Letter
It is good to know that science and religion are converging. In his article
Barbour suggests that time is simply a human interpretative device and writes:
“There are many `Nows’ in which a version of us exists.”
St Augustine of Hippo anticipated this by some sixteen hundred years, when he
said that only “Now” exists. Past and future exist in our present; time is
subjective. A rather perceptive cleric!
Letter
I found Barbour’s article “Timeless” difficult to follow. Was I reading it in
the wrong direction?
Liquorice levels
I read with interest how seven grams of liquorice taken daily lowered
testosterone levels by 44 per cent in healthy young men in only four days
(16 October, p 27).
If this were the case, how is it that the Chinese, who use
liquorice in most of their medicinal formulas and consume more possibly than any
other nation for other uses, have the largest population in the world?
Liquorice is one of the most therapeutic medicinal herbs, but medicines need
to be taken in the correct dose. Seven grams of liquorice a day would be the
equivalent of 17 aspirin tablets a day鈥攜ou would not live long taking this
obvious overdose. So the golden rule is: all things in moderation.
The pheasant factor
In the US, deer are implicated in cases of Lyme disease in humans. Your news
article blames pheasants and hunting interests for the existence of Lyme disease in Britain
(9 October, p 27).
Our scientific findings, presented at a meeting of
the British Veterinary Association, do not allow such a conclusion.
There are three species of Borrelia in Britain that cause Lyme
disease, each producing different symptoms in humans. B. garinii
affects the nervous system, B. afzelii affects the skin and B.
burgdorferi causes arthritis. The bacteria are maintained in nature by
complex transmission chains involving many mammals, birds and ticks.
Our work showed that B. garinii is maintained by bird/tick cycles
and that the pheasant is a host for this species of Borrelia. However,
blackbirds and some seabird species are also hosts for B. garinii.
B. burgdorferi and B. afzelii, however, are adapted to
small mammals, such as mice, squirrels and hedgehogs. It appears that birds are
unable to transmit B. afzelii, since ticks infected with this
Borrelia species lose their infection when they feed on birds.
Various animal hosts will therefore influence the relative proportion of each
Borrelia species circulating in nature. In view of the complexity of
the system, it is very unlikely that a reduction in the density of one host
species would prevent the circulation of all Lyme disease bacteria.
Traffic hoppers
Your recent booklet Daughter of Bizarre (11 September)
told of galahs (rose-breasted cockatoos) using whirlwinds as a fairground ride.
On two occasions I have seen white or sulphur-crested cockatoos flying along
the main northern artery out of Sydney, the Pacific Highway, right down in the
speeding traffic. They would get into the gap between two vehicles and fly along
with the flow at 60 kilometres an hour, cavorting from side to side and
shrieking as only a white cocky can. I can’t help but believe that these birds,
like the galahs, have a great sense of fun.
Downsized sample
According to your report, Johannes Zanker “asked five people to distinguish
perfect circles from minutely stretched ellipsoids, and squares from
`near-square’ rectangles” and concluded “people’s brains judge spatial
relationships best when they see whole curved shapes”
(16 October, p 27).
Only five subjects in a scientific study? I trust this is a typographical
error and that he asked more than five people. Otherwise you might as well
publish my findings that humans don’t like celery, because I know 11 people who
do not.
Chemical claptrap
I don’t think I’ve laughed so much for a long time. The cause of my laughter?
An article about a fungicide from milk that talks of “chemical-free vegetables”
and asserts: “At present only chemical fungicides are available”
(16 October, p 10).
The only thing that can be “chemical-free” is a pure vacuum. It follows that
all fungicides are chemical. I’ll grant you that some are nasty synthetic
organic chemicals and others are nice “organic” chemicals, but they are all
chemicals.
The last tiger
I found Robert Mazurek’s article on saving threatened animals interesting
(9 October, p 41),
but some information in the box was not entirely correct.
The Tasmanian tiger or thylacine is believed to have disappeared from the Australian
mainland around 3000 years ago, not in 1936.
The current belief is that they were outcompeted by dingoes, which were
introduced to the mainland around 5000 years ago. But thylacines survived until
this century in Tasmania (which was separated from the mainland at the end of
the last glacial, around 15 000 years ago) because dingoes never made it across
the Bass Strait. The last wild thylacine was captured in 1933, and鈥攄espite
a number of unconfirmed sightings since then鈥攖he last one known to exist
died in Tasmania’s Beaumaris Zoo in 1936.
Thorny solution
The item on using cactus spines as gramophone needles
(16 October, p 52)
reminded me of when I was in India in 1945. Thorns were regularly used in
offices in place of pins. I never found out which plant they came
from鈥攑resumably not a cactus. But they were similar to cactus spines,
around 3.5 centimetres long and served the purpose beautifully.
In the doghouse
Debra Griffiths in her letter
(16 October, p 59)
seems sceptical as to whether dog treadmills could work.
They did, and were used in the “great houses” of the past to rotate the spits
on which meat was roasted. A working example survives at the Welsh Folk Museum
near Cardiff. I don’t remember whether the treadmill was angled so as to
convince the dog that it was approaching the meat, but such a temptation could
well have worked.
About time
Julian Barbour claims time should be banished from the catalogue of reality
(16 October, p 28).
But he may be making an unwarranted assumption鈥攖hat to
understand reality is the same as to experience it.
Physics is concerned exclusively with the first. But, as Bertrand Russell
said some 70 years ago, all physics can ever do is to reveal the
causal/structural/relational features of reality. As the philosopher David
Chalmers puts it: “The picture of the world that (physics) reveals is that of a
giant causal flux, but the picture tells us nothing about what all this
causation relates.”
A famous line from Stephen Hawking sums this up well: “What is it that
breathes fire into the equations?”
There may be some sort of an answer here as to why time is so fundamental a
part of reality in our “normal” lives, yet apparently redundant when we try to
understand the nature of that reality.
It is arguable that what we know more surely and immediately than anything
else is our conscious experience, and a fundamental element
in the nature of that experience is a sense of before and after.
All other knowledge鈥攊ncluding all of physics鈥攊s a kind of story
that we tell about reality, more or less accurate (science being far more
accurate than any other tale), but always at one remove from it.
This is a view that is as yet far from widely accepted, especially in
conventional scientific circles. Perhaps only if and when it is will we be in a
position to start thinking more deeply about the paradox that time seems to
represent.
Fund with a focus
Frank Furedi must be deeply ignorant of the work of the United Nations
Population Fund (UNFPA) if he believes that, since birth rates in the world have
started to fall, the UNFPA can now be wound up
(9 October, p 52).
It is precisely because the fund’s work is succeeding that birth rates are falling.
Does he believe that the millions of couples whose reproductive healthcare and
contraceptive needs are now met by the UNFPA will suddenly start practising
abstinence?
Furedi claims that the UNFPA’s activities are better covered by other
agencies. Not so. The UNFPA was set up 30 years ago precisely because no other
UN agency had the necessary focus on population growth, unwanted pregnancy and
women’s reproductive health. Having bigger agencies does not lead to greater
efficiency. Having focused agencies does.
His premise鈥攖hat while the UNFPA continues to exist people will think
there is a population problem鈥攊s merely foolish. What Furedi is arguing
for would lead to a denial of human rights for the hundreds of millions of women
who want to limit their family size, some of whom still have no access to modern
contraception.
Head transplants
How disappointing that Robert White is still talking about head transplants
(9 October, p 48).
He was carrying out barbaric experiments on dogs and monkeys decades ago.
He severed the heads of more than 100 young monkeys and kept these heads
alive, hooked up by tubes to donor animals or heart-lung support systems. The
heads and brains lived on for days in his laboratory, not “properly
anaesthetised”, as White implied in your article, but fully conscious and unable
even to faint from pain or fright, because the blood flow to them was kept
constant.
One does not have to be an animal rights advocate to be shocked by White’s
experiments. The fact that he made them his life’s work reflects badly on the
entire scientific community.