Philosophy or science?
It is interesting to me that mathematical and scientific language, when explained in layman’s terms, sounds more and more like Philosophy (with a capital P) 鈥� as in “Mr Hawking’s Flexiverse” (20 April, p 28). In other words, while much in Philosophy cannot be tested or proven by experiment (as in Science), it is noteworthy that the theories and suggestions made in both fields are so similar when spoken of in general language.
I disagree with Paul Steinhardt’s statement that the Hawking/Hertog approach is tantamount to “throwing in the towel”. While the ideas might echo philosophical language when expressed in lay terms, I do not view Philosophy as a worthy substitute for Science, and I don’t think the two gentlemen in question do either. If Hawking’s and Hertog’s theories can be borne out by experiment it will be a truly thrilling next step in the attempt to understand the reality we seem to occupy.
An elephant in the room
I do get tired of people who decry major projects because “The money could be so much better spent…” alleviating the ills of humanity (Letters, 22 April, p 20 and others). Such comments are usually about Big Science or people in space.
There’s an elephant in the room, though, isn’t there? Our government has so far spent about 拢13 billion on its silly little adventure in Iraq. The Pentagon budget is nearly $500 billion! What we could do with that!
Name that monkey
You report that there are no clues as to the nature of the uacari 鈥� the bald, red-faced, angry-looking Amazonian monkey which surely ranks among the ugliest creatures on Earth 鈥� in either its common name or its scientific name, Cacajao (22 April, p 52). The tribes whose words these were are now extinct, and the meanings died with them.
But there is a third name for this animal, used widely in the Amazon, whose derivation may be less obscure. They call it o macaco ingles, which translates as “the English monkey”.
The editor replies:
鈥� That name refers, however, to only one of the two species of uacari, the one with the bald red head, Cacajao calvus (a picture of a sub-species of which accompanied the piece). The one for which the terms “cacajao” and “uacari” were coined by Humboldt and by Spix is the black-headed uacari, Cacajao melanocephalus, which is not bald and does not have a red face.
Beastly principle
I like the idea of the universe existing as a quantum superposition of possible universes, which collapses into an actual universe by an act of measurement by a conscious human observer (22 April, p 28). So what happened before human consciousness evolved? Did animals of limited or absent consciousness live in an undefined multiverse? Is this idea the same as the so-called “Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle” (C.R.A.P.)?
Dust-to-dust cost
Your correspondents seem to only look at the fuel consumption figures to determine the environmental cost of a vehicle (8 April, p 24 and 29 April, p 23). They do not seem to take into account the life of the vehicle, the energy used to both make and dispose of it, or the reusability of the parts in a vehicle.
Market researchers in the US have done a “dust-to-dust” analysis of the environmental costs of vehicles on the US market. The report at suggests that the cost of hybrid electric cars is much higher than their fuel consumption implies.
In Europe we use many more diesel-powered cars than the US, further reducing the significance of the headline-grabbing fuel consumption figures.
Tilt!
The Japanese micro-controlled bicycle belongs in Feedback’s department of superfluous technology (29 April, p 25). Every bicycle I have ever ridden already has a highly effective automatic tilt-sensing steering system which prevents falling. It is called the front wheel. At surprisingly slow speeds, this gyroscope will steer into the direction of any tilt. Why would you need electronics to do the same job?
If fact, tilting is the correct way to steer a bike. If you try to steer by moving the handlebars with your hands, you will cause the bike to tilt the other way and fall off! The trick with riding a bike is to trust the bike.
Far too cute
I hope I am not the only person to get halfway through Stephanie Pain’s “Sting operation” and fail to read the second half, becoming so enchanted with the picture and description of the giant pouched rat that it was the following day before I realised that I hadn’t finished the article and had no memory of what I had previously read (22 April, p 42).
Does anyone realise how unbearably cute these beasts are and how much some people might pay to have them as companion animals, even if they don’t live near an active minefield to justify this? I then went on to worry how many of them got blown up in the course of their duties and am now contemplating a campaign to give them better pension rights, health and safety regulations, and so on.
Someone ought to do some real research into the distracting power of cute images: I totally failed to take in the real message of the article.
Beauty…
You report the training of bees to stick out their tongues in response to specific odours (22 April, p 42). Each bee is restrained in an individual holder equipped with a miniature electronic eye, aligned precisely to record this reaction.
It is hard to explain why I find this particular solution so elegant, but I suppose the beauty is in the eye of the bee-holder.
A diagnosis disorder?
Western cultures appear to be the worst culprits in over-diagnosing Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). This poses the question: could it possibly be these cultures’ adoption of scientific discourses as the dominant paradigm and, as you suggest (15 April, p 5), the pharmaceutical industries being allowed to “educate” the government by lobbying for social and cultural problems to be worthy of medicalising?
As there is a general consensus that ADHD is an umbrella term for a set of behavioural characteristics, as opposed to any definitive chemical, structural or physical abnormality, perhaps we need to look into why so many children are labelled with ADHD and are prescribed medication. My guess is that individuality is not catered for in societies that depict obedience to conformity as their ethos, especially within the education system, and we run the risk of producing a generation of medicated “clones” if we carry on diagnosing these children at the currently rapid rate in order to gain social control.
All at sea
If the findings about the slowing of Atlantic currents are real, we need to persuade the British government to take action as soon as possible (15 April, p 42). They should lower the narrow basaltic Wyville-Thomson Ridge by about 500 metres, in an effort to double the inflow of warm salty waters and outflow of deep cold waters through the Faeroe-Shetland Trough, which is the major route for in and outflow towards the Norwegian Sea.
If this is not enough, we should start to lower the sediment basin in the Denmark Strait by stirring silt and mud into suspension and letting the bottom currents carry it away.
A more extraordinary project would be to “pick up” more warm, salty southern Atlantic water by using a long net all the way from west of Azores towards the west of Ireland, letting the Coriolis effect do the rest.
Power to the grid
As a member of one of the industrial nuclear consortia which designed and constructed the Berkeley, Bradwell, Dungeness “A”, Oldbury, Torness and Sizewell “B” nuclear power stations, and the Inverkip oil-fired power station, I take serious issue with Michael Brooks’s suggestion that it is all over for nuclear power (22 April, p 33). He strongly supports wind power and co-generative micropower, yet presents no evidence for how the various types of energy can be woven together to support a reliable supply grid system. Such a system worked well for 70 years, because the great majority of the generators used have been fully controllable. Nuclear power stations fit snugly into the system.
Even the largest wind turbine has a capacity only 0.5 per cent that of a 600-megawatt steam boiler-turbine unit. The economic attractiveness of the windiest sites for generation in the UK is largely cancelled out by the costs of reinforcing supergrid transmission lines.
Co-generative micropower appears to throw out all the economies of scale along with the bathwater. Not a word is said about the feasibility and cost of training local maintenance personnel in the new technologies. Finally, the unpalatable feature of co-generation is that electricity production is a mere by-product, not a commodity of variable output in its own right.
From A. Wills
There are now attempts to sell the idea of nuclear energy to the public by saying it doesn’t create carbon dioxide emissions. While nuclear reactors do not emit CO2 at the point of generation, reactors are just a small part of the nuclear fuel cycle, which emits large amounts of carbon during the course of uranium mining, ore milling, uranium hexafluoride conversion, fuel enrichment and fabrication of fuel rods. The treatment, conditioning, transportation and disposal of nuclear products also uses a lot of energy. Plus, there is the cost of decommissioning old nuclear stations.
Ruislip, Middlesex, UK
Act now on climate
We are at a critical point in history. Time is of the essence. Some limit must be set on what can be reasonably allowed for debate on climate change and the direction that the world must take before decisions are made.
Geoffrey Hammond’s challenge to the principle of “contraction and convergence” (29 April, p 22) comes across as an attempt to find another formula that will be more politically acceptable to more participants involved in the development of a global strategy. It is another instance of misrepresenting what C&C is all about and, in the process, muddies its clarity.
The merits of C&C make it unquestionably the only practical and morally defensible solution that the world can embrace, as I have argued in my book How We Can Save the Planet. If we continue to engage in wasting what little time is left in seeking to find other means of escape from our mutual dilemma, we run the serious risk that future generations will take us to task for our lack of resolve.
Gravity conundrum
It strikes me that modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) still has two problems, despite being reformulated to be compatible with general relativity (29 April, p 52). First, there is still no clear physical basis for the theory; and second, unless the reformulation has changed some of MOND’s predictions, it fails to cope with very large-scale situations 鈥� such as the behaviour of large galaxy cluster cores.
Dark matter has problems too. No one knows what it is made of, and no one has ever found any. What’s more, as MOND has highlighted, there is a consistent pattern to its distribution within galaxies that hasn’t been explained.
A resolution to all these problems would come from a source of mass (or equivalent energy) that is potentially present everywhere, is not normally detectable and could be brought into being due to the mass of baryonic matter in galaxies. It seems to me that the obvious candidate is vacuum energy, in the form of virtual particles, that pervades space.
From Tim Hely
The addition of two extra fields in the TeVeS model of modified Newtonian dynamics reminds me of the addition of epicycles in the flawed geocentric theory of the solar system. I predict with some confidence that the model will fit the data even better if we keep adding on extra fields. Why stop at only three? Why not choose four, five 鈥� or even 11 to match the number of dimensions in M-Theory? Unfortunately, I believe that our understanding of the astronomical processes involved will vary inversely with the number of fields required.
Edinburgh, UK
Waste not…
Much has been said about the carbon cycle and the part it plays in absorbing greenhouse gases, but the discussion always misses a vital element in this cycle: the supply of other nutrients which allow the growth and absorption to take place.
Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does increase the rate of plant growth 鈥� but only when the nutrients are available. The human race, in an effort to stay healthy, has seen fit to prevent these nutrients from being recycled by pumping sewage into the sea and burying large quantities in landfills, where they are not available to plant growth.
If we pumped our partially treated sewage and the organic content of landfills into desert areas and into existing forest areas, the nutrients and water could fertilise the growth of trees and plants and so help remove carbon from the atmosphere. The cost of this process would be far less than is currently spent trying to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and if the decay process of the waste material were used to produce methane (natural gas) for power generation it could even become profitable.
Love's many stories
I applaud you for addressing questions of emotion in the special issue on love (29 April, p 30). I was, however, disappointed by your focus on evolutionary psychology, since that discourse reduces the complex plasticity of love and sexuality to narratives about finding ideal mates and passing on genes. It also, as the inheritor of sociobiology, continually puts forward fixed ideas about gender 鈥� man the hunter, woman the nurturer, and so on. The narratives of romantic love, gendered behaviour and indeed sexuality itself are multiform phenomena produced within society, not simply within the human body. In other words, they all have cultural histories.
Martin Daly and Margo Wilson suggest that male sexual possessiveness is a biological phenomenon related to competition for “reproductive opportunities”. But systems of polyandry, where women take more than one male partner simultaneously, are well documented in Tibet, Nepal, India and China. Furthermore, contemporary western gay male culture, as well as producing many monogamous relationships, contains within it an acceptance of negotiated non-monogamy which would seem to give the lie to a particular masculine predisposition to excessive jealousy.
Simon Le Vay implies that the eroticism of difference is a constant feature of same-sex desire, designed somehow to make up for a “lack” of male/female difference. That this is culturally located and not a universal feature of queer desire is shown by the fact that 1970s gay clone culture involved an eroticism of similarity, as did 1980s lesbian feminist androgyny.
From Julian Fitzgerald
The statement that “It is male sexual possessiveness that is the dangerous variety” suggests that we do indeed live in an era of extremely partial analysis split down gender lines, even in the scientific community.
Leeds, UK