Spooky signal
Stephen Shaw writes of “tomorrow’s ghosts” in the “twilight zone of quantum mechanics” (Letters, 29 July). Such a proposition is so intriguing that the search for corroboration should begin immediately. I can offer one important piece of evidence.
In December 1994, I won the Feedback Christmas competition with the suggested book title “Ghosts, poltergeists and quantum mechanics”. Careful measurement indeed shows that this signal was received some 28 weeks before Stephen Shaw transmitted it.
Unfortunately, the whisky which I won seemed, to borrow a phrase from other ghosthunters, simply to vanish before my eyes. Most strange.
In that spirit, though, I eagerly await transmission of the winning entries for the 1995 Christmas Competition.
The anonymous author of the following item, which I first encountered in the 1930s, had obviously had similar thoughts to those advanced by Shaw:
There was a young woman named Bright
Who travelled much faster than light.
She started one day
In a relative way,
And returned on the previous night.
Shaw wonders if anybody has “considered the possibility that 鈥� someone in the future 鈥� is sending images of people back to our time and creating ‘ghosts’.”
Without commenting on the correctness of the hypothesis itself, yes, someone has already considered the possibility, or at least a similar one. In Olaf Stapledon’s novel Last and First Men, written in 1930, the Last Men (some two thousand million years in the future) attempt to communicate with earlier times. They comment that some of their earlier unsuccessful attempts were responsible for reports of haunting and similar phenomena.
Game of chance
Philosophy untested by experiment is dangerous. George Dyke (Letters, 29 July) dismisses the possibility that a combination of a 5p coin attached to a 10p coin would be equally likely to fall either way up.
I make no claim to statistical significance, but, until boredom set in, I tossed such a combination 250 times. The scores were: 5p coin uppermost, 125 times: 10p coin uppermost, 125 times.
Dyke isn’t the only one to use the equivalent of a smooth-sided coin to ensure complete randomness. In Guys and Dolls, Big Julie from Chicago plays with his own dice, from which the spots have been removed. Fortunately, he remembers where the spots formerly were.
I had always assumed that this meant that Big Julie was nothing but a no-good rascal. However, now it seems that he was really being scrupulously fair in ensuring all numbers had an equal chance. My apologies, Big Julie.
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No such condition
Although the Focus article by David Cohen on multiple personality disorder (“Now we are one, or two, or three 鈥�”, 17 June) was quite broad in scope it seems to me to have some biases. I did not recognise the description of my own work as vitriolic and suggest that the use of the term “disassociative” is inaccurate, the generally accepted word being “dissociative”.
More important, Cohen states that: “However the condition is viewed in Britain, it is clear that it is gaining credibility elsewhere.” This is scarcely a fair statement of the matter.
A few true believers in the Netherlands have produced a little bunch of cases and the same has happened in a corner of Norway. Hardly any cases have been found in Japan, despite the quotation from Frank Putnam, and the number in Switzerland is disputed. When I meet senior psychiatrists from other parts of the world, they are usually extremely sceptical.
Multiple personality disorder has lost intellectual credibility in North America and, according to Ian Hacking, a distinguished and not unsympathetic philosopher/historian, the proponents of it have been “running scared”.
Patients treated for multiple personality disorder frequently do worse than would otherwise be the case, and there is a striking scarcity of adequate evidence that such treatment can produce better results than with other methods. There have been scandals in the US involving the alleged exploitation of the diagnosis for securing hospital admission and insurance payments.
If I say that psychiatry 鈥� and even more psychiatric patients 鈥� would be well rid of this concept, I hope I will not again be accused of being vitriolic.
Victorian scourge
The piece on tuberculosis “epidemics” (New 杏吧原创, Science, 5 August) begins with the flip suggestion that people might have thought TB’s decline was due to a ban on spitting. No, actually I thought the scourge of TB had something to do with the state of affairs described in Friedrich Engel’s The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and, after reading the article, I still do.
Older people can remember growing up in a TB culture that lasted till the 1960s and Twiggy-type models. “How thin Johnny is looking!” was a standard disapproving comment. I am deeply suspicious of 11 variables being fed into a sophisticated mathematical model. How can anyone know if they are the key ones?
It is claimed that there was an “epidemic”. I had assumed that TB was endemic (it has been found in ancient human remains). When I was screened after my wife contracted it (from her father, who was gassed in the First World War), I was told I was “within normal limits”. One can reasonably assume that the whole population, up to a few decades ago, was infected, and that resistance was built up as a result of the reduction in poverty since the late 19th century. Also, susceptible people and their genes were eliminated from the population because the disease frequently kills or disables before the age of marriage.
In the latter connection, I have wondered whether the notorious rarity of heart attacks during the reign of Queen Victoria, despite the amazing diets of the better-off, was due partly to the large TB-susceptible fraction of the population being resistant to heart disease. This would suggest that the early death of huge numbers of TB-susceptible people (largely because of appalling living conditions) is in part responsible for the high prevalence of heart disease today.
This might also have a bearing on cancer: Hans Eysenck once produced some statistics that purported to show that TB sufferers were nearly cancer-proof.
The return of TB to American cities could signal that the endemic nature of the disease reasserts itself when a society loses control of poverty. This could be taken as a salutary warning for Britain.
Obesity and poverty
I live in an area of Sheffield where the average unemployment level varies between 60 and 70 per cent. Fewer than half the population of this electoral ward own a car, and a significant minority of people live in almost Dickensian poverty. There is also a high incidence of obesity, but I would venture to suggest that it is not, in general, caused so much by lack of physical activity (“Fighting fat with feeling”, 22 July) as lack of proper nutritional education. Many people in this area simply cannot afford labour-saving devices such as cars and washing machines, so these can hardly be the main culprits.
It is common for parents living in the flats to pacify their children by providing them with a virtually limitless supply of sweets. I suspect that children so pacified are more likely to retain an excessive taste for sweet and fatty foods into adulthood. The local take-away food outlets cater for traditional tastes, providing food which is on the whole extremely fatty. Because there is not a great deal of spare cash in this area, people tend not to experiment with healthier meals, and thus it becomes a vicious circle: established, unhealthy tastes are reinforced.
I am not in any way denigrating the role of exercise in staying slim and healthy. Being one of the 50 per cent or more without a car, I walk almost everywhere and enjoy it. However, I would attribute my 24-inch waist as much to a carefully controlled low-fat diet as to the amount of exercise I take, and I start to get just a little concerned when I hear a government official stressing one factor at the expense of the other.
Waking sleep
In “You won’t feel a thing” (22 July) you report the findings of Michael Wang and Ian Russell that “almost half of their [my italics] patients are 鈥� awake during anaesthesia 鈥�”. The emphasis is crucial. This problem afflicts some anaesthetists and not others. In general the problem is caused by the deliberate administration of doses of inadequate anaesthetic drugs in the belief that smaller doses will have less adverse effects on the patient. This latter contention is largely unproven.
You also refer to a 30-year old study in which hypnotised patients were apparently able to recall dramatic conversations from a period when they were genuinely anaesthetised. Leaving aside the uncontrolled nature of this study and the complexities introduced by the use of hypnosis, we should note that the study was published as a preliminary communication and yet there was no follow-up publication. A strange lack after such dramatic findings.
Lots to learn
Like Ken Wallace (Letters, 29 July), for quite a while I was puzzled as to how, in a black hole, infinite gravity compresses matter to nothing, and yet in the big bang, infinite mass compressed by gravity into nothing is said to have been overcome by some other force in an expanding Universe.
It’s like the graph of the tangent function we used to draw at school, disappearing into plus infinity at half 蟺/2 only to reappear from minus infinity at half 蟺/2 on its way to 蟺.
It could well be that there are other forces in addition to the four known interactions. Roger Jannison (Physics World, June 1995), while investigating “dowsing”, found a force very similar to, but not quite like the electromagnetic force, which was shielded by aluminium.
Only a fraction of a star’s mass is passed on to future generations and immense masses are devoured by black holes, and yet the Universe does not seem to be “running down” for want of fertile material, as one would expect. Jacqueline Milton, in A Concise Dictionary of Astronomy, defines a “white hole” as the mathematical inverse of a “black hole”.
There’s a lot of evidence for black holes 鈥� only recently acknowledged 鈥� and for the big bang, such as the cosmic microwave background radiation at just under 3 kelvin, but still there is a lot we don’t understand about either.
We are still in the learning stage, feeling our way, examining evidence as it comes along. There are still missing links to be discovered. But considering modern humans have only existed for about 30 000 years (about 1000 generations) and alphabet writing was only invented about 4000 years ago, we haven’t done badly.
Wallace questions how the Universe was able to escape its own gravity at the big bang. I postulate that it didn’t and the Universe is one gigantic black hole, not at present a singularity but still characterising the event horizon at the perceived edge.
We also, of course, reside on an event horizon, as viewed from the perspective of that perceived edge. It must be appreciated that the expansion is not akin in any sense to the popular current bun analogy, there being no Newtonian boundary to the Universe, only an event horizon.
Correspondingly, this is why the Hubble constant isn’t actually constant 鈥� it rises to infinity at the edge. Unfortunately, insistence on a fixed value has created bizarre things out of peripheral galaxies, such as quasars.
This is only the merest outline of one aspect of the theory, but there are many other implications. In the fuller form, it addresses the mechanism of breaking free from singularity, background radiation, clumping and even how many previous universes there have been.
One question remains unanswered though 鈥� how did the whole thing start off in the first place? Beats me!
Invisible mutants
Re Ciba’s activator spray to prime plant defences against pathogens (Technology, 15 July): taking as a model rice blast disease, caused by Magnaporthe grisea, there are at least two levels at which the resistance or susceptibility of the host plant is determined. The first, where most of the variation between plants lies, is the recognition of the attacking pathogen by the plant’s defence systems. This is probably analogous to the human immune antigen response.
Certain recessive mutations of the fungus will lack particular cell surface proteins, and they will be deficient in certain minor metabolic functions such as ion transport. But if this mutation renders them “invisible” to the defences of any given rice variety, then this mutant will be able to bring about disease, and reproduce, so it will be strongly naturally selected for as compared with the incompatible “wild type”.
An artificial plant defence activator cuts out this stage of interaction so that the only pathogen mutants which can achieve disease are those which are unaffected by (“immune” to) the sharp end of the plants’ defences 鈥� for example, induced compounds like salicylic acid, flavonoids and diterpenoids.
The mode of action of these antifungal agents is almost certainly more fundamental to fungal biochemistry than the processes involving the recognition proteins. Mutants in such essential pathways will suffer reduced viability compared with the “invisible” mutants, and under a natural situation they would be selected against. When an artificial activator is employed, only the “immune” mutants are able to cause disease and survive to complete their life cycle, so despite the metabolic penalties they must pay, they are very strongly selected for.
Ciba’s well-meaning work on plant activators will give us a population of “superbugs” and render the great majority of plant varieties currently resistant to disease susceptible.
Sequencing people
Your article on randomness (“It’s a lottery”, 22 July) suggested an experiment to test for the individuality or separateness of human consciousness.
As it is possible to identify the “signatures” of randomness algorithms when they are applied to solving problems in physics such as the Ising problem, would it not be possible to use groups of people to provide sets of random numbers? Each individual would suggest a single number to contribute to a sequence. They would then be sampled over a period of time to produce a series of sequences. Numbers should not be based on some known real-life parameter, such as dates of birth or test match scores, but on a “spontaneous” selection. Sets could be chosen on the basis of nationality, families, geography, membership of organisations or professions 鈥� any groupings that the investigators could think of.
It would be interesting to see if any detectable randomness signatures emerged. You could even have control groups chosen by “random” processes against which related groupings could be tested. It might not be possible to explain any apparent causal links that showed up, but it would be interesting to see if they appear to exist.
Pink power
Noisy neighbours can be neutralised by a simpler method than that proposed by Frank Fahy and colleagues (Technology, 29 July). For five years in the 1980s I lived in a small terraced house next door to someone who had fixed high-powered speakers on a joint wall and played bursts of loud music at unpredictable intervals.
I knew of the industrial use of antiphase sound, as proposed by the Southampton team for domestic use, but it was not a practical proposition for me. Better insulation in the walls was also not practical 鈥� I could sometimes feel bass notes from next door through my hands when they were in contact with the banisters and through the soles of my feet on the floors.
What I did was to use “pink noise”, a random mix of all frequencies which makes a continuous rushing sound. I recorded this onto both sides of a cassette tape. Using discarded stereo equipment I then projected the pink noise at the joint wall as close to the site of the speakers on the other side as possible. I insulated the backs of the speakers to minimise the projection of the “pink noise” back into my own home.
In this way I got relief from my noisy neighbours almost as soon as I had thought of the idea, at very little cost. Pink noise is unlikely to be perceived as a counter-intrusion, even by the most bullying neighbour. The reason it works seems to be as much psychological as physical: the brain learns to ignore a continuous sound, and if this masks an irritating beat then the result is peace.
Powder-free
Mike Hutton is a little late in his suggestion that the solution to the problem of making a powder-free glove would be a worthy task for any budding Nobel laureate (Letters, 29 July). In the early 1980s, London International Group patented and developed a process for making powder-free gloves which can be donned with dry, wet or damp hands.
The process involves coating the inner surface of the glove with a hard acrylic polymer which is itself inelastic, but allows the glove to be stretched quite normally without flaking or powdering. This truly powder-free glove significantly reduces the risk of the allergic and irritant reactions seen with powdered gloves.
The product, sold under the name Biogel to the medical and dental professions, has not yet brought its inventors the Nobel Prize, but in 1993 the company was awarded the prestigious Prince Philip Award for Polymers in the Service of Mankind.
Womb party
Gentlemen, don’t waste your valuable time knitting a uterus in order to demonstrate uterine function (Feedback, 27 May, and Letters, 24 June and 22 July). A far better model is available now in a shop near you. The womb’s a balloon: a party balloon.
The real uterus is elastic and pear-shaped, with a neck which is tied by a hormonal knot during pregnancy and untied for labour. It can expand to twenty times its original size, but never quite regains its original shape after the first pregnancy. It is an energy-storing device with elastic memory 鈥� the stretch-contract reflex. The balloon model gives an indication of just how large the forces of labour must be to open the neck to let a baby out; it also explains why a Shirodkar stitch at the neck of the cervix can save a pregnancy if the womb’s own hormonal knot fails.
Balloons have a tendency to pop. The womb is rather better designed but can acquire manmade flaws. The uterus can rupture during labour as a result of a failure at the site of a scar from a Caesarean section, an overdose of prostaglandin (which will tend to dissolve the scar) or an overdose of oxytocin 鈥� a drug used to induce labour. Further reading on the womb’s a balloon is found in my book Childbirth Unmasked.
You would be much better employed knitting a baby’s bonnet to cover the area of the body which loses most heat. With the rest of your packet of balloons you can celebrate the baby’s birth.
Safe pooting
Pooters, or aspirators, can indeed be dangerous, particularly when collecting insects from dung, cadavers, or in bat caves (Feedback, 22 July). There is a simple solution: a blow pooter that works on the Venturi principle, available from various American entomological supply companies.
The suction force generated is not very large, but, if there is no danger of inhaling pathogens, the exhaust hole can be covered with a finger and it can be used as a conventional suction pooter.
Incidentally, a few years ago there was a lengthy discussion in Antenna, the journal of the Royal Entomological Society of London, regarding the origin of the name “pooter”.