IF YOU or one of your children needed a heart transplant, your gratitude to the family that donated one would be boundless. In their hour of greatest despair that family would have consented to an organ donation, a selfless, life-saving choice.

But if the positions were reversed, could you make the same decision? Sadly, the number of donor hearts does not match demand. That means many adults and children die waiting. Every death is the loss of a father or a son, a mother or a daughter.

Part of the problem is that not enough families give their consent. In the UK only 60 per cent agree compared with 80 per cent in many other European countries. That means 4 out of 10 families who are approached in the UK refuse to donate.

Perhaps that鈥檚 not surprising. Many people are uncomfortable about confronting their mortality and that of their immediate family. Surveys for the National Health Service show that more than 30 per cent of people have never discussed organ donation, and few are aware how those closest to them feel about it.

The NHS wants to change this. Its organ donation team is encouraging families to talk about organ donation, to think about how they would feel about donation if they needed a transplant and to encourage them to sign the organ donation register at organdonation.nhs.uk.

And of course, the problem is not confined to hearts. People waiting for lungs, livers, kidneys, corneas and so on, vastly outnumber the supply of organs for transplant. At the end of March 2016, there were almost 6500 patients waiting for some kind of transplant.

Even a small increase in the percentage of people agreeing to donate would make a huge difference to the waiting time. Increasing the UK consent rate from 60 per cent to 80 per cent would lead to about 1000 more transplants each year. That鈥檚 a great many lives. One of them could be yours.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淗eart of the matter鈥�

(Image: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory/SPL)

Do you need to be extraordinary? Wealthy and white? Or can anyone be creative? Three books come at the question from different angles

THE secrets of invention and creativity have long puzzled, eluded and fascinated in equal measure. Many scientists, inventors and artists seem to have understood them intuitively, yet few have written coherently and knowledgeably about the details.

In Eureka! Discovering your inner scientist, Chad Orzel entertainingly argues that we are all scientists, with the innate ability to discover and create. And by exploring the work of great scientists he shows how it is done.

For example, the American physicist Luis Alvarez is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant and creative of the 20th century, not least because of his impact on disciplines beyond his own. Early in his career, Alvarez settled a long-standing argument among astronomers about the nature of cosmic rays: were they photons of high-energy light or charged particles?

He solved this conundrum by inventing a cosmic ray telescope that could determine the direction of the particles. Then he showed that the particles were deflected by Earth鈥檚 magnetic field and so must be positively charged.

Alvarez was able to apply cosmic ray telescopes and what he learned from them widely. He used a similar telescope to show that the Pyramid of Khafre in Giza, Egypt had no hidden chambers. And he also proved that the layer of clay laid down 65 million years ago between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary eras contained iridium that must have had an extra-terrestrial origin, most likely from an asteroid impact.

Orzel argues that while Alvarez was brilliant, his productivity did not come from a scattergun approach to science. Instead, he applied a relatively small set of techniques to a wide range of areas. For Orzel, it is the ability to look at and think about different parts of the world in the same way and then test ideas about them that defines scientific creativity.

Further, he believes that we all do this. When we cook, play chess, tell stories and so on, the results of these activities are essentially the scientific process in action. Recognising this everyday aspect gives us a better insight into the nature of creativity.

聯When we cook, play chess, tell stories, the results of these activities are the scientific process in action聰

The story deepens in How To Fly A Horse: The secret history of creation, invention and discovery by Kevin Ashton. He has some personal experience as an inventor, entrepreneur and a pioneer of the next generation of computing (he coined the term 鈥渢he internet of things鈥�).

Ashton writes that the process of creativity extends far beyond the individual who finds him or herself at the end of it. It is, rather, a continual process of building in which each step depends crucially on those that went before. The final step in this process is sometimes important but often incidental, claimed by many, or forgotten.

In this vision, the idea of the born genius is anathema. And Ashton rejects the notion that there are a handful of Mozarts, Picassos and Einsteins in every generation, hard-wired with unmatchable creativity.

Instead, he shows that being at the end of a long chain of events is the result of hard work, independent thinking and more than a little luck. That鈥檚 not to diminish the process of creativity and invention. Often, that final step is hard to make and requires an extraordinary individual to take the leap, many of which he describes in fascinating detail.

Ashton covers a lot of ground in How to Fly a Horse, revisiting well-known stories but through his own prism of creativity. The result is an engaging, fast-moving read that compels and surprises.

Another myth about creativity and invention is that it is most likely to be found among the wealthy white middle classes. That is an image Joshua Davis sets out to smash in Spare Parts: Four undocumented teenagers, one ugly robot, and the battle for the American dream. It鈥檚 the true story of four Mexican-American high-school kids who live in a run-down suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, with barely a legal immigration document between them.

In 2004, they represented their school in a NASA-sponsored underwater robotics competition, taking on schools and colleges from all over the US, including a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sponsored by ExxonMobil. Their story shows the importance of hard work, invention and inspiration in equal parts, and still manages a kick in the tail.

Davis first reported on this in Wired magazine in 2005, and the book-length version will coincide with the release in January of a . It鈥檚 the American dream in action.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淥ne per cent inspiration鈥︹��

(Image: Tor Lindqvist/Getty)

IN 1975, Austrian-born physicist Fritjof Capra published an unlikely bestseller that explored the parallels between ideas in particle physics and Eastern mysticism. The Tao of Physics became a cult classic, selling over a million copies globally. Despite positive reviews, the book left many readers ultimately unsatisfied and unconvinced.

In Geek Sublime, Vikram Chandra draws similar parallels between the process of writing computer code and some of the Indian philosophical systems that have profoundly influenced art, literature and poetry in the subcontinent, but which remain largely unknown in the West.

The book is broad and idiosyncratically engaging. It ranges from the intricacies of machine code and the history of logic, to an ancient Indian theorist of poetry, Anandavardhana, and the remarkable algorithmic rules of the Ashtadhyayi 鈥� a Sanskrit text about grammar and syntax dating from about 500 BC.

The parallels between the Ashtadhyayi and programming today are remarkable and worth exploring. But Chandra鈥檚 frequent self-indulgent forays into his own writing process are less engaging. His comparisons are fascinating, but his fundamental thesis 鈥� that computer code shares the same aesthetic qualities as Sanskrit poetry and literature 鈥� is ultimately unconvincing.

鈥淧arallels between ancient Sanskrit grammar and modern programming are remarkable鈥�

So can code be elegant? Yes. Chandra describes 鈥渆vent sourcing鈥�, a process that stores changes to an application as a sequence of events, allowing earlier states to be reconstructed. For many coders, this is a hugely elegant solution to the problem of knowing what went on in the past.

And can code be beautiful? Perhaps. But poetic?

Geek Sublime may garner a cult following, as Tao did 40 years ago, perhaps among the increasingly influential cultural group of Indian programmers. But, while it may inspire, Geek Sublime will frustrate in equal measure.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淟ooking for the code of poetry鈥�

Enrico Fermi鈥檚 fiasco: alpha male making an alpha mistake (Image: American Institute of Physics/SPL)

Enter our prize draw: Click here for a chance to win all 12 books reviewed in this week鈥檚 CultureLab

HE IS known as one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. A Nobel prizewinner who coined the term 鈥渘eutrino鈥�, Enrico Fermi鈥檚 mind was so sharp, and his work so infallible, that colleagues called him 鈥渢he pope鈥�.

Yet this reputation came back to bite him. Embarrassingly for Fermi, he was once photographed in front of a blackboard on which he had written several important equations relating to quantum mechanics (see picture), one of which 鈥� the equation for alpha 鈥� contained a mistake. Unfortunately for Fermi, it escaped the eyes of designers at the US post office, who used the photograph on a stamp to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth. The story, as well as the photograph, has gone down in history.

As Fermi showed, when it comes to human error even great scientists are far from immune. But whether you are doing theoretical physics or number crunching, it is painfully easy for the wrong digit to slip into a calculation. In Magnificent Mistakes in Mathematics, Alfred Posamentier and Ingmar Lehmann relate the story of William Shanks, a 19th-century British mathematician who spent 15 years calculating the value of pi to a record 707 places.

聯Whoever you are, it is painfully easy for the wrong digit to slip into a calculation聰

Shanks was long dead when, in 1946, an error was discovered in the 528th digit. Unfortunately that was too late for the owners of the Palais de la D茅couverte in Paris, who had immortalised Shanks鈥檚 number in large wooden digits on the domed ceiling of their building鈥檚 cupola.

But for me it is the mathematical gaffes the rest of us are more likely to fall for that make Posamentier and Lehmann鈥檚 book interesting. My favourites are the proofs that involve dividing by zero, leading to results such as 1=2.

Mario Livio takes a grander view of mistakes. In Brilliant Blunders, Livio uses the errors of great scientists as a prism through which to explore some of science鈥檚 most important episodes. The result is a sideways look at some well-known stories. But it鈥檚 hard not to stumble over Livio鈥檚 criteria for blunders. One of the more significant early criticisms of Darwin鈥檚 theory of evolution, for example, involved the idea of blended inheritance: that an advantageous characteristic would inevitably be diluted in the next generation, further diluted in the one beyond and so on, as in the mixing of paints.

According to Livio, Darwin blundered by failing to anticipate that the mechanism of natural selection simply does not work under this assumption. That seems harsh since Darwin had doubts over blended inheritance, and had already taken a huge theoretical leap in understanding heredity at the time.

Then there is Lord Kelvin, who calculated Earth鈥檚 age by measuring the rate at which the planet is cooling and comparing this to the heat generated by the various chemical processes. Kelvin settled on the youthful figure of 98 million years old, because he was unaware of the heat that nuclear processes can generate. We now know the real figure is some 4.5 billion years. But characterising Kelvin鈥檚 work as stupid or careless seems a blunder in itself given that his approach changed the way we think about our world and established geology as a mainstream science.

Livio is insightful in other ways, though, not least in showing that, however you wish to define it, fallibility exists in even great scientists and their work.

Oscar Wilde once wrote that 鈥渆xperience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes鈥�. These books remind us that these experiences can prove edifying and entertaining for others.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淢istakes worth taking鈥�

If the universe is just a Matrix-like simulation, how could we ever know? Physicist Silas Beane thinks he has the answer

The idea that we live in a simulation is just science fiction, isn鈥檛 it?
There is a famous argument that we probably do live in a simulation. The idea is that in future, humans will be able to simulate entire universes quite easily. And given the vastness of time ahead, the number of these simulations is likely to be huge. So if you ask the question: 鈥榙o we live in the one true reality or in one of the many simulations?鈥�, the answer, statistically speaking, is that we鈥檙e more likely to be living in a simulation.

How did you end up working on this issue?
My day job is to do high performance computing simulations of the forces of nature, particularly the strong nuclear force. My colleagues and I use a grid-like lattice to represent a small chunk of space and time. We put all the forces into that little cube and calculate what happens. In effect, we鈥檙e simulating a very tiny corner of the universe.

How accurate are your simulations?
We鈥檙e able to calculate some of the properties of real things like the simplest nuclei. But the process also generates artefacts that don鈥檛 appear in the real world and that we have to remove. So we started to think about what sort of artefacts might appear if we lived in a simulation.

What did you discover?
In our universe the laws of physics are the same in every direction. But in a grid, this changes since you no longer have a spacetime continuum, and the laws of physics would depend on direction. Simulators would be able to hide this effect but they wouldn鈥檛 be able to get rid of it completely.

How might we gather evidence that we鈥檙e in a simulation?
Using very high energy particles. The highest energy particles that we know of are cosmic rays and there is a well-known natural cut off in their energy at about 10²⁰ electron volts. We calculated that if the simulators used a grid size of about 10^-27 metres, then the cut off energy would vary in different directions.

Do cosmic rays vary in this way?
We don鈥檛 know. The highest energy cosmic rays are very rare. A square kilometre on Earth is hit by one only about once per century so we鈥檙e not going to be able map out their distribution any time soon. And even if we do, it鈥檒l be hard to show that this is conclusive proof that we鈥檙e in a simulation.

But can we improve our own simulations?
The size of the universe we simulate is a just fermi, that鈥檚 a box with sides 10^-15 metres long. But we can use Moore鈥檚 Law to imagine what we might be able to simulate in future. If the current trends in computing continue, we should be simulating a universe the size of a human within a century and within five centuries, we could manage a box 10²⁶ metres big. That鈥檚 the size of the observable universe.

How have people reacted to your work?
I gave a lecture on this topic the other week and the turnout was amazing. Half of the people looked at me as if I was disturbed and the other half were very enthusiastic.

Heat from their surroundings causes all molecules to move randomly, but engineers tend to regard such movements as noise to be avoided like the plague. at the Free University of Berlin in Germany and colleagues took inspiration from the natural world, where random motion powers structures such as proteins that move cargo around inside cells.

They placed a quartz springboard, weighing a fraction of a milligram, next to a slab of copper coated with hydrogen molecules. When a molecule changed its orientation, the force between the molecule and the board changed, setting the board vibrating. The team could keep the board vibrating by injecting electrons that encouraged the molecules to move, one at a time, in this way.

鈥淎 single hydrogen molecule ends up pushing an oscillator 10¹⁹times more massive than itself,鈥� says Pascual.

Journal reference:

Want a piece of Facebook? The social networking behemoth has finally announced that it is going public聽鈥� on 18 May聽鈥� and its proposed share price values the company at between $77聽billion and $96聽billion. 鈥淓conophysicists鈥�, however, say the company will be subject to a stock price bubble and is vastly overvalued.

Peter Cauwels and Didier Sornette, , say that financial institutions do not publish the methods they use for valuing social networking companies. So Cauwels and Sornette developed their own model, which they have made publicly available ().

The model suggests that even with the most optimistic growth forecasts, Facebook鈥檚 fundamental value is no more than $30聽billion. Cauwels says that the company鈥檚 unique status as the biggest social networking start-up gives it extra potential, worth perhaps another $30聽billion. 鈥淚nvestors should be aware that everything they pay above $30聽billion is just an option on future potential and everything above $60聽billion is bubble money,鈥� he says.

Much of the excitement is based on Facebook鈥檚 meteoric rise聽鈥� the company has gained new users at an exponential rate since its launch in 2004. But Sornette and Cauwels say there are signs that its growth is slowing, and that the next generation is starting to think that Facebook is boring. 鈥淚t鈥檚 something their parents are using,鈥� says Cauwels.