Make or break
Michio Kaku describes quantum entanglement as a potential way to perform teleportation (5 April, p 36). He states “if you… disturb one particle, then the information… is transmitted instantaneously to its partner”. In the following paragraph, however, he says “the slightest disturbance can break the ephemeral bond”. So which is it 鈥� teleportation or breakage?
I’m with Schr枚dinger’s cat on this one 鈥� there’s no way I’m going to be put in that box!
No more screech
I was very excited by your article on software that eliminates feedback from live music performances (5 April, p 26). I have been extending my musical repertoire with sound engineering recently and was bemused by the comment from a fellow sound engineer who said “this is the kind of stuff that will make us all unemployed”. What a silly notion. My job is to blend the sounds made by vocals and various instruments to make the band sound as good as it can. Eliminating feedback is a necessary and somewhat tedious, part of this task. If I can have software that eliminates feedback so I can just concentrate on the sound coming from the band, bring it on. If you are worried that the computer does a better mix than you, maybe you should think about finding another job.
For the record
鈥� Marcus Chown’s review of The Coming Convergence (12 April, p 46) described author Stanley Schmidt as “former editor” of the science-fiction magazine Analog. Actually, he is still the editor. Sorry.
鈥� Our article on an asthma drug that can restore the sense of smell (12 April, p 15) described cAMP and cGMP as proteins. They are, in fact, nucleotides.
鈥� David Wengrow’s research on branded goods in Mesopotamia (26 April, p 10) is reported in Current Anthropology, vol 49, p 7, not, as we said, Current Archaeology.
A fly in your ear
Your article on the microphone that can pinpoint the source of a sound implies that the device is the first to mimic the acoustic response of the ears of the fly Ormia ochracea (22 March, p 26).
However, a number of researchers have previously reported the construction of microphones and/or directional acoustic sensor systems based on the ears of O. ochracea. Ormia-inspired directional microphone diaphragms have been fabricated out of silicon, polymers and bronze with dimensions as small as 1 millimetre by 2 millimetres and a thickness of only about 1 micrometre. Most of the microphones reported in the literature are at least a factor of 10 smaller than the system described in your article. Researchers have also used various optical methods for detecting the motion of the microphone diaphragms.
Ormia‘s ability to localise sound has also inspired a number of researchers to develop signal-processing algorithms for sound source localisation.
Equal way
Anne Campbell asks “who are these people bent on forcing equal numbers of men and women into all jobs?” (5 April, p 46). Well, the Institute of Physics for one. In December 2002, the IoP reported as policy that:
“By 2015… women in the UK should make up 50 per cent of A-level physics students, 40 per cent of undergraduate physics students, 40 per cent of postgraduate and postdoctoral physicists and 40 per cent of newly appointed physics lecturers and professors. In addition, women should make up 35 per cent of young professional physicists in industry, 30 per cent of physicists employed in senior industrial positions, 35 per cent of Institute members below the age of 40, 30 per cent of members above 40, and 30 per cent of Institute Fellows,” (Physics World, p 45).
Even if only one of these numbers is 50 per cent, the gist is clear. This may well be about equal opportunity but, if so, the IoP is using a very crude metric to judge the efficacy of policies and interventions. Unfortunately, I suspect this target-based approach is more common than Campbell thinks. As a university lecturer in physics, I see evidence that these targets are distorting the choices made by young women. They are worth fighting, even as one wholeheartedly supports equality of opportunity.
Voters' choice
In your article on voting systems, Rob Richie praises instant run-off voting (IRV), in which the candidate with the least number of first-choice votes is eliminated if no candidate has an overall majority (12 April, p 30).
He says the system “will never elect a candidate who doesn’t have substantial first-choice support”, with the implication that this is good, but he misses the point. The problem is that it can easily fail the test of “most acceptable to the greatest number” as badly as plurality voting does.
Consider, for example, a slate with five candidates. Which would be the better election outcome?
1. Elect the candidate who is the first choice of every voter east of the Mississippi, but the last choice of every voter west of the Mississippi.
2. Elect the candidate who is the last choice of every voter east of the Mississippi, but the first choice of every voter west of the Mississippi except for those in Alaska and Hawaii.
3. Elect the candidate who is the first choice of voters in Alaska and Hawaii, and the second choice of 82 per cent of voters elsewhere in the US.
I submit that in this admittedly simplistic scenario, the third choice would be the best. Instead of leaving almost 50 per cent of voters disgruntled that the absolute worst possible candidate was elected (which is pretty much what tends to happen under plurality voting), it would leave about five out of every six voters feeling satisfied that they got either their first or second choice.
I contend that the measure of success of any voting system is not whether it picks the candidate who is the first choice of the most voters, regardless of how displeased the rest of the electorate are. We have that in the US now, and it has polarised the electorate and the nation into two opposed and furiously disagreeing camps, each of which believes the other camp’s representative is the Antichrist. On the contrary, the true measure of success is to minimise the number of voters who are dissatisfied with the outcome of the election, and maximise the number who feel they got at least an acceptable candidate.
The most crucial thing of all, though, is to eliminate the other side effect of plurality voting: it causes voters who would otherwise vote for third parties to actively not vote for the candidate they prefer, but instead to vote for the candidate they consider second-worst, as the price of keeping the worst of all out of office. That is a travesty of representation.
Creating grief
Charles Young’s call for photographs of the most complete progression from one species to another to illustrate evolution (5 April, p 21) highlights two interesting issues when considering the evolution/creationism controversy.
In his online battle with creationists who demand evidence for the existence of transitional evolutionary forms, Young seems to have fallen foul of their variation on . In its original form, this appears to demonstrate that walking from one side of a room to the other is impossible if one tries to do it “mathematically”. By walking half the distance, then half the remaining distance, then half that remaining distance and so on, you will never reach the other side.
When creationists demand not just the broad sequence of transitional forms that led, for example, from land-based mammals to whales, but also every conceivable “in-between” form, they know they are asking the impossible. That’s not because evolution of the whale didn’t happen as described, but because of the statistical impossibility that each and every stage would be fossilised and then found 鈥� fossilisation is, after all, a rare event 鈥� and a simplistic view of evolutionary change as only ever taking place in small, incremental steps in each and every species. Adding transitional forms simply increases demands from creationists. They will claim that instead of filling a gap, the new fossil actually creates new gaps before it and after it, thereby increasing the problem for the evolutionist. If we then “fail” to fill these new “gaps”, they cry victory.
Nevertheless, Young’s call for better, more robust examples to be made more available is a valid one. Sadly, textbook writers are somewhat lazy in simply using the old favourites of the horse and peppered moth. Your feature by Donald Prothero (“Evolution: What missing link?” 23 February, p 35) nicely illustrated the range of well-evidenced transitional forms. These are the examples that should adorn our textbooks.
Zeta malfunction
The otherwise excellent article on the Riemann hypothesis omitted an important caveat in the “Zeta and the primes” sidebar (22 March, p 40): namely that the summation form given is appropriate only for numbers whose real part is greater than +1.
Plugging -2, for instance, into the given formula (which almost every reader is going to be tempted to do) gives zeta(-2) = 1 + 4 + 9 + 16…
The sum here is clearly not going anywhere near zero.
The chips will go down
For want of a nail the kingdom was lost. In our civilisation, the nails are the computer chips used in every electronic device, every level of infrastructure and throughout communications, transportation, manufacturing, and so on (5 April, p 32).
Computer chips are so fragile that most fail or degrade within four years. Chip fabrication plants cost more than $10 billion because the water, chemicals and silicon to make them require such purity that particles 500 times smaller than a human hair can cause defects. Microchips require metals that are depleting faster than fossil fuels, have the longest supply chain of any product, and are vulnerable to single points of failure (see at and my website, ).
I hope your articles on the collapse of civilisation have given readers a Darwinian leg-up in the unravelling that lies ahead after global energy use peaks.
The consequences of complexity theory apply particularly to national governments. Their failure to understand complex systems and to take corrective action contributes more than anything to collapse.
Over 10 years the Murray river in Australia has moved to ecological collapse, an outcome predicted by scientific data. Thousands of hours of talking by commissions, committees and state and federal governments aiming to protect all rights, perceived or real, have paralysed government decision-making. Fish stocks in northern hemisphere oceans are collapsing slowly due to collective government failure to act. Robust climate change science has existed for 20 years, but governments have failed both to understand its complexities and dangers, and to contemplate action that might disturb the economic paradigm.
Liberal democracy has fundamental flaws, analysed in the book I co-authored with Joseph Wayne Smith The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy. Competing individual rights that are supported by legal systems and political need, increasingly hold sway over the common good. The freedom conferred by democracy did not solve the “tragedy of the commons” 鈥� the destruction of shared medieval grazing lands by peasants acting for their immediate benefit 鈥� even though this was disastrous for everyone in the long term. Yet this was a relatively simple problem compared to the complex problem of preserving ecosystem services today.
In preparation for collapse, reform of governance must accept the primacy of science and develop mechanisms for urgent decision-making. It will be difficult, because radical reform of democracy has never occurred, not just because of the vested interests of politicians, but because of its complexity.
Crafers, South Australia
Of course civilisations naturally rise and fall 鈥� and ours will too. Rudyard Kipling wrote a verse about it a century ago:
Cities and Thrones and Powers,
Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die…
So how do civilisations survive? Like any other highly complex counter-entropic organic structure 鈥� such as a plant 鈥� a civilisation will attempt to reproduce before it dies. It does this either by a kind of asexual budding process into other parts of the world called colonisation, or more often by a rough form of sexual reproduction known as conquest.
At the moment neither of these options are really available on this planet 鈥� so the only way is up. We have to stop pouring dwindling resources into insane and pointless weaponry and start pouring them into starting self-sustaining colonies in space. First on the wish list is a cheap and energy efficient way of getting out of the Earth’s gravity well.
Oh and please don’t tell me it’s impossible. Pace Michio Kaku, until the physicists can track down that pesky 96 per cent of the universe they’ve so carelessly mislaid, they have no right to pontificate on what’s not possible.