What fine-tuning?
Where does everyone get the idea that the universe is fine-tuned for life (for example: 6 December 2008, p 12)? If it were that finely tuned, it would be teeming with life. But it’s not. As far as we know, the only place in the universe with any life able to cling to it for any period of time is one insignificant rock circling one nondescript star in a remote corner of one galaxy.
It seems to me that the universe is about as mistuned for life as it is possible to be, without being completely hostile to it altogether.
From Spencer Weart,
A further important conclusion can be drawn from your report on Ben Freivogel’s calculation that the dark matter mix is “just right” (6 December 2008, p 12). His ingenious twist on the anthropic principle is to assume that in a multiverse of countless different kinds of universes, the number of intelligent species in a given universe is proportional to the number of galaxies. He can then calculate how much dark matter a universe needs to produce an abundance of galaxies, and thus at least one intelligence that can observe its existence.
But a good many basic constants of physics may vary between universes: not only the proportion of dark matter, but the gravitational constant, speed of light, and others. It will be exceedingly rare that they all have exactly the right values to produce an abundance of life. Alongside a few well-populated universes, there must be an immense number in which the parameters are not quite so nearly perfect.
For every universe that has 1000 intelligent races per galaxy, there must be vastly more in which only one such emerges in 1000 galaxies. The odds are thus overwhelming that we happen to inhabit a universe in which intelligent races are very rare.
College Park, Maryland, US
Boing!
Anil Ananthaswamy passes on the assumption that all parts of the universe must once have been in causal contact in order for the temperature of the universe to be as uniform as we find it today (13 December 2008, p 32). Surely it is possible that the temperature of the universe is uniform because it was all created by the same process, and as a result different parts that have never been in causal contact have not only the same temperature but also the same laws. As an analogy, my body has the same temperature as those of other human beings, not because I am in contact with them but because we were all formed by the same process.
Oil be damned
An Exxon-funded study has once again given the enormous Exxon Valdez crude oil spill site “a clean bill of health” (20/27 December 2008, p 6). We need to remember that Exxon fouled not only the uniquely productive waters in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, but also more than 1000 miles of shoreline, out to Cook Inlet, which has the world’s second-highest tides 鈥� up to 11 metres.
In warmer climates with lower tides, oil spills are repeatedly stirred and washed by storm waves, subjecting the oil to degradation by wind and sun. But when a high tide floats thick layers of toxic crude oil onto the upper parts of a sandy or stony beach, receding waters naturally draw that oil deep down through sand or stones. That deeper oil is unaffected by colossal charades such as steam-cleaning newly toxic beach surfaces to employ and distract suddenly redundant fishermen 鈥� while simply cooking all remaining life forms.
So I am astounded that Olof Linden, commenting on the study, is “surprised they even find any oil at all after 18 years”. I was also unimpressed that of just 25 sites throughout this vast area, according to your report, found only small patches of oil “deep within cracks between boulders and pebbles, much of it degraded”. I might have had more confidence in these findings had Boehm’s surveyors included neutral observers and dug deeply into many more beaches.
Isotopes and ageing
Mikhail Shchepinov advocates heavy water and other isotope-labelled molecules to combat ageing (29 November 2008, p 36). You caution that the idea of using heavy isotopes to increase longevity hinges on free radicals being at the root of ageing.
While that might be strongly debated, there are a number of diseases in which reactive oxygen species produced by white blood cells are firmly implicated. The variety of leukocytes known as neutrophils produce large amounts of reactive oxidants to degrade microorganisms that invade the human body. These oxidants may also inflict damage on nearby tissues and are thought to be important in diseases such as acute respiratory distress syndrome, atherosclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis ().
Would isotope-labelled molecules be more resistant to oxidative attack under these circumstances?
If so, an organism containing these molecules might not only age more slowly but also be less prone to oxidant-related diseases.
Walk on the mild side
In speculating about the mechanism which causes homosexuality, you write that “perhaps our brains get too much or too little of a crucial hormone in the womb,” (20/27 December 2008, p 33). That implies that just the right amount of hormone is the amount that produces heterosexuality.
This normative claim is not supported by the research in question, and reinforces prejudice against homosexuality. I am sorry to see you give any credence to the idea, long rejected by science, that heterosexuality is a product of normal and healthy development while homosexuality is a product of pathological development.
The editor writes:
鈥� It was not our intention to suggest that homosexuality is abnormal. We should indeed have written “more” or “less”.
Price of popularity
Richard Hammond ponders why kids get turned off science so successfully these days (3 January, p 14). The answer is that kids are interested in the world they see and feel around them 鈥� while science has largely abandoned this world for the unseen world.
What evidence do I see around me of relativity, quantum mechanics or even natural selection by chance mutation? But of Newton’s world of pushes and pulls, I see plenty; and it’s fun to muck around with contraptions you can make yourself.
From Martin Ratcliffe
I applaud Richard Hammond’s attempt to inspire more children to become scientists (or engineers, I hope). I consider myself very fortunate to have been taught at primary school by a wonderful teacher with the gift of combining the fundamentals of science with the excitement of discovery. This was in the days when teaching was highly rated as a profession. Teachers had the respect of parents and pupils; needed to spend little time on crowd control; and were trusted by the government to decide how best to educate children.
But Hammond should be careful 鈥� there is more to science than making a jelly volcano. Young people must realise that it requires a deep understanding of scientific principles.
Maidenhead, Berkshire, UK
From John Richards
Richard, you may be part of the problem! You have made a good children’s entertainment programme 鈥� and set a standard far too high for the school science teacher to compete with. Back in the drab and wretched 1950s, when there was little television, and no Xboxes nor iPhones, school was the best show in town. Before the “health and safety” fixation got going, science teachers could thrill with explosions and dissections. Now, Richard, you must do the honourable thing and deliver the entire science syllabus to schools from the studio.
East Preston, West Sussex, UK
From Julien Glazer
Richard Hammond is right: the difference between scientists and poets is not that big. Neither earn a decent salary.
Nerja, Spain
Fab prices
Joerg Heber notes that the price for abandoning silicon-based technology is “huge” (6 December 2008, p 35). That is the core reason why silicon will not be abandoned.
It has cost trillions of dollars to bring silicon to its dominant position. A new silicon fabrication plant costs up to $5 billion. A universal conversion to carbon, or any other material, will cost at least $500 billion.
There are technical reasons, too. Silicon forms a hard, uniform, non-water-soluble oxide. All silicon technology since the invention of the planar process has depended on that single point. Had the oxide of silicon been a gas, and that of carbon a solid, then we would perhaps be silicon-based beings, using carbon microprocessors.
It's a wrap
I worked out the areas of the wrapping of the two-dimensional parcels containing up to seven thin mince pies, in both sausage and cluster formats (20/27 December 2008, p 67).
In your article Ian Stewart states that the sausage arrangement should have the lowest area, but by my calculations, in every case, the cluster arrangement has an area less than or equal to the sausage arrangement with the same number of mince pies.
In the case of six pies with unit radius, for example, the cluster area is 22.07 whereas the sausage area is 23.14. Here the cluster arrangement I used is a triangle of pies.
The editor writes:
鈥� Many readers have pointed out that we were mistaken to say that the most efficient way to wrap six circles or fewer is to lay them out in a line. We were wrong to say that this was a mathematical theorem, too. Clearly, New 杏吧原创 functions better in higher dimensions: the sausage conjecture is correct in three dimensions and more.
Multiversality
Peter White suspects our universe is a cosmic engineering undergraduate’s final-year project (10 January, p 16). I thought I had explained that it’s the mice… the hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional mice…
He might be willing to award it more than a second-class degree if he lived somewhere other than Wales. Somewhere with more fjords, perhaps?
For the record
鈥� We said “in the UK… the is charged with undertaking cost-benefit analyses of treatments for the NHS” (10 January, p 29). NICE has no role in Scotland.
It's a wrap
Mathematician Ian Stewart’s thoughts on wrapping mince pies in string (20/27 December 2008, p 67) looked like a simple way to encourage an interest in maths in my 9-year-old son. We put string around 6 AA batteries 鈥� even more plentiful than mince pies at our Christmas 鈥� and found that 20 centimetres of string fits around the circles in a sausage configuration, and 13.5 cm fits around either a triangle or two parallel rows.
Now how do I explain that mathematics is not always the best tool to use?
From Richard James
I am struck by an odd coincidence: for wrapping spheres the sausage arrangement is best up to 56 spheres and then 57 or more are best wrapped as a cluster. But 56 is also the atomic number of iron, which I gather is the heaviest element whose creation by fusion releases energy.
I can’t help wondering whether there is some connection between these two facts.
Otterbourne, Hampshire, UK
Price of popularity
Michael Brooks (20/27 December 2008, p 16) and Richard Hammond (3 January, p 14) each ask a question that has occupied the scientific community in the UK for a long time: how can we effectively popularise science and reduce the reported decline of interest in science subjects at school?
We must not, however, forget science in the enthusiasm for communicating it. Science is an evidence-based practice: it depends on flexible individuals who can generalise and specialise when and as required.
Intense specialism can kill mass appeal. But history shows us science specialists with complex personalities who can make today’s celebrities look tame: consider the physicist Richard Feynman, an ultra-specialist scientist who worked in competitive environments and became a master of generality when required, scattering his science with anecdotes about the pope, dinosaurs and our many human conditions.
Not every science teacher or scientist is a Feynman, or a Hammond for that matter. Requiring all scientists to entertain might have very unfortunate results.
Science often flies in the face of conventional ideas. It is often conceptually difficult. Its content expands exponentially. Science teachers must maintain credibility and be driven by fact, not public whim or fancy.
From Roy Smith
Having two children in the state secondary school system in the UK, I can see exactly why Richard Hammond says that science is less popular than art, music or English (3 January, p 14).
In art, students are encouraged to explore hands-on a wide range of media, they are given the technical skills to produce good quality work, and they can express their own ideas within the curriculum constraints.
Similarly, in music, the theory is brought alive by personal performance on a variety of instruments, in a range of musical styles. Again they can develop the personal performance and composition skills. In English there is a good deal of reading to do, which can be enjoyable in itself, and also a range of compositional styles is explored, allowing self-expression and valuing the children’s own creativity.
In contrast science education seems dire. The work is about learning “facts” towards examinations, with little scope for individualising the approach to match the children’s own interests.
There seems to be very little interesting practical work, which would develop individual manipulative skills, data gathering and interpretation of results. Nor is there theoretical development to provide an understandable framework for all those facts.
The situation changes a bit for the better in years 12 and 13, at around age 16 or 17 when UK students specialise, but by then it’s too late. Most of the children have naturally gravitated to the more rewarding subjects by year 11.
The problem for the UK at least is to define an approach to secondary school science education that brings back the zing while not losing the rigour. If other subjects can do it, why not science?
Burntwood, Staffordshire, UK
The Curse of the Committee
The analysis of the optimum number of members of a committee (10 January, p 38) reminded me of a simple relationship that I speculated on for expressing the potential value of meetings in organisations. My initial thoughts were that the effectiveness of a meeting is inversely proportional to the number of people attending the meeting.
In weak organisations, the classical default response to every new issue that arises is to “call a meeting” often with multiple participants. This is often rationalised by some misguided view of democracy and/or consensus management.
I now wonder whether the rule should be that effectiveness is inversely proportional to the square of committee size, more accurately to reflect the rapid fall-off in productivity as numbers increase.
By either rule ultimate meeting effectiveness and innovative potential is achieved when there are no attendees. It is possible to hold a reasonably effective meeting with one attendee: from then on it is all downhill.
Owt for nowt
Responding to Lawrence Krauss’s proposal that physics has largely answered the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” (22 November 2008, p 53), John Turner (10 January, p 16) suggests that Krauss thereby strays into metaphysics by substituting “how” for “why”.
I suggest the opposite is the case.
The word “why” contains the idea of purpose or intention, and because a disembodied purpose or intention is absurd, the word implies the existence of a sentient being having that intention.
Furthermore, if a question beginning with “why” is cosmological in nature, that sentient being would have to be supreme. So the question is “loaded” with the hidden premise that God exists, and any attempt to answer it implies the acceptance of that premise.
Compare it with the famous loaded question “When are you going to stop beating your wife?”, to which any answer at all is an acceptance of a premise implying guilt.
If Lawrence Krauss had answered the question without changing “why” to “how”, then he would have strayed into metaphysics. He changed it precisely to avoid doing so.
From Brian Robinson
John Turner is seeking a “why” before a “how” as regards existence of the universe. By the phrasing of his comments he shows that he has already decided there is an answer to “why”, which means he has decided that there must be a reason why the universe exists. That implies he believes in a creator or god figure.
Many or most intelligent people dispute that there is a “why”, but are interested in the answer to “how”.
Brentwood, Essex, UK
Research economics
Terence Kealey’s arguments about the economic laws of research and the pros and cons of funding it privately or publicly would be easier to follow if he clearly distinguished science from technology (3 January, p 42).
Obviously scientists, finding out how the natural world works, use much technology in their work and sometimes invent new technological methods to do so. Similarly technologists, inventing new devices and innovating improvements on existing ones to make a profit by selling them, make much use of scientific understanding of the natural world.
But many studies have shown how separate are science and technology, and in particular have revealed the deep tensions and conflicts when researchers work as scientists within a technological context.
Kealey has a background in biochemistry but strangely his use of biotechnology as an example for his argument is actually one of the strongest counter-arguments.
The entire biotechnology industry rests on a phase of science research originating in the discovery of X-rays and their prompt use in crystallography. That technique was used to answer the question of the nature of the genetic material. The answer was the discovery of the structure of DNA 鈥� which raised the exceedingly difficult question of how proteins are coded and put together.
The answer to that, combined with the discovery of plasmids and their use in pure genetics studies, suddenly revealed a way of synthesising proteins, such as insulin, using microorganisms. That method was patented and profits soon ensued.
The path from X-rays to plasmids represents 90 years of science research, almost entirely funded by governments and done in many universities by researchers who were certainly not seeking an improved version of insulin.
Multiverse/other
If a supernatural theory is an “unfounded leap of logic” (6 December 2008, p 48), so is an assumption that science is the only true path to truth. Values, conscience, purpose, history, art, the justification for the scientific method itself 鈥� all are beyond the scope of the scientific method. Science opens up a marvellous vista of things and processes, but the good things it delivers to us are still at the beck and call of human beings who can use them for good or for ill.
The proposal by Bernard Carr that “if you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse” is, as Amanda Gefter hints in her final paragraph, a false dilemma. It was also shown to be not persuasive by Paul Davies in The Goldilocks Enigma. The multiverse only put the cosmological philosophical question back one step: who wrote the equation for the multiverse?
The principle of sufficient reason is used fruitfully in physics to construct models of what material reality might be. The same principle can be used metaphysically to deal with questions arising from science but unanswerable by the scientific method. That’s speculative, but at least it’s reason.
From Robert Oldershaw
I enjoyed reading Amanda Gefter’s tongue-in-cheek commentary entitled “What’s God got to do with it?”, which discussed ideas about why life seems to fit the universe so well. While the cited boffins deserve much clapping for their heroic hypotheses on why the universe seems finely tuned to generate us, I could not help but wonder why a much simpler idea was being ignored.
Perhaps life evolved to fit the universe, rather than the universe being “designed”, or anthropically selected, to fit us. This simple idea does not require a “designer” (other than nature), or a googol of hypothetical “universes”, or the preposterously anthropocentric notion that we “are creating the universe and its entire history right now”. If we want to advance the cart of science, might we not want to put the horse before the cart.
Amherst, Massachusetts, US