Letter
That’s right.
The editor writes:
鈥� Charles Paxton and Charles Deeming were part of the team that won the 2002 Ig Nobel biology prize for their report “Courtship behaviour of ostriches towards humans under farming conditions in Britain”. Marc Abrahams, organiser of the Ig Nobels, informs us that the loo is where many of the prizes are displayed.
God of infinity
I agree with Graeme Lindenmayer’s comments in his letter and am equally bemused when the concept of infinity is used in conjunction with the physical world and universe (4 October, p 35).
杏吧原创s are quick to accuse religious people of believing in a “God of the gaps” who dwells in the ever decreasing gap that science has not yet explained. But it seems to me that scientists could equally be accused of a similar practice of using a “God of infinity”, who they conveniently use to fill in areas that their theories yet cannot properly explain.
Common sense tells me that the one thing apart from death and taxes that we can be certain of in this world, and in the rest of the physical universe, is that nothing is free. There is always a price to be paid. Therefore, although the concept of infinity in a mathematical sense is OK, any theory of the physical universe that states, for example, that it is acceptable to have a situation of infinite energy or mass is plainly incorrect and just absurd. Or should I say, infinitely absurd.
杏吧原创s ought to know better. Rather than putting out theories that contain infinities, they should just admit that they do not yet fully understand the physical reality that their theory is trying to explain. If they can’t, maybe they should make a career change and become mathematicians.
Software police
Tam Dalyell seems unworried by the ever growing number of surveillance cameras covering more and more British towns and cities (4 October, p 51). I am very concerned by this intrusion on our liberties.
Worse, he seems happy with the prospect of the output of these cameras being linked to software to identify potential criminals, which will “work by identifying any behaviour which is even subtly nonconforming”. Is this the type of society in which Dalyell wishes to live? It isn’t mine.
Let me put to him a hypothetical case. Suppose that there are some people who, because of physical or mental disability or disease, unavoidably exhibit this “subtly nonconforming behaviour”. Is Dalyell content that such people should live a great part of their lives outside the home under suspicion 鈥� judged by a computer 鈥� without being guilty of wrongdoing of any kind?
Has he forgotten the notorious “sus” laws, which led to often completely innocent people being stopped and searched by police, in many cases only because of their skin colour? As unjust as this was, at least a human was involved in deciding who to stop in the street. Dalyell seems willing to delegate this to software.
Too easy to tap
I was pleased to see you run an article on packet telephony, or voice over IP (VoIP). As the article implied, it is a technology that is slowly and quietly edging its way into all our lives (11 October, p 24).
You note that the official wiretappers are concerned about regulations preventing them from listening in to calls made with VoIP. In fact, an opposite concern is one of the things holding back major service providers and enterprise IT departments from deploying VoIP. They are worried about security and the fact that open networks like the internet and IP local area networks are far easier to listen in to than the controlled, closed-access networks of telecom backbones and access lines.
Security in VoIP is something that is only just being addressed efficiently by equipment manufacturers.
Living plasma
I was struck by your article raising the possibility of creating a non-organic life form using charged plasma gases (20 September, p 16).
A year ago, I came across a video feed from one of the space shuttle flights during which the crew cut loose the wake shield. A series of photographs taken from the craft a using a telephoto lens depicted something very similar to the blobs of plasma referred to in your article. NASA described these spheres as an anomalous atmospheric/space phenomenon. Are the two phenomena possibly the same?
Igs on display
Feedback asks whether Ig Nobel prizes are treasured by their recipients (11 October). Alas, this Ig Nobel laureate no longer has his prize, collected in 2002 鈥� a tasteful combination of clockwork teeth mounted on a pillar. I promised it to Charles Deeming, one of my co-winners, who was unable to attend the ceremony. Last I heard, he keeps it in his loo.
Carbon storage
Having accompanied the Sleipner carbon dioxide storage project for several years in a project monitoring the injection process, I would like to comment on statements in your article on the “mineral sieve” (4 October, p 26).
The method of removing CO2 from methane gas is not by distilling the CO2, but by amine scrubbing, the standard technology at present. CO2 is then pumped not into a “disused oilfield”, but into a much shallower saline aquifer 鈥� that is, a porous rock formation filled with salty water.
Your article quotes an environmentalist who is concerned that this technology may “be used as a prescription for business as usual” and may delay development and implementation of other, energy technologies not based on fossil fuel. This concern is not justified, because CO2 handling, including safe storage, will make fossil energy more expensive and thus make alternative energy resources more competitive. No wonder most of my colleagues developing CO2 capture and storage technologies view themselves as environmentalists, though with a practical, applied touch.
Time passes
Fay Dowker promises to present a theory that may eventually reconcile science “with our deep sense of the reality of the passage of time” (4 October, p 36).
I have to say that causal set theory, in which a universe of indivisible space-time units randomly creates new units like itself, does not correspond very closely with my own sense of the passage of time. The determinism or indeterminism with which these spontaneously generating units behave does not at all match my own subjective sense of being a free agent who can choose his own destiny.
I hope scientists will consult poets when creating a bridge between physical reality as it is objectively described and life as it is vibrantly lived. Without their input, I’m afraid these bridges will never support much weight.
Secondly, causal set theory is offered as an explanation for the expansion of the universe, since its rules always produce a bigger playing board. But in the same issue of your magazine, this expansion is described as being the result of ultra-light, hard-to-detect, pervasive particles of dark matter. Both of these theories cannot be right. The second seems much more likely.
We won't get older
In your interview, Cynthia Kenyon suggests that longevity is evolvable, and that humans already have a lifespan a thousandfold that of a nematode worm (18 October, p 46). If that is the case, surely modifying genes in shorter-lived animals to increase their lifespan will not necessarily lead to ways to achieve greater longevity in humans, as we may already have evolved those alterations in order to live longer in the first place.
I am reminded of an earlier article in this magazine (3 April 1999, p 34) correlating heart rate with lifespan. It concluded that almost all animals live for more or less the same number of heartbeats 鈥� with the exception of humans, who live much longer. Perhaps we already have all the years we are likely to get.
Letter
Rex Anderson suggests an experiment in a pub that proves time travel is impossible (11 October, p 30).
Only the other night I visited the Angel pub in St Giles High Street, London, and found Rex’s note on this subject lying on the floor, with a damaged drawing pin stuck through it and marks on the wallpaper where someone had attempted to pin the note up.
Taking pity on the drunken fool, I gathered some materials and transchronified to 1983, where I constructed a darts noticeboard so there would be somewhere suitable for his note to be pinned 20 years later.
Noting that the pub was, in that year, featured in the Good Beer Guide, that the excellent ale was cheaper than at present, and that the darts players (including Rex) were a likeable crowd, I ended up staying for the following nine months and winning the pub’s inaugural “B-Team player of the year” darts cup, on which my name is still engraved.
In brief, Rex’s theory relies on two assumptions that may not be true: that his life has not already been affected by time travellers, and that any time travellers visiting the Angel would carry out his plan for him.
Letter
An asteroid travels to the past through a naturally occurring wormhole and knocks its previous self off the path before it enters the wormhole.
Snooker in time
Alan Robinson asks if there are any time-travel paradoxes that do not involve sentient beings (11 October, p 30). I can recall one from an old issue of this magazine.
Imagine a snooker table on which the corner pocket is the mouth of a wormhole that leads to a position on the table 1 second in the past. For certain trajectories, the ball emerging from the wormhole will deflect its earlier self and thus prevent it from entering the hole in the first place.
Losing your life
The article discussing the possibility of storing your life on a laptop, thanks to large disc storage capacities and specialised future operating systems, is interesting, but it does miss a major issue that most home users do not take into account (4 October, p 28). Discs fail, and the larger the disc the greater the damage if and when a failure occurs.
If we are all going to start storing our lives in a single place, then hopefully there will be plenty of help ensuring we do not lose it. I am sure many people will lose a laptop, but even for the most absent-minded, losing your mind is slightly harder, although not an impossibility.
Paul Marks writes:
鈥� The idea is that you will have a MyLifeBits database in every gadget you own. Drives will be so dense and cheap you will have copies of your lifebase in an MP3 player (like an iPod), your PDA, laptop, desktop PC, TV’s set-top box, and so on. Lose one 鈥� by losing your iPod, say 鈥� and you will be able to go to one of the others and download a new copy.