Natural choice
P. W. Agnew criticises the use of gas for electricity generation at Ballylumford power station as being a scandalous and inefficient misuse of gas (Letters, December 23/30). I should like to make a number of points in response to this criticism.
The conversion to natural gas firing was a condition of British Gas’s purchase of Ballylumford following privatisation of the generators in 1991 and in 92. Gas is the cleanest of all fossil fuels. Its use at Ballylumford will reduce emissions of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide, offering significant environmental benefits for Northern Ireland and farther afield.
Generating electricity by combined heat and power (CHP) schemes has, as David Flin pointed out (Letters, 27 January), only limited use because of restrictions on the amount of heat that can be economically delivered to users. CHP schemes are typically relatively small and associated with factories or other enterprises which have a concentrated heat demand. There is, therefore, also a need for some power stations which generate electricity alone.
The use of gas at the Ballylumford power station will not preclude its use in domestic boilers and CHP schemes. Plans are well advanced for the introduction of gas into the Greater Belfast area. However, without the assured early revenues from the power station the investment in the pipeline may not have been made.
Desert naivety
Your article describes a proposal by Japanese researchers to improve the desert tolerance of plants by giving them the gene for a more efficient form of the CO2-fixing enzyme RuBisCo (Technology, 20 January). This gives credence to a naive proposal that is very unlikely to work.
Despite the support given in many biochemistry textbooks to the supposed role of RuBisCo in limiting the rate of photosynthesis, it is unlikely that the enzyme would pose a serious limitation in desert conditions. Mark Stitt and his colleagues, then at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, quantified the effect of varying the activity of RuBisCo in tobacco plants under a variety of environmental conditions. They found that RuBisCo alone does not limit the rate, except when photosynthesis is being driven at high rates by above normal light intensity, carbon dioxide levels and humidity. Other factors are at least as important under conditions of reduced humidity (Planta, vol 183, p 555).
This project merely represents one instance of a widespread misapprehension that the rates of metabolic pathways are determined by single pacemaker steps. Theory and experiment have both shown that this is not generally true. On the contrary, control is often distributed over a number of steps, none of which alone has a strong effect. This study on photosynthesis will not be the first to show that increasing the activity of just one supposed rate-limiting target enzyme has disappointingly small, even negligible, effects. When are molecular geneticists (and their funding bodies) going to stop repeating the same mistakes?
Plain wrong
I am surprised that Alasdair Beal persists in an argument that was more than adequately demolished by Tom Nash and Jeremy Henty (Letters, 18 November and 23/30 December).
The main point that Beal misses is that Herbert Dingle’s idea of swapping the roles of the two clocks to infer a paradox is just plain wrong. The pole clock is inertial (barring gravity) while the equator clock isn’t. Their roles cannot just be swapped via Beal’s incorrect “all motion is relative” statement. Of course Einstein didn’t swap them 鈥� he didn’t need to in order to make his point, although it can be done by using more advanced special relativity (of rotating frames). Einstein’s conclusion follows simply from the postulates of special relativity and can be found in any book on the subject.
Dingle’s ideas were confused and illogical, and that’s why he made no headway with his contemporaries. If Beal wishes to swap the clocks without using special relativity correctly, thereby inferring a paradox, then he’ll find himself at odds with a century of experiments which have upheld relativity every time. That’s why relativity is seen as correct 鈥� it agrees with experiment. It’s also completely self-consistent.
Alcohol-loving flies
The observations by J. R. Catlin on the behaviour of small flies in his bungalow struck a chord (Letters, 6 January). I have been similarly plagued by these beastly little monsters in my top-floor flat. I have not tested their taste buds with brandy but have observed that they prefer red wine to white. They are nearly impossible to swat effectively, being too small, and so I have learnt to live with them, but I keep a beer mat handy to cover my (red) wine glass when they are buzzing around. I also plug the wine bottle between pourings.
I cannot think of a use for pickled flies. What concerns me is the source of these blighters. Do they come up the kitchen sink, the loo or what?
Bees on the Internet
So the Qu茅becois butiner on the Internet instead of surfing (Feedback, 6 January). Butiner, however, means to gather nectar, the work that bees do. I suspect that bees would be offended if their activities were described as “plundering”.
If the French butiner on the Internet, the image is that of the bee that goes from flower to flower, sipping nectar.
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Rutherford V Haber
I believe Kishor Bhagwati does not have the correct version of the Rutherford-Haber encounter (Letters, 6 January), Isaac Asimov, quoting J. Robert Oppenheimer’s famous remark, once wrote that Haber was the first scientist to “know sin” through his development of poison gas in the First World War. As my own father’s life was shortened by Haber, I can sympathise with Rutherford if, in 1919, he refused to shake hands with the German chemist.
Bhagwati states that “Haber was 鈥� no more responsible for grenades than Rutherford was for the atomic bomb”. He bases this on an anecdote in your Letters pages (9 December). Like Bhagwati, I do not wish to perpetuate myths, but there is more behind Haber’s story than your correspondents suggested.
It is true (according to an essay in front of me by Isaac Asimov) that Rutherford refused to shake hands with Haber on his arrival in the US. But there were greater reasons than those given in the earlier correspondence. Haber was, according to Asimov, a “German patriot of the most narrow type [who] during the [First World] War 鈥� laboured unceasingly to develop methods of producing poison gas in quantity and supervised that first chlorine attack”.
This, perhaps, explains Rutherford’s supposed reluctance to welcome him. There is a double irony here, as Haber was Jewish and had to flee Germany when Hitler came to power. Rutherford was one of those responsible for rescuing Jewish scientists, including Haber.
Is it not more likely that the reason for Rutherford refusing to shake hands was Haber’s enthusiastic development of suitable agents for use in chemical warfare and active support of their use? Haber carried out that work despite pleas from his wife Clara not to and she committed suicide on the night of the first use of gas as a weapon of war.
Electrostatic vibes
The phenomenon of vibrations when you draw your finger or some other sensitive part of your body over nonearthed electrical devices connected to the mains is clearly electrostatic, because it does not require the appliance to be metallic (Letters, 2 December and 13 January). It occurs strongly on the outside of ceramic “electric jugs” filled with water heated by a naked element or, as mentioned by Don Hinson, on electric blankets.
This explains why it is only felt when “stroking” the equipment. While stationary, the contact between hand and surface prevents the variation in attractive force caused by the cyclic nature of the potential resulting in any movement that can be felt. When rubbing the surface, this variation in attraction results in cyclically changing friction between skin and equipment which feels akin to a tingle, but is actually mechanical in origin.
While the equipment displaying the vibration is generally perfectly safe, any real tingle felt when touching rather than stroking mains-connected electrical gear should be investigated immediately.
Language diversity
Gail Vines claims “the diversity of human language was probably at its peak 15 000 years ago, when some 10 000 languages were spoken” (“Death of a mother tongue”, 6 January). She also claims there are currently some 6000 languages spoken in the world.
While any such figures must depend on the criteria used to define a language, work on the World Language Register being compiled as part of the Logosphere Programme at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, over the past ten years suggests that the current total is well in excess of 12 000. Since records of human language go back only 5500 years, nothing can be known for certain about the number or diversity of languages spoken 15 000 years ago.
Vines’s assumption that more languages were spoken then than now may be correct but it is at least partially in conflict with the views of some historical linguists that human language originated in very few locations -perhaps even only one location 鈥� and that new languages have emerged from a continuing series of splits ever since, as is well documented for the Indo-European languages over the past 3500 years.
It is misleading to suggest, as Vines does, that “languages began dying in droves from the late 15th century onwards as western Europeans colonised the world”. In the Americas and Australia, where Europeans rapidly outnumbered the original population, it is true that the languages of many indigenous peoples declined towards extinction 鈥� but such people were dispossessed, and in some cases killed, not merely colonised. We are not aware of any evidence which suggests that colonisation has resulted in language death in Africa or Asia. Furthermore, colonisation is directly responsible for the creation of most of the more than 500 Pidgin and Creole languages listed by Norval Smith in Pidgins and Creoles: An Introduction (Benjamins, 1995) as being currently spoken by more than 100 million people.
European colonisation of North America continued over a period of more than 400 years, but formal surveying of the geographical extent of particular languages dates only from the present century. To aggregate informal accounts of languages and their speakers, written by the conquering groups at times of rapid social change, and to devise generalised rules concerning the “density” of human language groups based on these, may be of dubious scientific value.
Conventionally, the extent of particular languages has been shown spatially using coloured polygons to indicate the extent of particular languages. This is presumably what Vines has in mind when referring to “the territorial range of North American languages”. Unfortunately such mapping gives the false impression that languages have hard boundaries and extend over largely uninhabited areas. Languages are spoken only where there are humans; Mark Pagel might find that mapping human settlements would provide a more accurate means of indicating language distribution and diversity than the quasi-zoological term “territorial range”.
We might also add that our recent investigations in London 鈥� a northern city 鈥� indicate that at least 275 languages are currently spoken there. London is, by any argument, a linguistically and culturally diverse city; but it cannot be said to have a “rich variety of landscapes, animals and plants”. There are clearly other reasons which explain the enormous “density of human language groups” present.
Your feature on the loss of the world’s languages is interesting and timely. All languages change, effectively killing off old ones even without us realising. Chaucer and Shakespeare, in building up modern English, helped to kill older versions, and I suspect that even Shakespeare, were he alive today, would have a problem understanding a lot of modern journalism.
What worries me is the way one particular language has come to dominate the world and (especially scientific) thinking in a way that English, Chinese or other languages will fail to do. That language is ISO metric weights and measures.
When the US finally falls under the decimal metric juggernaut we will see the first link in place for a single world language which will mean that everyone thinks and speaks in a monoculture.
Life works not just in tens, but more often in twos, threes, fours and sixes. Decimals are not the only method of measuring, as anyone who has struggled with recurring decimal points will acknowledge.
Counting and measuring is as much a form of thought and communication as any language. If it is so worthwhile and necessary to keep the present Babel of languages in the name of “diversity”, can we not work to sustain different measuring systems? And can we not invent new ones to make it easier to “speak” the language of measurement that suits a particular application best? And can we not even keep systems that 鈥� like many conventional languages 鈥� are useful simply for their intricate beauty or understanding of our past?
Library slashes
I am astonished the rumoured cutbacks at the British Library have not aroused the scientific community in both academia and industry (This Week, 13 January). From my own industrial standpoint, the axing of a third of the journals taken by the British Library’s Science Reference and Information Service (SRIS) in London could have serious effects.
Clearly, the loss of this many journals may deprive industrialists of simple facts which can be used to avoid the heavy costs of “reinventing the wheel”. Less obviously, they may affect the effectiveness of the patenting programmes of British firms. Even quite obscure (and foreign) science and technology journals are important for checking the patentability of a technical development. If a new chemical for curing gout has been anticipated, but lay undiscovered 鈥� perhaps in an obscure Chinese journal 鈥� then Maxo Pharmaceuticals will be unable to obtain a patent after its five years R&D work.
The British Library Postal Lending Division at Boston Spa is an excellent service, but it is not sufficient. As an occasional user of the SRIS, I can vouch for the usefulness of being able to browse there. In these days of library cutbacks in most universities, it is even more essential to have adequate central library facilities. The SRIS science journals may not equal the scrolls of ancient Alexandria in importance, but we must not stand by and watch them being withdrawn.
Learned money
I would be interested to know the views of other readers on the issue of commercial sponsorship of learned societies. As reported in the press last month, the Royal Geographical Society is embroiled in a controversy because of the 拢40 000 annual sponsorship it receives from Shell. A heated debate took place at the society’s annual conference on a motion to end the sponsorship immediately, with the majority believing that Shell’s environmental record in Nigeria was shameful and that it was implicated in support for the Nigerian government and its execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the eight others in December 1995. The motion was passed by about 150 for to 10 against. Although the council of the society is not obliged to act on this, it has arranged for a one-day open forum on 10 April for a full discussion of this issue.
In my view it is inappropriate for learned societies to receive commercial sponsorship, since the donor is thereby granted legitimacy and approval from the bodies to which they give. The issue is not that the companies are trying to influence the societies (there is no evidence of that in Shell’s case), though it is possible that self-censorship within the societies can result. The key issue is that sponsorship is seen by outsiders to imply approval of the company (and therefore its policies and activities) by the learned society.
Some “realists” might argue that sponsorship is inevitable and essential in today’s financial climate, and that it would be hard to find any large international company that is completely free of taint. But this is surely no excuse. While it would be ludicrous to claim that science should be cornpletely free of influences that might divert it from an independent path (the greatest obviously being government funding) it is surely right to reduce as many of these potential limitations as is possible, especially when they are of a commercial character. The criterion should be that if it cannot be done without sponsorship then it should not be done.
European legacy
Reg Dennick claims it is time that Lewis Wolpert is “challenged to expand his narrow definition of what constitutes science” (Letters, 13 January). However, I would support Wolpert in his assertion that science is a product of European thought and culture, though its results and methods are available to all. Other cultures, such as Chinese and Aboriginal Australian, accumulated much useful knowledge about the world, but what was lacking was a credible theoretical underpinning for their observations.
The key feature of science is that it not only leads to new discoveries but it also unveils the principles behind the phenomena of the physical world. In the most developed science, physics, a set of mathematical laws links widely disparate phenomena. Thus a falling apple and the motion of the Moon are integrated within a broader system of order. It is this broad and deep theoretical knowledge that sets true science apart from the mere cataloguing and organising of facts. The notion that there exists a law-like order in nature is a legacy of European 鈥� and in large part Ancient Greek -thought.