Big Brother, the RumorBot
I was amused by the guilelessness of the item about the RumorBot whose
“sole purpose” (we are assured) will be to patrol the Internet tracing “idle or
malicious gossip to its source”
(3 February, p 15). I’m sure whoever invented
the telephone tap would have claimed the same.
If this software allows paedophiles and speculators to be tracked, it can
also be employed to snoop on the private lives of more law-abiding citizens.
Imagine it in the hands of a country like China with a desire to track the
activities of dissident elements who use the Net.
At quantum's mercy
Contrary to your colourful headline, “Babar fluffs first shot at universal
mystery”, the Babar Experiment has not “fluffed” its first shot at the universal
mystery of charge-parity-violation
(17 February, p 9). The successes of the
first years of both Babar and the PEP 2 machine, which delivers its electrons
and positrons, have gone way beyond expectations.
While a sportsman might be blamed for fluffing a shot, particle physicists
are at the mercy of quantum mechanics and its inherent uncertainties. Physicists
cannot be blamed if, on occasion, nature teases them with an inconclusive
result.
The uncertainty of a measurement is often as important as the result of the
measurement itself. If my theory of “life, the Universe and everything” predicts
the answer 42, but my measurement gives 35 with an uncertainty of 1, then I can
be pretty sure that my theory is wrong. However, if the uncertainty of the
measurement is 8, then the theory could well be right. To find out, I need to do
a better experiment, with better apparatus and more data.
Babar is such a better experiment, and its new value of the quantity sin2&bgr;,
with an uncertainty of only 0.2, is easily the world’s best measurement so far.
OK, so Lady Luck (aka quantum mechanics) produced a headline result almost
halfway between two very interesting possibilities, and our uncertainty is just
big enough that we can’t yet confirm or rule out either of them. But that’s
life. It isn’t fluffing the shot.
Come again?
I have just read about Stuart Meloy’s idea for an orgasm-producing device
following his serendipitous triggering of an orgasm in a patient
(10 February, p 23).
This is no breakthrough, nor a novelty. All doctors who use spinal cord
stimulation to manage pain, myself included, every now and then trigger both
male and female orgasms.
Defining deerness
Nick Pinder writes that a Darwinian biologist might say that
being hunted by dogs is an essential part of being a deer
(20 January, p 49). In considering
human evolution over the millennia, should people believe that to be taxed,
robbed, raped, tortured or killed is an essential part of being a human?
Waiting to exhale
According to your article, the 19th century geologist Lucas Barrett died from decompression sickness
(10 February, p 50).
But the circumstances described do not fit a typical decompression sickness accident.
Sudden death from the bends is extremely rare. The pain, rashes and
neurological symptoms almost invariably come after the dive. Divers are
cautioned to treat symptoms occurring within 12 hours after a dive with
respect.
A more likely explanation would be that Barrett suffered a ruptured lung
followed by an air embolism, caused by holding his breath on ascent. This is the
bogeyman of scuba divers that all novices divers are drilled to avoid.
In order to breathe under water, divers must breathe air at the ambient
pressure. If they hold their breath while they ascend, the air in their lungs
remains at the same pressure as when it was inhaled. Meanwhile, the external
pressure is falling as the depth decreases, resulting in a relatively higher
pressure inside the divers’ lungs. This ruptures the lungs, forcing air into the
bloodstream or into the chest. The effects are immediate.
Something like this probably happened: Barrett bent over to pick something
up. This caused the air in his helmet to move from the helmet to his back, which
had become the highest point. Now the air could not escape through the exhaust
valve, so the suit started to fill with air, making it more and more buoyant. In
my experience, the helmet fills with water when this happens, because there is
usually water inside the suit that drains into the helmet once it is low
enough.
At this point an experienced and trained diver will shut off his air supply
and either roll sideways, raising an arm, or forwards, raising a leg or two, and
vent the air through either the wrist or ankle cuff. All that needs to be done
then is to stand up and turn the air on again. This pushes the water out of the
helmet and the diver resumes breathing.
However, Barrett would probably not have been aware of this technique.
Instead, he would have quickly found himself in an out-of-control buoyant
ascent. Assuming that he had even a little water in his helmet, he would have
held his breath. A breath-holding ascent of less that two metres could be fatal.
Barrett seems to have been diving much deeper and was thus significantly more
exposed.
Set in their ways
Chris James is concerned about the consequences if we start living to 140 or
more, and with good reason
(10 February, p 56).
For most of us, our fundamental attitudes and assumptions are formed in our youth.
After that, it’s very hard to change them.
Whether we like it or not, our world is changing more and more rapidly, and
the ability of the human race to adapt swiftly to new circumstances will be
crucial. In 2100, the last thing that will be needed is people like me whose
assumptions may have been roughly appropriate in the 1980s, but which almost
certainly won’t be appropriate any more.
Yes, no or maybe
Hans Christian von Baeyer’s piece on the bit and its place in quantum physics
(17 February, p 26),
points out that “The simplest [questions] have yes-or-no
answers: ‘Did the photon arrive here, or not?'”
In fact, the answer to this question is always “yes”, since the photon will
always either arrive or not. The actual “yes/no” question is simply: “did the
photon arrive here?”
Also, it seems to me that the existence of many interpretations of quantum
theory, only one of which (one supposes) will turn out to be the right one, is
itself a very “quantum” phenomenon.
Cod piece
Reading that Mark Kurlansky’s Cod was discovered in the religion
section of a Canterbury bookshop
(Feedback, 17 February)
reminded me that one of our descriptions of school meals was:
“The piece of Cod that passeth all understanding.”
It was the booze…
I read your article on Eric Altschuler’s claim that the biblical figure
Samson suffered from antisocial personality disorder
(17 February, p 19). It is
suggested that his behaviour was hereditary, his mother having been reckless as
well. But at the end, the piece speaks of angels warning Samson’s mother against
drinking while pregnant.
There was no mention of what I thought to be an obvious avenue of further
research. Has Altschuler considered the possibility of fetal alcohol syndrome to
explain Samson’s behaviour? Based on his personality profile, it would appear
that he is a classic case.
Look at it this way
Dean Ware makes the point that a piece of paper, being made of atoms, has
depth and is in fact a cuboid, topologically equivalent to a solid sphere. Thus,
it has only one side
(10 February, p 57). That side, however, may more logically
be considered a surface.
If we stick with sides, then semantically the piece of paper has eight sides:
outside (the surface), inside, left, right, top, bottom, front and back
sides.