E-voting flaws
I have studied electronic voting systems and so I was interested in your article about possible subversion of the democratic process in the US (8 November, p 5).
I came to the conclusion that a voting scheme should at least provide assurance to each voter that all votes have been counted correctly, and assurance to the returning officers that they cannot be unfairly accused of rigging the election.
I was unable to create a scheme guaranteeing both confidentiality of votes and that each voter only gets to vote once. In elections in the UK, each voter has a unique number that is recorded with the unique ballot paper number. (I believe that the speaker of the House of Commons has the authority to find out which way people voted.)
In her memoir of Nazi Germany, the late Christabel Bielenberg tells how her husband was a counter at one referendum where the votes he counted were 99 per cent against the anti-Jewish, Nazi motion, but the result was announced as 99 per cent in favour. Passing on what he knew must have given the German resistance a lot of comfort, but with an electronic scheme, no one outside the Nazi party would have known.
Although the present British scheme may appear cumbersome and expensive, it is much more robust than any practicable electronic scheme I have seen. The forging of enough ballot papers to materially affect a general election would leave substantial physical evidence.
Our politicians are always saying that democracy is very valuable, and the purpose of recent electronic local elections in the UK was partly to increase the turnout, and partly to save money. Can they prove that more people voted, or just that they counted more votes? As for value for money, I suspect that you get what you pay for.
Blink and we're gone
Is anyone really surprised that physicists want the cosmological constant to be zero (1 November, p 34)? They want it to be zero for the same reasons the ancient Greeks wanted the orbits of the planets to be perfect circles. It satisfies their sense of order, nothing more, nothing less.
The anthropic principle also exists for the same reason. It gives us a central place in the order of the universe 鈥� also very satisfying. The truth of our existence is much more likely to be the result of our habitat blinking into existence, just like a virtual particle in a vacuum. Only the local timescale is different.
All we are waiting for is something like a brown dwarf or mini black hole to cruise past our star, sending the planets into eccentric orbits for a few millennia, thereby very rapidly blinking us and our egocentric theories out of existence.
Will the universe go on changelessly, even though we are no longer around to observe it? Will other habitats that support intelligent beings blink into and out of existence after we are gone? Will the cosmological constant be the same value after our planet is burnt to a crisp or frozen solid? I suspect that the answers are yes, yes and yes.
Condoms are safe
There is much confusion regarding the supposed efficacy of condoms (8 November, p 32). People often quote the 80 to 85 per cent effectiveness figure. How could anyone in their right mind trust their life to something that only worked four times out of five?
Yet couples where one partner is infected with HIV and the other one isn’t continue having sexual intercourse, relying solely on condoms, and do not pass on the virus. Many sex workers remain uninfected through consistent condom use.
The fact is that condoms are 99.9 per cent effective when used properly. The 80 per cent figure reflects all the times when they are not used correctly 鈥� that is, for example, when they have not been put on properly, or when they are used with oil-based lubricants that destroy the rubber.
Condoms remain the only effective way to prevent the spread of HIV and other STDs and should be promoted as such. Any suggestion that condoms simply do not work is a lie.
Work or die
If people take Jo Spencely’s views seriously, the next logical step would be to decide at what age people will no longer qualify for medical care, free or otherwise (8 November, p 32). There is no conceptual difference between doing this and Spencely’s idea of ceasing research into enabling people to live healthier and longer lives. Take the idea even further and you could deny other things to people beyond working age, or even herd them into camps.
I like to think that Spencely is young, with old age far off, and may not have thought this through. Otherwise the idea of people with views like this getting into positions of authority is chilling indeed, and could lead to a rerun of the horrors of the early 20th century.
Legal killers
Tam Dalyell seems all too willing to accept the Home Office’s belief that heroin and cocaine are the most harmful drugs (8 November, p 51). I doubt he has seen any evidence that these illegal drugs are more harmful than the legal drugs alcohol and tobacco.
The World Health Organization estimates that tobacco use contributes to 6 per cent of deaths, alcohol 1.5 per cent, and illegal drugs a mere 0.2 per cent. Of course, tobacco use is more common than illegal drug use, but only by a factor of about 6.
Our current discriminatory drug laws are based on prejudice rather than evidence. As a result the law misleads people 鈥� especially the young 鈥� into believing that legal drugs are safer than illegal drugs. This inevitably contributes to the death toll from alcohol and tobacco.
Show me a clone
Due to the lack of publicly available proof, much of the media have chosen to discredit Clonaid’s achievements by stating them to be “a hoax”. To add insult to injury, some journalists recently went as far as to say that I myself have said that the births were a hoax (18 October, p 6). This is obviously false as the five babies are alive and doing perfectly well. We would also like to inform the public that legal action has been taken against those defamatory journalists.
I want to make sure that people realise that we are dealing with human lives and not artificial objects. In early January I had to choose between my reputation and the life of the clone babies and their families. I chose to let them live a peaceful life and it is rewarding to receive pictures of baby Eve smiling.
Other children will be born soon, conceived by nuclear transfer. Among the future parents some are ready to go public. If the attempts to declare us as criminals at the UN level are dropped, then proof of our achievements will be published. They will not be published, however, if cloning is declared to be a crime against humanity, as some would like it to be. It would be foolish of us to give evidence that could be used against us.
Meanwhile, Clonaid’s reproductive cloning programme continues and our patients can be assured that we will respect our non-disclosure agreements under any circumstances.
Senseless universe
Graham Coupe invokes common sense as an argument against the use of the concept of infinity in physical theory (1 November, p 32).
There is no principle I know of that says that the universe must behave in a common-sense manner, and if that is so, we should not expect successful theories of the universe to conform to common sense either.
Common sense is a set of generalisations that we make from our everyday experience. This personal experience is restricted to a tiny range of timescales, spatial scales, velocities, and so on. Who are we to say that these generalisations should apply universally?
Surely the success of the highly counter-intuitive quantum theory and relativity shows us that common sense is a very blunt scientific instrument indeed.
Faster than light?
Your article poses the important question of whether information can travel faster than light (18 October, p 42). The background to the article was a paper published recently in Nature (vol 425, p 695) by Michael Stenner and others, who claim to have designed a novel experiment to prove this question. They found that the speed of information is less than the velocity of light.
While the experimental result was correct, I believe their interpretation of the results was misleading. Stenner and his colleagues transmitted a light pulse through a gas that effectively speeds up a narrow range of frequencies beyond the velocity of light. Although their light pulse fell within this range, the information was modulated by a lower frequency that did not. This meant that the information 鈥� as encoded by a sharp change in the pulse height 鈥� travelled as light usually does through a gas, with a speed slower than that of light. So the experiment by Stenner and his colleagues does not properly address the question of whether information can travel faster than light.
China's ambitions
You ask why China “wants to conquer space” (25 October, p 8). Two suggestions: they do not care for US plans for full-spectrum military dominance on land, sea, air and space, and nor do they care for US global missile defences. All of which promises an appalling waste of global resources.
If the US agreed to return to international law and international arms control, things might be very different.
Travel to marry
The article by Lynn Dicks on the effects of inbreeding reminded me that ancient civilisations have known about such effects for a long time (18 October, p 38).
My father, an Amhara from Ethiopia, always told me that by tradition he wasn’t allowed to marry any of his cousins who were less than seven times removed 鈥� that is, related to him in the past seven generations.
Accordingly, as a child he had to memorise his male ancestry. Men had to travel long distances to other villages to find a spouse. He always joked that as he couldn’t remember his ancestors’ names properly, he married my mother, a French woman.
The secret's out
Rex Anderson’s test to prove the impossibility of time travel depends on the inventor not wanting it kept secret (11 October, p 30). But this is unlikely to be the case. In fact, it has been suggested that the secret of time travel was found some time ago by the entire Scottish nation. The clues are subtle, but they are there. How else would they be able to use the phrase “You’ll have had your tea?”, or end a conversation with the grammatically unfeasible, “That’ll be me, away down the road, then”?
Mice, beware!
Researchers in the US have created a virus that is lethal to mice (1 November, p 6). So now we know for certain: America has discovered weapons of mouse destruction.
For the record
鈥� Due to a technical problem, only a small detail of the photograph of Cecilia Payne appeared in “The star who unravelled the sun” (8 November, p 52) rather than the whole picture.