Keep the battery
Though phonon power might replace the alternator in my car, I shall still need a battery to start it from cold (4 September, p 34).
Letter
The heat from the various appliances in my house is only wasted in the summer, when my heating is switched off.
In the winter the waste heat contributes to the heating of my house, and while heat from electricity may be expensive compared to that from gas, it is not wasted.
Cool Swedes
One of your “Cutting edge” pieces reports on a district cooling system recently installed in Toronto (28 August, p 20). What’s new here? Stockholm has been doing this for many years, not from 80 metres deep, but using cold bottom water for its district cooling system.
Sweden’s first district cooling system started in 1992 in V盲ster氓s (and where else, as it was also the home of district heating 40 or more years earlier?). Stockholm came later, in about 1996, I think.
Worth the bumps
You report Kari Hansen’s advice to parents of 3 to 5-year-olds 鈥� “I would recommend that children do not cycle when so young” 鈥� which is based on an increased injury rate in this age range (4 September, p 14).
Do her data take into account the health benefits of cycling? Perhaps those who start young are less inclined to turn into couch potatoes in later life, in which case a few bumps and scratches would seem a small price to pay.
Earth's nuclear heart
A nuclear reactor at the centre of the Earth is an intriguing prospect. But I have two problems with Marvin Herndon’s hypothesis as described by Stephen Battersby (7 August, p 26).
First, the near-surface natural reactor once active at Oklo hardly supports the idea that dense uranium salts would have concentrated at the centre of the Earth. More disconcerting is the notion that gravity is a significant force near the centre of the Earth. Deep within the Earth gravitational forces cancel and the net effect is that gravity is weak within the core and zero at the Earth’s centre. Therefore, if matter is organised deep within the Earth, it would not be due to its density.
Saint Stephen
Am I alone in the rather unnerving feeling that Feedback is trying to progress Stephen Hawking to sainthood 鈥� especially with the heading in the 11 September issue “HELP US STEPHEN”, all too reminiscent of prayers for intercession.
Perhaps we ought to remember the assessment of Hawking in James Gleick’s book on the physicist Richard Fenyman, Genius: “Briefly Stephen Hawking, a British cosmologist esteemed but not revered by his peers, developed a reputation amongst some non-scientists as Einstein’s heir to the mantle [of genius]鈥� in terms of raw brilliance and hard accomplishment, a few score of his professional colleagues felt that he was no more a genius than they.”
As Zaphod Beeblebrox’s analyst remarks of Zaphod in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “He’s just this guy, you know?”
Feedback, the mug
Feedback’s insinuation regarding the label on a mug is completely unjustified (11 September). Some utensils have a chemical composition which means they heat up faster in a microwave than the food inside them. Many is the time I have put a mug of coffee in the microwave, only to find that the mug is too hot to touch and the contents lukewarm.
It is a perfectly sensible warning.
Evolving discord
In your report about the work by Susan Lindquist’s team on the “Lamarckian” behaviour of yeast containing the prion form of Sup35 protein, you state that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a chief rival of Charles Darwin and that they had conflicting ideas about the explanation of evolution (21 August, p 13).
However, in his book Fabulous Science, John Waller summarises recent research by numerous historians that undermines this rivalry. In fact, Darwin’s notebooks revealed that Lamarck’s ideas profoundly conditioned the way in which Darwin set out to uncover the mechanism of evolutionary change.
Darwin was at ease suggesting that environmental factors somehow induced heritable changes in maturing embryos, in accordance with conventional 19th-century ideas of intermingling growth and reproduction. His “provisional hypothesis of Pangenesis” contends that every feature of the embryo’s body and mind is formed by innumerable specialised hereditary units, or gemmules, that compete for limited “attachment sites” on the newly created body where they can grow and be expressed.
These gemmules were believed to originate in the respective parts of the parents before making their way to their reproductive organs. The use of certain organs strengthened and enlarged certain parts, while disuse diminished them, and these modifications were supposed to be transmitted to the gemmules.
Darwin had no conception of random mutation: he never broke away from the core of the evolutionary ideas that antedated his own and never did think like a modern Darwinist. I would not dare to suggest that prions perfectly fit the concept of gemmules, but notice that Lindquist’s epigenetic mechanism sounds very Darwinian after all.
Odds on gravity
I notice that Ladbrokes cut the odds on the LIGO detector finding gravitational waves by 2010 from your reported 500/1 to 2/1 in one week (28 August, p 33). Shame, I was hoping my winnings would pay for a trip to a space hotel.
We have named gravitational waves correctly
Letter
The British Medical Association has never recommended the introduction of a tax on fatty foods. Given Whyte’s attacks on “sloppy thinking”, the least he could do is check his facts before launching a tirade against the BMA.
The BMA discussed the possibility of tackling the obesity epidemic using the taxation system at our annual meeting in 2003, but it was the overwhelming opinion of doctors that such a system would place an unacceptable burden on low-income groups.
Doctors do not pretend to have all the answers to the health problems facing the world. However public health problems such as the high levels of obesity and the dangers of second-hand smoke are close to the hearts of doctors, who see the devastating effects these problems can have on the lives of their patients.
It is important to give people the tools to make informed choices and not dictate what those choices should be. By increasing public debate on these issues this is what the BMA is trying to do.
Letter
I was profoundly disappointed that during the interview with philosopher Jamie Whyte you let him characterise religious faith as “belief in something more than we have a good reason to believe in”, and yet didn’t pick him up on what the good reasons are to believe in his speciality: truth. Perhaps a little study of another slippery concept is in order: that of justice.
Uncertain realities
I enjoyed the interview with Jamie Whyte, and agree with much of what he has to say (4 September, p 40). However, his annoyance at those who are neither atheists nor Christians seems to be what he might call a polarisation fallacy. He argues for a scientific approach, which must accept equivocation and try to circumvent the paralysing nature of accepted paradigms. Until we can comprehend the origin of the universe, it is premature to presume or deny a causative 鈥� whether there is a “prime mover unmoved”.
Whyte throws out non-theistic views, such as fundamental Buddhism, without even a nod. He would surely have been exasperated by Bohr, Schr枚dinger, Fermi and Einstein, who all “believed in something” other than the Christian (or indeed any other) God.
What would Whyte make of this infuriating statement of Einstein’s? “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” The logician’s lust for certainty expressed in language is itself emotional rather than rational. The enquiring mind is not chock-full of rigid preconceptions, but of hypotheses that demand testing. And in science the weird has at times proved truer than the commonsensical.
Letter
Many may have found parts of your article “Falling on deaf ears” difficult to believe. It was precisely the sort of thing described in your article that caused me to resign as chair of a disabled-rights association and sever my links with the disability movement.
Many profoundly deaf people cannot accept that deafness is any sort of handicap and are most offended if anybody offers to “cure” them. Once, when I argued for adequate financial provision for children born with severe disabilities, someone told me that I was presenting the disabled “in a poor light” and saying “nothing empowering about them”.
We should make adequate provision for people less fortunate than ourselves, but should we pretend that not being able to walk, see or hear are advantages? Should we all pay exorbitant prices for books, to subsidise the production of a range of minority formats for the visually impaired? I question the wisdom of scrapping fine old library buildings just because a minority (of whom I am one) have trouble climbing stairs.
Right to be deaf
Once again the prospect of a cure for profound deafness has voices within the “deaf community” asserting that the condition is not a pathology but just a difference, like skin colour or sexual orientation (28 August, p 36). This view is wholly or mainly dependent on saying that signing is a full language equivalent to an oral one. This may well be so, but oral communication is far from the only function of hearing.
Although profoundly sympathetic to the wish of deaf people not to see themselves as disabled, I believe they are deluded. I need only one word to refute the “different but equal” claim: music.
Should a cure be perfected, to withhold it from a profoundly deaf infant would be an abominable act.
Merchants of ivory
Daniel Stiles makes the extraordinary assertion that trading in ivory is a better way to conserve elephants than an ivory ban (28 August, p 16). In fact, history has shown trade to be the single most decisive factor in making scores of species from tigers to cod endangered in the first place 鈥� and elephants are no exception.
Stiles states that there will always be a demand for worked ivory, but this is clearly not the case. Following the 1989 ban on ivory trade by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), prices plummeted and demand dried up. While he admits the ban led to an initial crash in ivory markets, he says this was followed by a resurgence in the mid-1990s. Yet bizarrely, in the same paragraph, he says an ivory stockpile sale approved by CITES in 1997 鈥� the first since the ban 鈥� did not lead to any increase in elephant poaching or ivory trade. In fact, it was this very stockpile sale, not the ban, which caused the resurgence in trade. With talk of even a limited trade in ivory reopening, poachers and traders 鈥� who need a legal market onto which to launder their wares 鈥� set out to recommence the bloodshed.
With CITES already estimating the world’s illegal trade in ivory at up to 15 tonnes per year, Stiles’s call for a “regulated trade” in ivory is a dangerous utopian fantasy.