ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

Physics porn

While it is important, as Michael Hanlon acknowledges (9 February, p 22), that we – as scientists – keep dreaming and having our flights of fancy, we must be very careful in the way we portray ideas to non-scientists. They do not necessarily have the experience to be able to distinguish the nuances between what we would categorise as an almost-totally-convincing theory; a theory; a conjecture; or a wild “wouldn’t it be fun if” conjecture.

Otherwise, we run the risk of extremely successful scientific theories – such as evolution – being tarred with the same brush as flights of scientific fancy – such as awaiting time travellers at the Large Hadron Collider.

Otherwise, things like quantum mechanics will sound as far-fetched as time-travelling aliens to those with less of a background in science, or maybe even more so. We as scientists – and most of all, science reporters – have a duty to point out the difference.

Fairies at the bottom of the garden indeed! I have heard mathematicians reminding us that you can get almost any result by fiddling with the maths, and even Nobel prize-winning physicists say that modern physics is mired in a mess of wild imaginings.

As far as I have seen, not one of these ideas has led anywhere or produced any results. I would appreciate your otherwise interesting and informative magazine a whole lot more if you stuck to articles based on real experimental evidence and real facts and data from real research in the real world.

Dorrigo, New South Wales, Australia

On reading Michael Hanlon’s comments on infinite multiverses, I suddenly realised that (to apply Karl Marx’s fine phrase) this theory contains the seeds of its own destruction.

If, as it states, all conceivable universes are possible, this infinity of universes must contain at least one in which the theory of multiverses is false. The moment this universe appears, all other possibilities and options must collapse onto this immutable reality and, hey presto, multiversality is no more.

I would go so far as to suggest that this has already happened.

Valbonne, Alpes-Martimes, France

Time travel is late

If I have understood wormhole generation at the Large Hadron Collider correctly, (9 February, p 33) we should not be holding our breath waiting for silver-suited visitors from the future in 2008.

Imagine this, if you will: in 2008, the LHC goes online. By 2010, sifting through particle debris shows that wormholes are being generated. In maybe 2018, dark energy is “discovered” and produced artificially in a lab.

On 1 January 2050, scientists at the LHC create a wormhole and hold it in place using a stabilising field, conveniently invented the year before, while they enlarge it with a “dark energy generator”.

After three months of pumping the wormhole full of dark energy, it is now large enough for a human to use it to travel through time. On 1 April 2050, scientists announce to the world that they now have the power to travel back in time – as far back as… 1 January 2050, the date the wormhole was created.

The world sighs and goes back to worrying about the global shortage of jet-pack fuel.

Surely it will be obvious when science succeeds at time travel. ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s will become the most obsessive of gamblers, and start buying football clubs on the proceeds. And university science places will be in high demand.

Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, UK

Pro-what?

I was amused by correspondent Jerry Mack’s proposition that an acorn is just an oak at one stage of its life cycle and that likewise an embryo is a human at one stage of its life cycle and should therefore be considered as an actual child or person rather than just as a potential one (16 February, p 23).

Using this logic an acorn could not be swept from the road without contravening tree preservation laws. Manufacturers of fruit-and-nut chocolate bars would be condemned for causing massive deforestation.

The comparison should surely be between an embryo and an unripened acorn taken from the stalk. The latter cannot mature into a tree, nor can an embryo become a person outside a womb.

Avenel, Victoria, Australia

Search for intelligence

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been a bit like a drunk searching for the keys under the street light because that’s where it’s easiest to see (9 February, p 8). Astronomical observations, including SETI, are confined to tiny parts of the radio spectrum. These astronomical bands were chosen largely because they are rich in natural sources; moreover it would be daft to choose for communication those channels that maximise noise – and these are the same throughout the universe.

Rational aliens would minimise power demands and maximise bandwidth by communicating using the highest easily generated and detected frequencies compatible with low noise and signal loss in the interstellar medium – that is, at frequencies away from natural sources, precisely those on which we are not listening for them.

And they wouldn’t expensively broadcast to the universe at large the implicit message “here I am, come and get me”.

It really has to be time for SETI to change its name to ensure success. The present name suggests Set, the ancient Egyptian god of disorder and chaos. I suggest Mapping Astral Alien Territories, which would give us MAAT – the goddess of order, justice and truth.

Old Bar, New South Wales, Australia

Steam-boosted cars

Michael Brooks’s report on more efficient cars was interesting (2 February, p 32). But another idea for reducing fuel costs on petroleum-powered vehicles – water injection – seems to have died a death.

Over 35 years ago I noticed that one of my Morris Minor cars, which was getting water in the cylinders through a leaking head gasket, ran beautifully once started, producing noticeably more power and using less fuel.

I fitted a metered water spray into the inlet manifold of another beloved “Moggy”. It achieved 4.7 litres per 100 kilometres (60 miles to a measured imperial gallon), while an identical non-equipped vehicle rarely achieved 6 litres per 100 kilometres.

The best results were achieved after several miles, when the cylinder block reached a good working temperature. Turning off the water spray two miles before the end of the journey reduced problems with emulsification of lubricating oil and fuel. I had as many things to remember as a steam locomotive driver – but otherwise it was most successful. Why has it disappeared?

Yo! Yo' 'yo'…

Mark Peters states that linguists have been looking for a gender-neutral personal pronoun for 200 years (5 January, p 7) and quotes Elaine Stotko suggesting that while none of the top-down suggestions have taken, “yo” might be emerging naturally. One of the examples given is “Yo put his foot up”. Is this a mistake, because the word “his” appears in the sentence? A much more common gender-neutral term is “they” – so common that Microsoft Word recognises it.

• The “foot” sentence might not have been a great example in retrospect… Stephan Gyory is correct that “they” is the real solution to all of this, but many people vehemently hate this use because they want the word to stay plural. I cut a mention of it from the first draft of my article.

An errata

I have always been impressed by the standard of grammar and punctuation in New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, but my heart sank when I read “Name that bacteria in one” (16 February, p 28). The singular of bacteria is bacterium. I can cope with “this data” since we rarely use “datum” (unless we’re surveyors) and data has a spreadable feel, like butter.

But why use “bacteria” as both singular and plural? It helps understanding to distinguish singular and plural. Will we have “bacterias” one day?

And while I am having my little rant, I find it amusing that I referee papers in which cells are bathed in “media”, though the only medium used is “Dulbecco’s Modified Eagle’s Medium”.

Can we please preserve the mitochondrion as well? I look to you to help control my blood pressure and give me a long life.

Smoking gun

From 1955, I was a doctoral student and later a researcher working under the guidance of professor Ronald Fisher, whose scepticism over the link between smoking and cancer Ray Johnstone mentions (2 February, p 19). I used mice to study the inheritance of susceptibility to lung tumours induced by chemicals in tobacco smoke and Fisher encouraged me throughout.

Fisher was interested in Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill’s papers on the subject and was keen to question them. He prepared a very elegant proof, using the same methods as Doll and Hill, to show that there was a direct correlation between the import of apples and the increased divorce rate. However, this work was funded by the British Tobacco Research Council, which meant that Fisher was considered to be biased and his work suspect.

For the record

• Discussing whether animals think like autistic savants (23 February, p 8) we said that using the right hemisphere allowed birds to process only categorical features of a scene, and using the left meant they could attend only to the details of a stimulus. In fact the right hemisphere processes details and the left processes categorical features.

• The reference to the paper by Josh McDermott and Marc Hauser on monkeys’ musical motivation (23 February, p 29) should have been .

• The reference to the paper “Discovery of a Jupiter/Saturn analog with gravitational microlensing” by Scott Gaudi and colleagues (23 February, p 17) should have been .

• We described Leonore Tiefer, at the New York University School of Medicine, as a psychiatrist (23 February, p 6); she is a psychologist.

Born what way?

In writing about changing attitudes to homosexuality, Jim Giles accepts that notions of “liberal” and “conservative” change over time (2 February, p 29). But of course – even assuming that such a one-dimensional categorisation is at all useful – they are also inconstant across societies. I can’t have been the only UK-based reader who was initially puzzled by the respective use of red and blue to denote political groupings in the article – the characteristics of a particular affiliation in the US mapping far from perfectly onto those of the same label in the UK.

In real life, it is particularly noteworthy that characteristics apparently conflict to the degree of being contradictory. In particular, there are those whose “interest in different cultures” and “ability to accept new ideas” extends to championing perspectives – in areas such as equality in gender, and indeed, sexual orientation – that might otherwise be seen as rather anti-liberal. I recall a colleague – who by her general demeanour was open, would challenge things and had defied convention in parts of her life – reacting to a newspaper story of a man whose “conservative” ideas about appropriate female behaviour extended to murdering his free-spirited daughter. She sympathised: “It’s his culture” was the explanation.

I was not surprised to read that voting behaviour is related to personality and that both are strongly affected by our genes. However, the article’s emphasis on the more extreme personalities and extreme voting behaviour may mislead readers. Particularly with the cover heading “Two tribes – Are your genes left-wing or right wing?”.

The personality traits mentioned are not bimodal, since most people tend towards the middle on these tests. So we might expect that about 30 per cent of the population are dedicated liberals and 30 per cent strongly conservative. But although that means a majority has fixed views, the 40 per cent in the middle are available to be swayed by politician’s personalities, 30-second TV bites and the usual pork-barrelling. So there is no need for “a whole new field of study” and no reason to change our political system in any way.

West Launceston, Tasmania, Australia

Physics porn

Michael Hanlon rightly asks whether there is something amiss in the state of physics (9 February, p 22). I think that there is not: multiverses and universe-gobbling particles are both possibilities. But it should not be forgotten that these ideas all arise because they are mathematically possible, though they may bear no relation to the “real” world, the one that we human beings physically perceive. As a chemist, I have always had problems with my first course on gas behaviour, which starts with “imagine you have an ideal gas”… but that is another story!

Education hits the wall

The headline “There’s no excuse for ignorance” on A. C. Grayling’s column on the need for scientific literacy (9 February, p 55) could not be more in error. Sadly, it is impossible for an ignoramus to know of their own ignorance. The fault lies with the educators.

The decline in scientific literacy parallels the decline in all forms of literacy. Before I was allowed to sit the entrance examinations of the (then) British Institution of Radio Engineers I was required to demonstrate my skill in use of the English language.

The problem is to find a way back to the educational standards of yore in a world where the requirement for teachers vastly exceeds the available – and possible – supply and where academia leans more than ever toward the imperative of cash returns.

Electric clouds

Mark Anderson mentions four main hypotheses which have been proposed to explain why condensation droplets can grow from 10 micrometres to 40 micrometres (26 January, p 44). He omitted to mention another, described by Henrik Svensmark in his paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society (2007).

That ions play a part in condensation of water vapour is hardly a novel idea, as evidenced by the cloud chamber invented by Charles Wilson. In this, a chamber filled with saturated air is expanded by withdrawing a piston, resulting in a drop in pressure and temperature. If, at the same time, the chamber is exposed to a rain of subatomic particles, the paths of these particles as they pass through the chamber leave a trail of ionised water molecules.

When cosmic rays hit our atmosphere, they collide with air molecules to produce showers of secondary particles, reaching a peak about 15 kilometres above the ground. However, also produced are muons, which, travelling at high relativistic speeds, survive long enough to reach ground level, and produce ionisation in the lower levels of the atmosphere which leads to cloud formation. As Svensmark’s experiments showed, free electrons are the key, acting as catalysts in the formation of water droplets.

Some of this is false

There are even more disturbing aspects of the contemporary research scene than John Ioannidis describes (16 February, p 44). As he says, many studies declare their results significant if the probability that they could have got the same results by chance is no more than 1 in 20; and there is bias against publishing negative results.

New but false ideas may start to be accepted on the basis of the randomly favourable results – of which there will be many in popular areas of research.

In areas where financial or ideological influences are at work, even on an unconscious level, desired results may eventually be obtained by chance.

It would be simple enough to remedy this by introducing a worldwide register of studies, so that those that produce positive results could be seen against those which were not published. Unregistered studies could be discounted.

Some of this is false

John Ioannidis’s conclusion that “most published research findings are false” may in itself be a false published finding.

What he has really shown is that, given certain assumptions concerning what percentage of all hypotheses that could be tested are actually true, how much bias there is and so on, one can draw mathematical conclusions about the probability of a published result being true.

To jump from that proposition to claiming that most published findings are false is not logic, it’s opinion, because it depends on what you think about the a priori probabilities of positive findings, the amount of bias and so on.

What would be more valid would be to look at published studies from, say, 30 years ago to check what proportion are now considered to be wrong.