya, and this is, ultimately, an
issue of national sovereignty.
Safety is always a major concern and is especially so in the face of the
AIDS epidemic in Africa. Safety was the primary issue addressed by qualified,
expert consultants of the WHO and OIE in their consideration of vRVFH in 1989.
These agencies are the appropriate ones for such deliberations, and the
guidelines they provided were properly stringent. Strict adherence to these
guidelines was followed in designing a testing protocol, and indeed the final
design exceeded even their recommendations to assure safety of all
concerned.
This correspondence is now closed – Ed
Cooldown
Richard Courtney is quite right when he says that in normal operation
nuclear power stations emit little radioactivity (Letters, 22 October).
However, it is totally incorrect to say that radioactive remains from nuclear
power stations are emitted to the environment. Such waste is in fact
concentrated and isolated, and not dispersed into the environment.
Nor do nuclear power stations have to be “encased in concrete for
centuries”. The ability to decommission to a greenfield site has in fact been
demonstrated, and in Britain the Windscale Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor is
being fully decommissioned on an early timescale. Under Britain’s preferred
three-stage decommissioning strategy, fuel and coolant are removed immediately
after the plant is shut down, reducing radioactivity by 99.9 per cent, and
most of the site is demolished and removed over a 5-10 year time span. It is
proposed to leave the reactor vessel itself for up to 130 years – not
centuries – before demolition, by which time its radioactivity will have
decreased to very low levels, making decommissioning easier, safer and
cheaper.
Coal contains trace quantities of potassium-40, uranium-238, thorium-232
and their decay products. When coal is burned, these radionuclides are
redistributed from underground into the biosphere; however, the waste from a
nuclear power station is contained and is dealt with. Radioactivity is not the
only hazardous waste from coal-fired power stations to find its way directly
into the environment: ash, heavy metals, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides,
as well as carbon dioxide, are all released from fossil fuel electricity
generation. Research into the mitigation of CO2 continues, but in
the meantime, the use of nuclear power helps to cut CO2
emissions.