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Songs for the birds
A leopard in the film Bringing Up Baby has a special liking for the song I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby (“Blues for Beaky”, 24/31 December). This reminds me that some years ago it was recorded in the paper that the owner of two African grey parrots had died, leaving 拢3000 or so for their future upkeep. The birds and their endowment were duly sent to Bird World, the park near Farnham, Surrey.
Shortly after this my wife and I visited the park in search, among other things, of Ella and Lewis, the two parrots in question. Having located the African grey aviary, we endeavoured to call the parrots, who were concealed in the nesting enclosure, but without success.
However, as soon as I gave my imitation of Ella Fitzgerald imitating Louis Armstrong singing I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby, the two African greys immediately rushed to the wire of the aviary and were obviously delighted to hear something which they recognised from their former home.
Whatsisname
As a lifetime sufferer from temporary loss of memory of people’s names, I found Alun Rees’s article on onomastic aphasia (Forum, 24/31 December) very interesting. However, he has hardly scratched the surface.
A typical situation is that I can remember the name five minutes before I need it; I cannot remember it when I need it; and then I remember it again five minutes later, when it is too late.
If I get cross and concentrate desperately hard at trying to remember the name, it absolutely and totally refuses to come. But I can sometimes trick my memory by relaxing and thinking of something else 鈥� the lost name will then pop into my mind (because my memory thinks I no longer need it). I then have to repeat it many times to stop it disappearing again.
It is as if my mind and my memory are two separate entities. I control my mind but my memory will only help me if it feels like co-operating. I am beginning to believe that it is both obstinate and has a perverse sense of humour.
Something else that Rees does not mention is that onomastic aphasia is telepathically transmittable. Many times a name is in my head when someone asks me “what’s his name?” at which instant the name will disappear until it is no longer required. The same will happen the other way around, when I ask someone else for a name.
I know that memory is little understood but I suspect that there is much more to it than even the researchers think.
First steps
I was interested to read that 1994 was the 30th anniversary of Ed White’s space walk from Gemini 4 (“1995 and all that,” 24/31 December). Maybe the author should also have remembered the Russian cosmonaut Leonov, who performed a space walk from Voskhod 2. He achieved this feat some time before White, this making it the first space walk ever to be peformed.
Peat and ice
Fred Pearce’s report on Lars Franzen’s paper on peat bogs and ice ages is a little worrying (New 杏吧原创, Science, 3 December). It leaves the impression that there is imminent danger of an ice age, with the implication that we should, perhaps, dig up the remainder of our dwindling resources of peat.
Perhaps some of Franzen’s hypotheses should have been questioned more closely, such as his suggestion that peat under ice can decompose and release enough carbon dioxide through the ice to cause sufficient warming to melt the ice sheets.
Following the logic of Franzen’s arguments, there should have been massive glaciations following the carboniferous era, when astronomical amounts of carbon dioxide would have been removed from the atmosphere in the formation of limestone and coal. Perhaps a correlation could be found between coral reef formation and ice ages?
Stereo visions
Could the phenomenon of autostereography (“How to play tricks with dots”, 9 October 1993 and Letters, 24/31 December) explain the appearance of “visions” both paranormal and religious?
First, the human brain can create imagery out of commonly occurring shapes. Clouds can appear as faces, embers in the fire can suggest dragons, rocks in caverns may be named after a resemblance to some object or figure. The Rorschach inkblot test relies on such subjective visual interpretation. Significantly, the texture of the image is unimportant, but the suggested appearance is easily shared with fellow onlookers.
Secondly, the “wallpaper effect”, discovered by the Scottish physicist David Brewster, originally described the experience of stereopsis in relation to a commonly occurring visual experience of the time (Victorian wallpaper patterning). The unexpected (and therefore notable) feature here was the appearance of three-dimensionality in an otherwise flat uniform pattern. As above, the texture is of the image is unimportant, but unlike the above, the 3-dimensionality cannot be shared without detailed explanation and practice. This, of course, is the basis for the current craze for autostereograms.
Thirdly, once an autostereographic image is acquired by an observer, it can be held over a significant distance even if the observer moves away from the generating pattern. I have found that an image generated on an A4 sheet can be clearly held up to approximately 5 metres distance, with an optimal image at around 2 metres.
So how could autostereognosis explain a “vision”? For the sake of example, imagine a young girl standing in front of a stone wall, daydreaming (and with her visual axes therefore parallel). Fortuitously, the angle of the sunlight on the regular pattern of the wall creates an autostereographic image. As all those familiar with the phenomenon will know, this is striking, real (no doubt the more so if it appears completely unexpectedly), and can be held by the observer.
That the image is not a detailed representation of the Virgin Mary (for instance) does not matter; the “reality” of it is subjectively interpreted as such. Furthermore, the experience could not be shared even with close bystanders, who would be scanning in vain with focussed eyes.
Finally the image would be lost and most likely unrecreatable even by the observer. Such a chance effect could also be invoked to explain paranormal apparitions such as “ghosts”, usually (always?) unrecordable by photographic means.
Patents please
Judging by the press coverage there were several different consensus conferences on food biotechnology last November (This Week, 12 November). At the one Derrick Purdue was at (Letters, 10 December), the panel found “the genetic patenting system ‘completely inadequate'”. In the one I attended, the panel said “If patents were not given, this could severely hinder progress 鈥�” and made several other statements clearly recognising the importance of patents. I urge those interested to read the whole report.
The panel did find current patenting procedure “risky 鈥� and inadequate 鈥� [to deal] 鈥� with the issues raised by plant biotechnology”. It isn’t quite clear what issues they mean here. Many in industry would agree that current patenting procedures should be improved, but feel that they cannot be adapted to deal with many biotech issues (biosafety, for example).
Plant breeders’ rights do control subsequent generations of homozygous seed.
Finally, if patents were to be abolished for this technical area, I can assure Purdue that funding public research is by no means the only thing that the plant biotech industry would cease doing.
Net loss
The extensive coverage of the Internet appears to have had one interesting result. On a recent visit to a well-known high street newsagent, I visited the “popular science” book section. The shelves were crammed with books on computers and the Internet. Almost as a token gesture, on the bottom shelf were three copies of A Brief History of Time and one or two other volumes.
The only other science was to be found on the National Curriculum shelves. Science was also thin on the ground at the second Internet-based World Wide Web conference in Chicago recently, and looks like being so at the next one in Darmstadt in April. Is this a case of idolising the messenger rather than the message?
Centrist concept
John Gribbin’s article, “Do we live in the middle of the Universe?” (New 杏吧原创, Science, 17 December) was of more interest from the psychological than from the cosmological point of view. For many years, inflation theories involving a highly uniform universe have been strongly supported by practically all theorists. Is it just a coincidence that the sudden change of stance from this concept has followed so quickly after the recent Hubble Constant estimates have so clearly indicated that we live in an open, ever expanding Universe, an unpopular idea amongst workers in this field?
The attempt to evade the message of the observations by returning to the discredited pre-Copernican notion of ourselves situated in the privileged centre of the Universe, is surely the “dying gasp” of the advocates of a closed Universe.
Cretaceous comet
Speculating that X-rays from a periodically flaring black hole at the galactic centre caused the decline of the dinosaurs (Letters, 3 December) may be fun, but where’s the evidence?
The iridium and soot in the Cretaceous boundary clay imply one other cause, as James Davies accepts. Impact cratering of the Earth and other solar system bodies has unquestionably been going on since formation. And the dating of the 180-kilometre Chicxulub crater and tsunami deposits at 65 million years leaves little room to doubt the comet-asteroid impact explanation.
The non-terrestrial amino-acids measured in the sediments near the Cretaceous boundary, for roughly 100 000 years spanning the impact time, indicate a far more credible explanation for the decline and mass extinction of species, than the hypothetical black hole unrelated to any impacting object.
A giant comet splitting and fragmenting, partly via close approaches to Jupiter (in the manner of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9) would have supplied huge quantities of organics in dust to the Earth’s upper atmosphere, sufficient to force climatic fluctuations.
The impacting object would plausibly have been a large (10-kilometre) fragment of the same giant comet.
We have published detailed arguments for such a theory, originally proposed by Kevin Zahnle and David Grinspoon. Each point has been physically validated; giant comets exist, comets split, organics in comet micro-dust survive soft-landing through the atmosphere, stratospheric dust causes greenhouse cooling.
The black hole at the galactic centre, on the other hand, is conjectural and “suspiciously quiet” (Science, 22 October 1993), while none of the physicochemical impacts at Earth of its supposed X-rays have been explored and evidence sought.
Theoretical modesty
The well-written article “Gravity’s secret signals” (26 November) incorrectly describes me as “the theoretical physicist who first proposed LIGO in the 1970s”.
In fact, the original idea for a “laser interferometer gravitational-wave detector” was invented in the late 1960s, primarily by Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and the “Fabry-Perot” variant of such a detector, which will be used in LIGO, was invented largely by Ronald W. P. Drever of Glasgow University in the mid-1970s.
The LIGO Project itself was proposed not by me in the 1970s, but rather jointly by Weiss, Drever, Stan Whitcomb, me, and the Caltech/Massachusetts Institute of Technology team working with us, in the early 1980s. The project would have remained only a dream were it not for the leadership of Rochus Vogt (LIGO’s first detector), which brought it to the beginning of construction, and the more recent leadership of Barry Barish, LIGO’s principal investigator.
I, as a theorist, have made only minor contributions to LIGO by comparison with the talented experimenters who are actually carrying it out. It is a regrettable commentary on the sociology of science that we theorists often get credit for the ideas and achievements of our experimentalist colleagues.