Pandora's boycott
What supporters of a European academic boycott of Israel like Steven Rose and Rita Giacaman fail to consider is that any such action will almost inevitably result in a counter-boycott by many non-Israeli Jews of European institutions that support it (11 December 2004, p 26).
One also has to consider what the response of the US government would be to such a boycott. I could easily see the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health refusing to fund travel to any conference which excludes Israelis, and cancelling all joint research with European institutions that discriminate against Israeli researchers.
The worst-case end result could be a European academic community from which Jews become excluded and yet another huge European-American row. Opening this Pandora’s box is simply a very, very bad idea.
The sponsors of this approach also overestimate its potential for influencing events in the Middle East. The possibility that the Israeli government, which has been suffering from three years of suicide bombing, is going to change its policy because a bunch of European academics disses them is remote to say the least.
It is also hard to see why Israel should be singled out. Using the same logic we should boycott Chinese academics because of the country’s treatment of Tibet, Sudanese academics because of Darfur and Iranian academics because of Iran’s atomic bomb programme.
Academia, and academic science even more so, is the place that has come the closest to achieving a genuine multicultural/post-national outlook. Most universities teach students from all over the world with a minimum of friction and fuss. A boycott would make a hash of this achievement and turn academia into just another arena for nationalistic competition.
Don't lose the scent
If the contraceptive pill affects women’s perception of body odour, and as a consequence they tend to choose partners with similar, rather than complementary, immune systems to their own, then mightn’t their children be born with suboptimal immune systems as a result (4 December 2004, p 30)? Could there be a relationship between this and documented increases in asthma and allergies?
Syndromes not diseases
You refer to the induction of psychosis by immune reactions in the brain (6 November 2004, p 40). Is it not high time that psychiatrists recognise that such categories of mental disturbance represent not so much diseases as clinical manifestations of disease?
We recognise that “fever” is not a disease 鈥� though our great-grandfathers believed it was 鈥� but rather one way in which we become aware that the body is reacting to infection. What we need to discover is what malfunctions of structures or processes give rise to particular syndromes, bearing in mind that a syndrome can be the common end point of a number of disparate insults.
The search for a specific cause for schizophrenia first posited emotional stress, then an inborn metabolic error, then a mutated gene, now infection. That search is futile. It shows psychiatry pretending that it can classify diseases in the same way as medicine, and in this respect it is a century behind the times.
Slipstream speeders
While the reduced wind resistance and improved design of a speedbike doubles its speed, the wind resistance is by no means eliminated (4 December 2004, p 36). In motor-pacing, a cyclist rides behind a motor vehicle towing a cowling, and is almost completely shielded from the wind. The speed record for this stands at 152 miles per hour, which is almost twice as fast as Sam Whittingham achieved on his speedbike.
Earth is no museum
David Horne believes my idea of re-establishing Adam’s Bridge, the connection between India and Sri Lanka that was submerged some 12,000 years ago, is full of holes (20 November 2004, p 38, and 11 December 2004, p 27). But he manages to find only one hole, which I mentioned, namely that you change the ecology if you convert sea floor into land surface. This is a rather obvious consequence of my idea of pushing up the sea bottom by injecting sulphuric acid into subsurface limestone.
So yes, the corals will end up on the sides of the newly created dam, where they were 12,000 years ago. The Earth, and particularly its surface, is a continuously evolving system, and nature has very effectively resisted the attempts of conservationists to turn it into a dead museum.
Wandering stars
William Blair’s claim that an “alignment” (conjunction) of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars corresponded with the birth of Christ is incorrect (11 December 2004, p 33). No planetary conjunction at all is known for the traditionally accepted year of Jesus’s birth, 1 BC. Because of this, some have suggested that he was born in 7 BC, when there was a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation Pisces (Kepler’s star is in Ophiuchus). At the time, Mars was in Sagittarius. Others have opted for 2 or 3 BC, when there were conjunctions of Jupiter and Venus. In fact such astronomical searches are pointless. The “Star of Bethlehem” was a figment of the imagination of the evangelists, who imagined that at the time of the Saviour’s birth there ought to have been a celestial sign.
Viviani's pendulum
Govert Schilling says of the way in which a pendulum’s plane of swing appears to rotate with respect to a laboratory on Earth: “This effect was first demonstrated by French physicist L茅on Foucault in 1851” (27 November 2004, p 28).
In E. Grimsehl’s A Textbook of Physics there is a footnote in the volume on mechanics (p 168, 1947 edition) that says: “Foucault was unaware that the pendulum experiment had been previously performed with satisfactory results by V. Viviani in 1661 at Florence, and by Bartolini in 1833 at Rimini.” I have tried to locate Viviani’s work without success. I would appreciate a reference to his work, so that I might see the original.
O thou weed so lovely
Experimentation with drugs (known to Shakespeare as “compounds”) seems to have been practised by pipe-smokers in 17th-century England, if results of chemical analyses of residues from pipe bowls from Stratford-upon-Avon are anything to go by (13 November 2004, p 32). Literary evidence is also suggestive of this practice, especially when one examines Shakespeare’s sonnets carefully. These poems refer to a “noted weed” (perhaps cannabis) in the context of creative writing. The sonneteer prefers the “weed”, turning away from “compounds strange”. Further, he writes of its ability “to make my appetite more keen”, and there is absolutely no doubt that cannabis is an appetite stimulant.
It would seem highly probable that Shakespeare and other writers (including Francis Bacon, who referred to a “despised weed”) were deliberately cryptic about cannabis after the church condemned it, associating this plant with witchcraft. To have one’s writings associated with the wicked weed could have led to the burning of books. Perish the thought that Shakespeare’s texts could have been burnt at the stake.
Say what's real
I would like to join a campaign, if someone else would start it, to make sure that TV and film documentary makers clearly differentiate for us what is real and what is computer generated. I am thinking of, for instance, images of deep space, or deep sea, or of inside the body, where I can’t always tell. A little sign in the corner would do, as there is in reconstructions, saying “simulated”, or “computer generated”. Any takers?
Liberal chemists
You quote Nobel laureate Harry Kroto (4 December 2004, p 9) as saying “A university without a chemistry department should be stripped of the title and redesignated a liberal arts college, which is all it is.”
Presumably he was referring to the UK. In the US, liberal arts colleges have chemistry departments so, in one sense, the well-meaning quote is actually a slur on these colleges. Williams College, for example, is quite strong across the sciences.
I hope that these decisions to abolish chemistry departments are reversed.
Mystical balls
Feedback dismisses too quickly the charts of frequent and infrequent lottery numbers (11 December 2004). In a lottery I want not only to win, but to share the win with as few other people as possible. So if some people’s use of the charts leads them to pick the most frequent or infrequent numbers, I maximise my expected return by picking numbers which are not in these two sets.
However, now that I have let readers know my strategy, I will have to decide on a new approach. My lips (and my wallet) are sealed.
For the record
鈥� In “Through the smokescreen” (18 December, p 42), an editing error meant that a graph showing worldwide deaths from smoking was accompanied by an incorrect caption, which appeared to inflate the number of deaths. The caption should have read “Cumulative deaths caused by smoking…” instead of “Annual deaths caused by smoking…”.
鈥� The Selendang Ayu, which ran aground off the Aleutian Islands, was a bulk carrier. Our headline (18 December 2004, p 5) wrongly called it a tanker.
We need philosophers
Simon Singh believes scientists do not need philosophers in the same way that birds do not need ornithologists (4 December 2004, p 23). He could not be more wrong. Birds do need ornithologists, and it takes a peculiarly narrow view of birds’ interests to imagine that they do not. They need them because, without expert protection, many bird species are headed for extinction.
For a similar reason scientists need philosophers and sociologists. 杏吧原创s, like birds, live in a complex social and political world inhabited by other groups with wider agendas. These groups constantly seek to divert funding, influence committees and discredit individuals, organisations, research findings and ideas, both within science and outside it. These often powerful, well-financed, highly motivated and self-interested groups (think of the tobacco lobby, for example) operate in almost every field of science. Distressingly, they often succeed in aligning science and unwary scientists with a particular agenda or product. The long-term effect of this has been to bring science into disrepute.
Sociologists and philosophers of science can help researchers understand the realities of this complex environment and recognise the tactics used by lobbyists and others. They can show, for example, that scientists often have poorly defined notions of scientific objectivity, independence, balance and caution, yet are extremely sensitive to any transgression of the boundaries of proper scientific behaviour. As a consequence it can be relatively easy to sway scientific opinion against a troublesome critic by manipulating the use of such words.
Ultimately, we all need to know how social and financial power play out in the scientific realm and to understand how to ensure that the needs of different groups can contribute proportionately and democratically. But to do this scientists will need to collaborate constructively with philosophers and sociologists in an atmosphere of mutual respect rather than mutual disdain.