Letter
I was impressed with the way that a simple arrangement of beam splitters can
be used to study the results of a computation that you did not actually do. I am
worried that some of your readers with access to the appropriate equipment might
use it to read copies of New 杏吧原创that they do not actually have.
So perhaps you should be encouraging them to buy New 杏吧原创and use
the equipment to read the many other articles and letters that you might have
published but actually did not.
Back to life
Your article on cryogenics and cryonics
(“Life on Ice”, 2 May, p 24)
neglected to mention important points concerning the freezing of whole humans.
The article seems to imply that a cryonics patient would be revived simply by
being thawed out鈥攁nd the cryobiologists rightly point out that this is
impossible.
A cryonics patient would have to be revived by some technological feat which
simultaneously repaired freezing damage, cryoprotectant toxicity and the
original cause of death. Nanotechnology, with its ability to manipulate matter
on the atomic scale, might provide just such a feat.
The article also appears to miss the key point that a cryonics patient is in
a stable condition, and will remain that way for many decades. Despite the
damage, all the information that makes the patient who he or she is, is probably
intact and stable as long as the brain remains frozen. Future technology may be
able to use that information to rebuild the living person by some means we can
now only imagine. Who can know what will be impossible a century from now?
Library rules
With regard to Todd Collins’s library conundrum of how to locate the Library
Association’s book of cataloguing rules
(Letters, 25 April, p 57), the Library
Association uses a standard manual called AACR2 to list its cataloguing rules.
It also uses a standard, known as the UK MARC, for entering computerised
records, which conforms to AACR rules.
Where you find these in a library depends on what classification system it
uses. Under the Dewey Decimal system employed by most public libraries,
cataloguing rules would be housed at 025.3. The Universal Decimal Classification
often adopted in university Libraries is very similar, housing cataloguing
schedules at 025.45. My classification system, on the other hand, houses its
cataloguing schedules on the second shelf up to the left, stacked so as to
support the shelf above.
Bogwash
At the British Antarctic base of Halley Bay, the toilets were just seats
above a deep hole in the snow. A structural timber passed beneath one of them,
and jobbies (we did not call them that) could land on it, freeze, and build up
to a large mound.
One of the tasks of Saturday gash (there’s a versatile Antarctic word) was to
poke and lever at this mass, using a crevasse probe, to send it crashing into
the depths. I thought that calling it a bog chisel was purely local, and am
intrigued to find that the term is still used
(Feedback, 4 April
and Letters, 2 May, p 53).
The term for the accumulation was almost certainly abandoned with
the hut at the end of the 1960s: it was a stalagshite.
Ghostly digit
I have a phantom little finger on my left hand, the original having been
removed when I was born as it would have been my 11th
(In Brief, 2 May, p 23).
Thirty six years later I still get an occasional reminder of it when, for
example, I’m cleaning my ears in the shower as I get this definite feeling that
I’m not using the smallest finger available!
The “phantom” sensation has if anything grown stronger, probably because
I look out for it now鈥攂ut is it common for a piece of the body that was
never meant to be there in the first place?
Just think …
Over the past few years of reading New 杏吧原创, I have got to
grips with chaos theory and the idea that the flight of a butterfly in China
might cause it to rain in Manchester. However, I was left feeling very uneasy
after reading about quantum computers that can calculate the answers to problems
without ever being turned on
(“Crazy Logic”, 2 May, p 38).
I’m sure that many students will now be telling their teachers that there is
no need for them to actually think, since they’d know the answer anyway.
Teachers wouldn’t bother trying to find out if their students were telling the
truth, because even if they could isolate a thought, they couldn’t
simultaneously tell if it was correct or not.
But frankly, all of this philosophising doesn’t help me in the least. Does it
mean that it will rain the next time I visit Manchester if I think about the
butterfly, or will it rain if I don’t?
Without strings
I read with interest Michael Day’s article concerning industrially funded research
(This Week, 9 May, p 18). Clearly the article was aimed at exposing the
circumstances in which a company paying for research might sway the final result
of an investigation. But your banner “Industry funding strongly affects how
researchers think and how they act” is deeply offensive to the thousands of
scientists undertaking fundamental research of the highest quality who also
receive an element of industrial support.
In the current funding climate in Britain, and in particular the ROPA
(Realising Our Potential Awards) scheme, industrial funding is required before
matching funds can be requested from the research councils. Is all research so
supported also tainted?
Clearly the scientific community must make every effort to be as free from
bias as possible. But we must not alienate ourselves or slow the pace of
collaboration between academic researchers and industry.
Hard facts
Edzard Ernst is right to point to lack of funding and expertise as the main
obstacles to progress in research into complementary/alternative medicine (CAM)
(Forum, 18 April, p 49).
He is equally right to state that “evidence-based CAM
must not remain a contradiction in terms”. However, he has been saying this for
a long time and has still not come up with solutions. Surely his own department
at the Postgraduate Medical School in Exeter has the expertise necessary to
conduct clinical trials into CAM. It is also in a position to attract funds,
unlike the CAM organisations.
Ernst must stop lumping all CAM therapies together. Each is at its own stage
of evolution. Let’s have a therapy-by-therapy investigation, starting with those
that are most sought by patients鈥攏amely homeopathy and
acupuncture鈥攖hat still fall outside government regulation.
The allegation that until CAM is proved safe, it must be considered unsafe,
is not sustainable. And how about testing the safety of many conventional drugs,
the damage from which many CAM practitioners are regularly asked to treat? We
urgently need to move away from arrogant positions on CAM, and combine our
resources in some exciting research.
Cafe or cappuccino?
Caspar Henderson muffs some vital statistics about cars and the amount of fuel they use
(This Week, 25 April, p 18). As our recent report Transport,
Energy and Climate Change details, in 1995 the average American
“car”鈥攁 category that includes saloons, light trucks and vans, among
others鈥攗sed about 30 per cent less energy per kilometre than one in 1973.
By contrast, the average car on the road in Europe or Japan uses only 10 per
cent less fuel per kilometre than in 1973.
More fuel has been consumed in the US in recent years than before the first
oil crisis because there are more workers and licensed drivers, and because,
above all, the baby boomers have grown up and are now on the road. These three
key components are hardly “caused” by the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE)
standards. In other words, American drivers were still in a fuel-saving mode in
the early 1990s compared with 1973.
The bad news is that the downward trend in fuel use per kilometre ended in
the early 1990s, and now has turned upwards. The blame is not with CAFE but
cheap fuel: in the US, the cost of fuel per kilometre is at an all-time low.
It is unlikely that Congress will pass a stricter CAFE standard. More
promising is the “Cappuccino” approach of the European Union and
Japan鈥攚hich is to extract quasi-voluntary agreements from the major
automobile companies in return for real savings that outpace greater power and
weight. By 2010 it may well have increased savings in the EU and Japan to the
same level as those achieved, and now evaporating, in the US.
Delayed response
The complaint by Greg Forbes in Ecuador that suppliers of laboratory reagents
seem to ignore orders from smaller countries
(Letters, 21 February, p 53)
strikes a chord. Here in Namibia we have a similar difficulty with student
textbooks. Of the orders placed more than six months ago, at least a third have
not arrived. In many cases, the company concerned has not even acknowledged the
order. This leaves the students in a very difficult position.
A year ago the university bookstore manager showed me a stack of
correspondence well over a centimetre thick that he had sent to one (British)
publisher asking about one book. The book has still not arrived.
The track record of publishers in supplying books has now become a dominant
factor in determining which books we recommend to students.
All in a tangle
“Mind-boggling” is what Anton Zeilinger calls his latest version of photon interactions
(This Week, 25 April, p 14). Last year the term he used in
Nature was “absurd” (vol 388, p 287), while his original phrase, used in
Physics Today five years ago (vol 46, p 22), was again
“mind-boggling”.
Whichever description we choose, the notion under discussion is that of
photon pairs as “entangled” objects鈥攓uantum particles in a linked
superposition of states. A measurement on one member of the pair causes an
instantaneous change in the state of the other, even when they are widely
separated in space.
The latest mind-boggling twist is to entangle two photons each from a
different pair. This is said to cause the other members of each pair to also
become entangled with each other. The new entangling procedure is the opposite
of the former measurement: mixing and losing the ability to distinguish between
the first two is now said to lose the distinction between their partners.
The science-numerate public might well ask whether such a description is
useful if it leads to mind-boggling and absurd consequences. Physicists should
be more specific, and ask themselves whether they should choose this model of
photons as quantum objects, in preference to basic notions of causality and
relativity.
The alternative model of light quanta鈥攚aves in the electromagnetic
field鈥攈as a long history. The waves of Young and Fresnel superseded
Newton’s corpuscular light in the early 1800s. Modern experiments on optical
phenomena, from the Lamb shift and “squeezed” light to the rainbow emissions of
optical crystals, are all better interpreted as waves in the presence of the
background “vacuum” oscillations.
Readers who seek an escape from mind-boggling absurdity can try
http://www.keyinnov.demon.co.uk/qed.htm for an accessible rundown of the
modern wave versus particle debate.