Chipping away
I can happily report to Brett Daniels that the amateur scientist is alive and well (Forum, 16 December).
By amateur, I assume that Daniels refers to the “unpaid enthusiast” rather than to “amateurish abilities”. The research interests of many professionals could be included in the former definition. One need only look through the daily papers or the pages of this journal to see the contributions made by amateurs to science. Within the last month alone the discovery of a new asteroid by George Sallit, an amateur astronomer, has made the headlines.
Within the mainly amateur society to which I belong, the Quekett Microsopical Club, there are many gifted amateurs who rank among the most expert in their chosen field, whether it be the study of algae, invertebrate animals or high-resolution optics. Often, a lack of up-to-date equipment is no hindrance to the amateur, as much can be made at home with a little ingenuity. Even today, the development of most scientific equipment starts with a good rummage through the spare parts bin.
Keeping up with the literature is more of a problem, together with the high cost of journals and specialised texts. It is often both difficult and expensive to determine whether one’s observations are original. Of course, there are some areas of science where the amateur is very restricted. Few gardens, for example, are large enough to accommodate a decent particle accelerator.
The amateur’s role is no longer at the cutting edge of science, but he or she can make good contributions to those areas of science which no longer attract research grants, and derive great pleasure along the way. Whether or iiot the amateur makes major contributions to science is open to debate, but how many professional scientists really make major contributions? Do we not all, with a few notable exceptions, merely chip away at the rock of knowledge piece by piece.
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Target growth
I was interested to read the article by Fred Pearce concerning the Millennium Commission’s grant to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for its Millennium Seed Bank (This Week, 6 January). However, I was disappointed by the negative slant it put on one of the most important projects ever conceived to conserve plant species for future generations. I feel it is necessary to dispel any impression left by this article that the project might fail to achieve its main aim 鈥� the collection and conservation of 10 per cent of the world’s flora by 2010 鈥� due to lack of funds.
The Millennium Commission’s award will prime the pumps by paying a considerable proportion of the cost of collecting seeds from overseas, as well as financing the building costs and the collection of the British flora. Kew is also hoping to help developing countries secure substantial funds from the Global Environment Facility so that they can collect the seed of their own native flora and buy into the project. This will create an atmosphere of international partnership, which is a crucial element of the Millennium Seed Bank.
However, the success of the project is not dependent on these funds being forthcoming. Kew already receives and will continue to receive significant commitments in-kind from several overseas countries for seed collecting.
Kew is also dedicating a considerable proportion of its own financial resources to the project and will continue its current level of funding for seed conservation, which has already ensured that the existing seed bank is the largest and most diverse of its type in the world. Public support is also crucial to the project, and Kew is looking to raise 拢7.3 million through an appeal which will be launched in the spring. Some 拢1.2 million has already been given in cash and commitments.
In short, Kew is absolutely committed to seeing this vital project achieve its targets. I strongly believe that the Millennium Seed Bank will make a very real difference to the conservation of the world’s flowering plants, which is in the interests of all humanity.
Structured speech
As a linguist I was pleased to see your story on language death (“Death of a mother tongue”, 6 January). However, one point requires comment. The article gives the impression that linguists disagree with Mace and Pagel’s mathematical approach to the ecology of language diversity. This is inaccurate in two ways. First, few linguists have heard of Mace and Pagel’s work 鈥� within the profession, debate on language death has concentrated on ethical and political issues. Despite a reference to “most linguists”, the only person quoted in this section of the article is “one social scientist”.
Second, and more importantly, I see no contradiction between mainstream linguistics and Mace and Pagel’s thesis. The linguist’s central concern is with the structure of languages, and with trying to explain general structural constraints (for example, why languages with a “z” sound tend to have an “s” sound but not vice-versa, and why languages that put the verb at the end of the clause also tend to put prepositions after the noun rather than before). Such questions are almost entirely independent of how many languages there are or how they are distributed around the world.
The concern with structure rather than ecology does, however, make clear why linguists have a professional stake in linguistic diversity. If 80 or 90 per cent of the languages spoken today disappear in the next century, generalisations about the few remaining languages may only reflect historical accident rather than revealing anything of importance about the linguistic potential of the human brain.
Easy lift
Timothy Jenson (Letters, 6 January) seems to have got his vortices in a twist, or at least to have confused action and reaction.
He is quite correct to note that in normal flight an aircraft wing produces a downwash, and that the reaction to the force acting downwards on the airflow is equal to the lift on the wing. He is incorrect to dismiss as a myth the idea that the lift corresponds to pressure variations. The reduction in pressure above the wing, together with a slightly smaller increase in pressure below the wing, are measurable quantities which are found to account for the magnitude of the lift.
The pressure variations involved are quite modest 鈥� it has been said that the suction acting on the upper wing surface of an airliner at takeoff is approximately equal to that which a three-year-old child can achieve through a drinking straw.
Power plus
With reference to P. W. Agnew’s letter about the inefficiency of Ballylumford power station (23/30 December), I would be interested to learn the derivation of the figures quoted.
If the efficiency of Ballylumford is approximately 30 per cent in converting gas to electricity, then that makes it comparable with other simple cycle machines of that vintage. Small combined heat and power stations, however, do not have an efficiency of 90 per cent. The most efficient CHP plants currently achieve figures in the order of 60 per cent. Unless a new reference base for efficiency is being used (which makes the earlier 30 per cent figure invalid) then something is very wrong.
While the point being made is a valid one, and worthy of discussion -whether it is more efficient in terms of resource usage to completely replace an older system with a more modern system 鈥� the case is weakened when inaccurate statistics are used. Of course, if any reader does know of a CHP plant which operates at 90 per cent efficiency, I would be extremely interested to hear about it.
Clean art
Andy Coghlan’s article “Layers of meaning” (December 23/30) throws much-needed light on the worrying, pseudoscientific cleaning methods which have found favour in Anglo-Saxon countries since the Second World War.
Mark Richmond’s dismissive characterisation of claims that solvents damage paint films as being “based on aesthetics or emotions” is unfounded and, therefore, is itself unscientific. These claims have emanated not from misinformed art lovers but from internationally eminent chemists and physicists after decades of rigorous research.
If I may provide an example: last year, when the Louvre was considering carrying out restoration on its Leonardos, my call for caution and restraint received support from Jacques Roire, a prominent specialist in solvent studies. Roire permitted me to cite his own views on cleaning risks -specifically, that when a solvent is in direct contact with (even very old) paint films, irreversible damage may occur if their upper layers are made of glazes.
This was not a maverick judgment: S茅gol猫ne Bergeon, a former head of painting conservation in the Louvre, made the same point at length and with graphic illustrations, in her authoritative 1990 book on art restoration (Science et Patience ou la Restauration des Peintures). Moreover, in this work Bergeon made a forceful, implicit, challenge to “Anglo-Saxon” cleaning practices, in terms entirely free of “aesthetics or emotions”.
Judgments on the rightness or wrongness of cleaning are not subjective but are simply a matter of scientific competence. For this reason, it is very perplexing that Aviva Burnstock of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London should suggest that even if the National Gallery were to publish evidence that solvents cause no damage, it would still fail to “dispel the doubts” of critics.
A reliable, demonstrable, scientific proof of safety would necessarily silence critics. Is it possible that Burnstock is not entirely confident that the forthcoming evidence promised by the National Gallery will be as solid and beyond methodological reproach as real scientific proofs are traditionally required to be?
Rational thought
The arguments put forward by Stephen Budiansky in denigrating Stephen Kellert’s book The Value of Life (Review, 23/30 December) are seriously flawed. His standpoint is clear from his final sentence: “The assertion that feelings matter above all else is an even more dangerous step away from rational discussion of a critical problem.”
Why? Not having read Kellert’s book, I cannot defend it and it may well be that his arguments are confused, but I would be surprised if his intention was to move away from rational discussion. It may well be that some current statements about rates of extinction should be taken with a pinch of salt, but the notion that feelings have no place in the conservation argument is bizarre. Feelings are important, and the assertion that they are somehow less so than scientific argument is absurd. The two complement each other and are certainly not mutually exclusive.
So why conserve? Surely for more than utilitarian, or what Budiansky calls “pop-ecology” reasons. Everyone knows that these arguments have their weaknesses, but the conservation movement often seems to think that its rationale has to be couched in purely materialistic terms in order to gain any acceptance. Surely this is mistaken.
Most conservationists know full well that these arguments are merely rather feeble attempts to rationalise their “feelings”. It is only the Philistine who cannot see further than the utilitarian arguments for the conservation of biodiversity. Why is great art worth preserving? Because of the effect it has on our “feelings”. Why go to a production of Hamlet? Certainly not for any scientific reason. We should afford the species of this planet, the products of millions of years of evolution, at least as much respect.
As for whether or not the human love for nature is innate, I don’t see how humans can fail to have some sort of empathy with nature, since we are a part of it. If we seek to cut ourselves off from that feeling 鈥� to place ourselves “above” nature 鈥� well, that is up to us. When Budiansky invokes the 17th-century vogue for thinking of mountains as “monstrous”, and so on, to support his argument against the human affinity with nature, he forgets one crucial thing. At that time nature was something to be afraid of, as we were subordinate to it. There was also plenty of it. Naturally enough, people felt insecure and afraid when confronted by the more dramatic manifestations of nature.
The pendulum has now swung the other way. Nature is now almost totally subservient to humans, so no longer poses any threat. There is also less of it that remains relatively unaffected by our activities. Therefore, unsurprisingly, the way we think about nature has changed.
It seems to me that there is a hollow centre to Budiansky’s arguments that leads to one of two conclusions. The first is that he doesn’t care: a perfectly legitimate point of view. The second is that he does care, but he doesn’t know why, a position I find harder to fathom. As for me, I am happy to admit to “feelings” being one of the sources of my concern about the future of the biodiversity of the planet. It will not stop me from thinking rationally about possible solutions.
Nothing doing
It amuses me when writers such as Ralph Estling (Letters, 6 January) seek to dismiss antagonistic views by attaching labels to them such as “metaphysical” 鈥� since all positions in science are grounded in the philosophical schools to which they respectively belong: empiricism, idealism and so on. For example, the great debate between Bohr and Einstein in the 1930s largely centred upon the philosophical interpretations of quantum theory.
The correspondence of Estling et al trades upon ambiguities in the word “nothing”. To speak of the Universe originating “from nothing” misses the point 鈥� in the view being debated there is not a “nothing” from whence the Universe came, but no beyond at all. It is also erroneous to equate the “vacuum” with “nothing”. The “empty space” of general relativity is a medium which is physically neither homogenous nor isotropic. Without it, light could not propagate: it is an ether which though free of mechanical and kinematic properties nevertheless has a physical structure.
What your letter writers omit to consider is that the big bang can only constitute an origin in one particular (dare I say it, metaphysical) view of the Universe: that of the evolving world. Though the current (Copenhagen) orthodoxy in physics does have it that past, present and future are objective features of an evolving Universe, there is no evidence for this. In the alternative view, the static interpretation of time (with Einstein among its adherents), past, present and future are anthropocentric constructs which in the objective world all coexist. In this model the big bang cannot be an origin but only a limit. This is because the whole Universe, including past, present and future, as we call them, simply exists and does not happen. As such, the Universe is, in its entirety (big bang and perhaps big crunch included), without origination or cause.
Forceful alternative?
After reading Marcus Chown’s interesting and entertaining article “Cosmic beachcombers” (23/30 December 1995) I would like to ask why do all our theories assume that gravity alone is responsible for holding the galaxies together (and indeed, for forming them in the first place)?
We can see that matter groups itself together on all scales from the subatomic to the supergalactic. This is taken for granted so much that no one feels silly looking for even finer subdivisions of elementary particles, or for larger groupings of galactic clusters.
We also see that different forces (or 鈥� if you like your theories grandly unified 鈥� different aspects of some underlying force) dominate at different scales. From the strong and weak nuclear forces at the subatomic level, through the electric force which holds sway over chemical interactions from the atomic level upwards, to gravity which dominates our lives and the motions of the planets in the Solar System.
But why stop there? The observed behaviour of nature so far suggests that where one force tails off, another takes over. Is there any reason to suppose the same shouldn’t happen at the galactic level as at the particle level? This actually seems less bizarre than postulating all sorts of exotic matter to give poor old gravity a helping hand, or even suggesting that gravity behaves differently at different distances.
A force which only became significant at such a huge scale would clearly be very difficult to detect in a laboratory. Perhaps instead we should be looking out for some behaviour at the galactic level which can’t be explained by the forces we know of, acting on the matter we know about.