A painless electrocution
I was interested by your account of (13 October, p 53) because I recently experienced what I am convinced was a near-fatal electric shock, when I accidentally put my thumb on a live 240-volt electrical terminal.
There was absolutely no pain. I was partially conscious for a period which I am unable to quantify, but I distinctly remember thinking that if I was not found soon I was going to die.
I was found semi-conscious by my wife, who reacted admirably and undoubtedly saved my life. We estimate that I was in contact with the power source for at least 45 seconds, the period it would have taken her to reach me.
The pad of my thumb was burnt to the bone and I had a large exit burn to my chest.
I was treated wonderfully by the burns unit at Morriston Hospital in Swansea. The worst pain I suffered was on removal of some of the stitches.
Doctors were concerned that, as the exit burn was so close to my heart, there would be some adverse affect on that organ, but as far as I am aware it is still functioning normally.
Just in time
Marcus Chown proposes a second time dimension (13 October, p 36), but he gives no real indication of how this might work or its implications, beyond resolving some problems in string theory and grand unified theories.
It is not clear to me why an object moving through a second time dimension 鈥� call it t 鈥� should be able to travel backwards in normal time, t, just because it is no longer travelling along the t axis, like some object plucked from the x–y plane in Flatland and deposited elsewhere in the plane, having been moved through z. It seems to assume that what we perceive as time is parallel to the t axis with some constant value of t, possibly zero, rather than being a vector with components in t and t, and that moving away from this axis somehow overcomes the monotonic nature of time as we experience it.
Could t explain the relativistic time dilation effect? May objects accelerating towards the speed of light still travel forwards in hypertime at a constant rate, the t component increasing and the t component decreasing, while these stay the same for the stationary observer?
In an article in an earlier issue, Saswato Das wrote that cryptographers expect to stay ahead of the quantum code-breakers by using techniques such as hash chains that “require you to wait to calculate one thing before you calculate another” (15 September, p 30). What if quantum computers can operate in multiple time dimensions, so that one calculation can take place at the same time as another in t but before it in t?
Many worlds, one wave
A glaring anomaly strikes me in David Deutsch’s new work on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which you reported on 22 September (p 6).
The original many-worlds interpretation was a response to the Copenhagen interpretation of the double-slit experiment, in which single photons apparently go two ways round the apparatus. This conundrum was avoided by proposing that each path is in a different, parallel world. But how then do we get the interference of the two waveforms, now in different universes?
The only plausible get-out clause is to have the parallel universes briefly interfere with each other. But this appears to run counter to the many-worlds view, which was designed to have a determinate universe for each world-line or history.
Salvation is at hand, however, since there is one view of quantum mechanics which has no anomalies: that there is no real particle, only a wave packet. The particle is only an expression to signify the point at which a wave packet interacts with our apparatus. One wave packet can interact only once, giving the impression of one particle.
Stemming snake oil
There is a perfectly simple remedy in Europe to prevent firms selling “homeopathic CDs” or similar products claiming to cure medical complaints (13 October, p 4). The prohibits advertising or selling any substances claiming to have medicinal properties unless they have a valid medicinal licence.
In the UK, refer advertisements for snake oil to your , who have the power to seize such goods and prosecute the seller or advertiser.
Is this a question?
Concerning free will (letters since 25 August), the 1986 University of Bristol philosophy degree final exam included the optional question 16: “Could you have not answered this question?” I was raised on the urban legend of the Eton College entrance exam candidate who answered “What is courage?” with the words “This is”. Therefore, though my degree rested on it, I was hugely tempted to hand in a sheet of paper that was blank, except for the number “16” in the margin. I didn’t. QED?
For the record
鈥� Our report about photonic crystals (28 July, p 28) should have attributed their properties to an array of micro-spheres, not of atoms.
鈥� We wrote: “Even in eastern Europe abortion rates have halved from 90 abortions per 1000 women in 2005, to 44 per 1000 in 2003” (20 October, p 8) That should have been “90 abortions per 1000 women in 1995…”.
Imperfect pitch
In your brief report of research on perfect pitch, you say “Bernstein had it…” (3 September, p 20). No, he didn’t. Those who knew Leonard Bernstein report that he denied having perfect pitch, and said it was not necessary. See for example
There is a lot of popular misinformation about which famous musicians did or did not have the ability. Given the rarity of perfect pitch among western musicians, one should always ask for reliable evidence.
Black holes postponed
I have a couple quibbles about Michael Lemonick’s article on black holes (3 October, p 36). He wrote: “Astrophysicists have measured the velocities of the stars and gas clouds at the centre of the Milky Way, and using the laws of orbital motion deduced by Johannes Kepler half a millennium ago, they have calculated the mass of the central object to be some 3.7 million times the mass of the sun, all concentrated into a volume much smaller than our solar system. No known material could remain intact at this density without collapsing to a singularity.”
The laws of Kepler do not include the relationship between the mass of the central object and the characteristics of the orbits around it. That was Newton’s contribution quite a bit later.
I wrote to Jean-Pierre Luminet probably 15 years ago, after reading his book on black holes, and I pointed out that black holes never actually form, in our time frame, as Krauss and others have now said. He didn’t believe me, and told me to try jumping in one to test it. Which of course would not prove the point.
Grow out of poverty
Poverty and hunger continue to be the most important issues facing humanity, but a close look at the figures you present (20 October, p 14) reveals strong grounds for optimism, as well as sounding a warning.
You report the number of people living on less than $1 a day in low and middle-income countries to be dropping from 1.47 billion (40 per cent of their populations) to 970 million (18 per cent). I calculate that the population of these countries has grown from 3.7 billion to 5.3 billion, so these low and middle-income countries are sustaining 2.1 billion more people above the $1-per-day line in 2004 than they were in 1981. This implies a staggering increase in prosperity. It is evident from the regional breakdown you publish that those countries best able to expand and exploit their roles as feeders of western consumption have done the most to alleviate poverty in their own backyards.
So rather than doing as the report suggests, and removing China’s booming figures from the data, the way to understand the long-term solution is to look specifically at China.
Global economic development is the only practical answer to the problem of world poverty. This must be accelerated as safely as possible by two things: political and legal reform within economically failing countries to assist the growth of local business; and continued growth of the developed world to ensure continued high demand for the produce of the poorer countries.
Family planning is a powerful tool against poverty, at both a family and a global level, yet, as your article (20 October, p 8) on abortion in the same issue states, 108 million couples want contraception but can’t get it, and a third of pregnancies in 2003 (and, presumably, currently also) were accidental. These two articles taken together suggest an obvious course of action to counter poverty.
Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK
Life expectancies
It may be true that life expectancy 200 years ago was only 30 or 40 years (13 October, p 42), but this didn’t mean people dropped dead at that age.
In fact, very many died in childhood from diseases now prevented by immunisation. Young men also died in the “risk-taking” years of the late teens and early 20s (often in battle), and young women died during childbirth at much the same age.
Those who escaped these fates typically lived to a reasonably old age. This did not mean, though, a healthy old age. Blindness was the norm for those older than the mid-60s (Johann Sebastian Bach is a notable example) since cataract operations in those days typically did more harm than good. Nobody expected to have any teeth in their old age, since the dentistry at the time consisted only of extraction.
For men, the ability to urinate also became a problem since while rigid catheters provided a (painful) solution to acute retention, there was no effective remedy for the chronic problem caused by an enlarged prostate 鈥� the astronomer Tycho Brahe being one of those often cited as suffering from this condition.
Guy Brown should know better than to perpetuate the myth that an average lifespan of 30 meant that people died young centuries ago. If you survived into adulthood you stood a fair chance of a reasonable lifespan, as a walk round a few churchyards will show. When Shakespeare described the last age of man as “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”, he wasn’t describing a 30-year-old. Extreme old age is not a new phenomenon (for example, Christopher Wren, architect of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, lived to be 91); it is just becoming more common.
Chandler’s Ford, Hampshire, UK
鈥� In the days when the majority of deaths were caused by infectious diseases, the likelihood of surviving to your next birthday remained roughly constant throughout life, after the initial spike of infant death. It is not true that if you didn’t die very young you were likely to live to be old, though some did. Those living long enough to be afflicted by the diseases of old age were in the minority. Now they are the majority.
Jumbo's blind spot
Various experiments are being mounted, at some expense, to try to find ways of keeping elephants in Africa off farmers’ crops (13 October, p 5).
Among notes from my days in soil engineering, I have the paper “The uselessness of elephants in compacting fill” by R. L. Meehan, in the . A footnote states: “Elephants ‘see’ the ground by feeling with the trunk and have a blind spot which is out of the normal range of both eyes and trunk. The animals may be kept out of gardens by stringing a wire horizontally 2 metres above ground. They are able to feel the wire, but cannot evaluate this invisible barrier and retreat in confusion.”
Perhaps the solution to the elephant problem is already known by African farmers.
Depressing prescription
Rob Pinnock criticises (13 October, p 25) Millie Kieve’s article on suicides following use of prescribed drugs, including anti-depressants (15 September, p 24), but his letter fails to acknowledge where the evidence on this issue comes from.
In 2004, a British study by David Gunnell and Deborah Ashby found: “There is no strong evidence that increases in antidepressant prescribing lie behind recent reductions in population suicides. Furthermore, data from paediatric trials suggest that SSRIs [selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors] are associated with an increased risk of suicidal behaviour and most SSRIs seem to be ineffective for childhood depression” ().
These authors note the difficulty of interpreting studies when so many are sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry. The article that Pinnock points to in his letter is authored by a team whose members disclose potential conflicts of interest arising from work for leading pharmaceutical giants, including Wyeth, GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly. Pinnock himself held a senior post at Pfizer.
The lives of children and young people are too precious to be left at the mercy of corporate good faith. We need evidence from researchers for whom there can be no conflicts of interest.
Climate conflict
Curtis Abraham is spot on in warning against the fashionable claim that the Darfur conflict is a consequence of climate change (20 October, p 24).
This simplistic notion may be used in good faith to bolster efforts to mitigate carbon-fuelled warming, as for example . The Nobel committee must have accepted it in awarding its peace prize to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But in the context of Darfur it is a distraction, as it diverts attention from the deeper, political factors driving the conflict there.
Abraham points to a line of reasoning that was all too common in the 1970s and 1980s, when some found it convenient to blame climate change for desertification. This drew attention away from the poor development practice, inept governance and political ideologies that were the real reasons for land degradation.
Now, 25 years on, the new fetish for framing climate change as a security issue seems to be putting us back where we started.