Letter
My concern is with the increased pressure for chemical control of the water
hyacinth. The plants will not be eradicated, merely reduced. As Pearce explains,
the water hyacinth is one of the fastest-growing plants in the world (and, as a
native of South America, is without enemies in Africa). It will therefore regrow
with vigour, fed by the nutrients from the recently sprayed, dead vegetation.
Then it will have to be sprayed again, and again . . . The spray manufacturers
will be laughing all the way to the bank.
Too hot to handle?
Rob Edwards’s article on the nuclear waste reprocessor at Sellafield was
misleading and lacked balance
(This Week, 20 June, p 13). The vitrification
plant, which converts liquid waste into safer glass blocks, has experienced
reliability problems in the past, but these have now been addressed and its
performance has improved dramatically. The reliability of the vitrification
melters has been doubled, plant throughput has increased threefold, and the
total amount of waste awaiting vitrification has been reduced by 200 cubic
metres in the past three years.
These improvements, along with the addition of a third vitrification line in
2000, gives us every confidence that this total will continue to decrease
quickly and in line with the requirements of the Nuclear Installations
Inspectorate. It has confirmed to British Nuclear Fuels that they are not
dissatisfied with the progress that we are making.
Doing their best
Since 1991, the Global Environment Facility, a fund set up by the UN and the
World Bank, has allocated more than $730 million to biodiversity projects
in developing countries and economies in transition. Much more needs to be done
by the GEF, individual governments and other international institutions. But in
the opinion of many, including leading nongovernmental organisations, the GEF’s
investments have helped to conserve the world’s remaining biodiversity.
Your article reports that even the agencies that run them rate 12 per cent of
GEF biodiversity projects as “unsatisfactory”
(This Week, 6 June, p 18). Put
another way, 88 per cent of the projects were deemed “satisfactory”鈥攁n
impressive result considering the state of environmental decay, the complex
social and political circumstances facing local populations, and the fragile
institutional structures of many of the world’s poorest countries.
Furthermore, you have selectively quoted the independent evaluation of the
GEF. The conclusion of that study was that “GEF has generally performed
effectively with regard to rapidly creating new institutional arrangements and
approaches to programming its resources in the four focal areas.”
Your article also questioned our priorities. By design, developing countries
have a strong say鈥攖hrough majority membership on the GEF’s governing
council, which determines the GEF’s operational strategy and programmes, and
through participation in the conference of the parties to the Convention on
Biological Diversity. The GEF, which runs the financial mechanism of the
convention, receives guidance on policy and programme priorities from the
convention.
Finally, it should be noted that the GEF is factoring the critical issue of
land degradation into all its work鈥攐n biodiversity, climate change,
international waters and ozone depletion鈥攁nd is doing more to support the
objectives of the desertification convention than any other multilateral
entity.
Sealed with an eclipse
It was good of you to publish E. C. Krupp’s letter
(2 May, p 52) pointing out
that my husband Tom Thornbury and I became engaged during a total solar eclipse
in Mongolia on 9 March 1997, before the engagement mentioned in Marcus Chown’s
report on the Aruba eclipse (“Total eclipse”, 4 April, p 26).
After dining on cow tongue, spending the evening in the most unromantic and
humble “hotel” and encountering a snowstorm on the morning of the eclipse, Tom
deserves an award for his action.
Our engagement announcements, which acknowledge both the total eclipse in
Mongolia and Comet Hale-Bopp and which were signed by Krupp, Alan Hale and
Thomas Bopp, were released in April 1997. We have also been informed by 20th
Century Fox that its movie Out to Sea, which contains a total eclipse
proposal, did not come out until July 1997.
I got my total eclipse diamond ring first, and now Tom sports an eclipse with
a hidden diamond inside his wedding band.
Local problem
It is quite misleading for Charles Seife to claim that quantum effects
threaten one of the cornerstones of Einstein’s theory of relativity
(This Week, 13 June, p 11).
The principle of equivalence to which the report refers is a
local condition, while quantum mechanics is famously nonlocal.
Put simply, the principle of equivalence says that gravity is equivalent to
an acceleration at a given point in space, and conversely, that a freely falling
observer feels weightless. The principle cannot, however, be applied to an
extended region of space. Observations over an extended region can readily
distinguish between a gravitational field and an acceleration.
For example, a 1 g acceleration in free space feels locally like the
Earth’s surface gravity, but the real Earth exerts a force in England in a
direction roughly opposite to that in Australia, and this pattern cannot be
mimicked by a single acceleration at one place.
In quantum mechanics, a particle is represented by a wave that can extend
over a region of space, so it can probe such variations in both field direction
and intensity. If a quantum interference experiment is performed over a region
large enough to encompass a gravitating object, such as the shell of matter
discussed by Seife, then the principle of equivalence does not apply, and the
experiment will be able to distinguish a gravitational field from an
acceleration.
A load of balls?
Have the advocates of reefs made of concrete balls carried out a full
cost-benefit analysis of their scheme?
(This Week, 20 June, p 10). I accept that
the energy costs of producing and shipping the balls would in time be paid back
in carbon fixed. But given the importance of limestone as an aquifer, home to
wildlife and archaeological treasures and provider of landscape and recreational
amenity, it is more valuable in situ than quarried for making concrete
(see “Bleak prospects for limestone”, 13 May 1989, p 56).
I suspect that it would prove more cost-effective to protect or restore
existing natural reefs: in some parts of the world these are threatened by,
among other things, sediment from quarries.
Letter
I could not help but marvel at Pearce’s assertion that Einstein, through
relativity, contributed to the development of nuclear weapons.
I wonder: has anyone heard of Lise Meitner, a follower of Ludwig Boltzmann,
who refused to believe that atoms were indivisible little lumps? Meitner and
Otto Hahn had just started to take up Fermi’s report on obtaining a new compound
after bombarding uranium with neutrons, when Meitner had to leave Berlin for
Sweden, for fear of the Nazis. While in Sweden, she read that Hahn, in Berlin,
had obtained barium from uranium, which he could not explain.
It was Meitner who realised that Hahn must have split the uranium atom to
obtain a separate element and it was she who proposed the term fission. It was
also she who realised the radical possibilities of that process and, given the
political situation of the day, the late 1930s, she relayed her theory via Otto
Frisch and Niels Bohr to the US, being careful not to tell Hahn what was in his
grasp.
Meitner’s meticulous, analytical mind saw what the geniuses had missed.
What if Einstein . . .
Both Roger Penrose, as quoted in Fred Pearce’s review
(16 May, p 46), and Tom Kibble
(Letters, 6 June, p 66) are wrong. There is no evidence that the
development of something very like the general theory of relativity would have
been long delayed had Einstein never been born.
Curved space and its relation to gravity was discussed in the 19th century
by, for example, William Clifford, and it was his old teacher Hermann Minkowski
who pointed out to Einstein the possibilities inherent in the geometrisation of
space-time in the context of the special theory.
As for general relativity itself, Einstein was put on the right track by his
colleague Marcel Grossman, who would have been quite capable of working it all
out for himself.
It boggles both ways
Max Wallis suggests that quantum mechanics has become, in my own words, so
“mind-boggling” and “absurd” as to be far-fetched
(Letters, 23 May, p 56).
While this might be correct, his claim that all modern optical experiments
can be understood by interpreting light as waves in the presence of background
vacuum oscillations is another case of naive realism. In fact, the very vacuum
oscillations Wallis proposes have the same mind-boggling entanglement features I
refer to and which are so clearly seen in experiments involving two or more
photons.
Letter
Nowhere was the phrase “integrated pest management” to be found in Pearce’s
article, but I think this is what Lake Victoria needs鈥攁 multinational
management plan incorporating measures to control agricultural runoff and
sewage, limited “warfare” on the weed around harbours, and concerted efforts to
develop useful products from water hyacinth.
Ironically, the plant is itself used for sewage treatment in Florida and
California. And in 1994, I visited a craft project in Thailand which has refined
techniques for soaking water-hyacinth stalks in glycerol to make them soft and
pliable, suitable for weaving and dyeing. I still have a pair of water-hyacinth
sandals.
I would recommend that anyone interested write to: Centre for Handicraft,
Bang Sai, Queen’s Project, Ayudhaya, Thailand
Spaced out
Feedback
(20 June) recommends David Yost’s suggestion of making chemical
names like amidophosphoribosyltransferase easier to read by introducing
capitals鈥擜midoPhosphoRibosylTransferase. This is not much of an
improvement and there is an easier way: treat groups like “amido” as words and
separate them with spaces, such as amido phospho ribosyl transferase.
Spaces are more easily picked out by the eye than capitals. They also obviate
the need to use the shift key, a minor but real irritant as the extensive use of
lower case on the Web indicates. And unlike capitals, they are universal in that
they don’t vary in different typefaces.
If you really want to ice the cake, do both and perhaps even double the
spaces. It is unlikely that a reader coming across a compound name like this
would fail to realise that it was that of a chemical, but in cases where there
might be doubt鈥攑eriodic acid, for example鈥攊t would be useful to put
it into square brackets: [periodic acid] or, better still, [per iodic acid].
The idea of making it a convention to treat chemical names as sentences made
up of separable words has the further advantage of bringing chemistry closer to
everyday language鈥攕urely no bad thing. Any hope that New
杏吧原创 might lead the way in this?
Ways with weeds
Fred Pearce meant well when he wrote about the water-hyacinth infestation on
lake Victoria and the efforts to control it, but we think he missed the real
scoop by ignoring the fact that biological control is now beginning to work
(“All-out war on the alien invader”, 23 May, p 34
and Letters, 20 June, p 55).
Two species of Neochetina weevils were introduced into Lake Kyoga in
Uganda in 1993 and into Lake Victoria, which straddles Uganda, Kenya and
Tanzania, in the past few years. In Kyoga the insects have virtually eliminated
the mobile component of the weed and are well established in Victoria, although
in some places they have not yet spread far from their release sites.
We believe that the only sustainable form of control will be biological
control and that the chemical approach is neither sustainable nor safe for the
other occupants of Lake Victoria.
Don't knock Gaia
W. D. Hamilton is for me a hero
(Letters, 27 June, p 52). In his book
Narrow Roads of Geneland he describes his ordeal breaching the central
chamber of a large wasp nest in Brazil. With my fear of wasps, I found his
courage inspiring. When I saw his article with Tim Lenton, “Spora and Gaia: how
microbes fly with their clouds” in Ethology, Ecology & Evolution, I
cheered. Here at last, I thought, was an eminent biologist with the courage to
use Gaia in the title of a paper and by implication treat it as something worthy
of scientific consideration.
His letter criticising Lynn Hunt’s fine article
(“Send in the clouds”, 30 May, p 28)
as too Gaian disappointed me. I would like to remind Hamilton that
the worldwide scientific effort to investigate the connection between algae and
the oceans, cloud formation and climate, all began because of the Gaia theory.
Before that, no one had asked whether the Earth and its organisms could keep
the planet’s climate and chemical composition in a state fit for life. Trying to
answer this question led to the discovery of the gas dimethyl sulphide (DMS) in
the ocean environment, and to my paper with Robert Charlson, M. O. Andreae and
Stephen Warren which first linked clouds with the biota. Such thinking also
uncovered the link between the biota, calcium silicate rocks, atmospheric carbon
dioxide and climate. This means of climatic self-regulation is now part of
conventional wisdom, although its Gaian origins are rarely mentioned.
The most interesting question posed by Gaia is: how can evolution by natural
selection lead to a planet with a self-regulating environment? Surely this is a
challenge for Neo-Darwinists? The evidence that the Earth does maintain a
climate and chemical composition favourable for life is now strong enough to
justify the attempt.
Hamilton is right to say that no one has suggested how a global thermostat
“could be adjusted appropriately”. What have been proposed are models, such as
Daisyworld, of self-adjusting worlds, something entirely different.
I also agree that complexity theory confuses rather than helps our
understanding of the link between Gaia and natural selection. However, I wholly
disagree when he says that it seems best to assume the planet is subject to a
set of out-of-control thermostats and that our main hope is that we can fix it
ourselves. I cannot believe he means anything so dismal.
Throughout the 33 years of developing Gaia theory, I have sought a
Neo-Darwinist who wonders if there might be something in Gaia after all. I hope
that Hamilton still wonders about how the Earth works. If we do not wonder in a
scientific way about the strange and beautiful anomaly that is Earth, we may
never learn to live with it.
Not him but her
In his review of John Barrow’s Impossibility, Michio Kaku writes
that Auguste Comte’s celebrated challenge of 1825 was solved “just a few years
later” by Joseph von Fraunhofer, who used “a spectroscope to analyse sunlight
and found that the stars were made of hydrogen”
(Review, 13 June, p 44).
But actually Fraunhofer recorded the solar spectrum and made a map of the
spectral lines in 1811 (published in 1814), prior to Comte. Further, the
discovery that the stars are made mostly of hydrogen is credited to Cecilia
Payne (later Payne-Gaposchkin) about 1925, a result that was famously doubted by
Arthur Eddington when she first advanced it.
Voting with your fingers
Feedback writes that none of the readers’ fixes for the Euro bug鈥攖he
problem that there is no symbol for Europe’s new currency鈥攊s “as simple as
the single keystroke that is really needed for what is supposed to be one of the
world’s major currencies”
(6 June).
Does Feedback mean the delete key?
Leeching away
I was amused by your Editorial “Lessons from a leech”
(20 June, p 3). As you
suggest in your title, leeches do give lessons: my mum teaches A-level
psychology.
Also, most people’s instincts would be wrong if they thought that leeches can
“no more do maths than play the trombone”. I can do both and so can my
sister.
Mixing your measures
The story about the instructions for mixing 1 pint of water with 410 grams of
evaporated milk to get 1 litre of milk
(Feedback, 13 June) reminds me of an
article I read some years ago in an American telecoms magazine. It referred to a
particular type of telephone cable as having an attenuation factor of so many
decibels “per 5.28 kft”. Only recently, when I was reading another article, did
I realise that “kft” means “kilofeet”, or 1000 feet.
And why “5.28”? Well, that’s 5280 feet鈥攐r a mile in the old
currency.
Letter
Chemists have actually already gone one better than Yost. They make big words
like deoxyribonucleic acid even easier to read than DeoxyriboNucleic Acid.
They simply miss out all the letters that aren’t in caps to get
DNA鈥攃lever, hey?
Letter
Wouldn’t a little punctuation mark to separate the components be clearer?
Your AmidoPhosphoRibosylTransferase would become
amido-phospho-ribosyl-transferase. This is not only even easier to read but also
consistent with standard English usage.