Right is wrong
Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell write that “vilifying an entire philosophy based on the actions of its radical ideologues would be unfair” (2 February, p 24). They then claim that “progressivism stands as the most pressing problem for science”.
They seem to be living in a fantasy world where the “lunatic fringe” of the left has real power. Are lefties stopping stem cell research? Denying students knowledge of the basis for all modern biology? Denying women medical services? Condemning us all to a much hotter, extreme future? Passing laws outlawing basic maths and science?
It is so easy to “hippie punch”, rather than take on the institutionalised and mainstream anti-science attitude of conservatives in the US.
Cool young sun
Stuart Clark discusses the paradox that 2.5 billion years ago, Earth was warm enough to have liquid water on its surface when the faint young sun meant it should have been much cooler than today (16 February, p 44). Mars was once warm enough to have liquid water too, about 3.5 billion years ago, and has since cooled. Is this a coincidence? If not, it could rule out theories to explain the paradox described.
Clark asks how life got started when the early Earth was 20 degrees cooler than present, but parts of equatorial oceans could still have been 10 degrees above freezing 鈥� warm enough for life.
Also, the freezing point of the water could have been lower, due to more dissolved salt or other minerals, or the ingredients of a primeval organic soup.
And the primordial Earth could have generated more heat internally, before the radioactive content of its interior decayed.
Earth is popularly believed to have started off as a molten ball, and cooled to a comfortable temperature by about the time of the Late Heavy Bombardment, which would have warmed it a little. Clark does not mention this, or the probability that volcanism was more vigorous in early times and many more high-temperature lavas, known as komatiites, were erupted then. Furthermore, there was more heat from nuclear fission within.
Kenmore, Brisbane, Australia
鈥� Earth’s interior was warmer then and more heat was released from it to the surface. But this higher flux of geothermal heat was an insignificant source of energy to the climate system, even under the faint young sun. And once the ocean freezes down to latitudes of about 30 degrees, it reflects so much sunlight back into space that a runaway into a “Snowball Earth” state seems inevitable.
Energy competition
Power producers should pay for cleaning up their emissions, David R. Allen suggests (16 February, p 33). If all countries agree, that’s fine: problem solved. If not, any country that continued to pollute would gain a huge financial advantage over its competitors.
Certainly, the only way to stop the massive increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is to impose a charge, either on emissions or fuel, and to allow competition to provide the cheapest alternative. This would work only with international agreement through the United Nations. The current subsidising of certain “green” measures does little if anything to reduce global emissions, and disadvantages the nations that do it.
Magic street lights
Has any thought been given to using the freeform lens technology described in Philip Ball’s article “Light tamers” (2 February, p 40) to reduce light pollution from street lighting?
The Chinese “magic mirrors” Ball describes appear in Desmond Bagley’s 1968 thriller The Vivero Letter. They project an embossed pattern on the back, and Bagley says there is a specimen in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
Like physicist William Bragg, Bagley attributes the phenomenon to imperceptible distortions of the mirror surface corresponding to the pattern on the reverse. He suggests, unlike Bragg, that these distortions were caused not by the casting process but by the subsequent scraping of the bronze casting to create a reflective surface.
The mirror would rest on the raised pattern on its reverse: “When scraper pressure was applied, the unsupported parts would give a little and a fraction more metal would be removed over the supported parts.”
Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire, UK
Robot inquisitor
I wonder whether the idea of the robot inquisitor (9 February, p 21) could be extended.
Consider a robot to which anyone can make a report and answer questions anonymously: call it “Sherlock”. It could accumulate data and alert the human authorities to any patterns that indicate serial offenders. Since no accusations would be based on a single report, the accused would not know who exactly to intimidate. And single false accusations would not lead to Sherlock causing damage to innocent reputations.
If victims of sexual crimes find it less stressful to give details to a machine than to a human, however sympathetic, more people might feel able to report, and serial offenders could be identified earlier.
Plug 'n' pray
Gibson Research Corporation, among others, has for years been publicising the security risks of Universal Plug and Play (9 February, p 24). In December 2001 it made available a free utility to disable it, UnPlug n’ Pray.
Natural knowledge
Amanda Gefter threw much interesting light on Eugene Wigner’s famous paper on the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences” (29 September 2012, p 38) but I was not quite satisfied.
In 1920, the English philosopher of science Norman Campbell wrote in The Foundations of Science that: “we accomplish the apparently miraculous feat of reducing a chaotic world to order, because we carefully confine our attention and our efforts only to those portions which we find can be ordered.”
This suggests that natural science can be defined as that portion of knowledge that can be reduced to mathematics. It makes the effectiveness of mathematics in science unsurprising 鈥� a tautology, in fact.
So why does natural science seem to form such a large portion of knowledge? The answer might lie in a version of the anthropic principle: advanced civilisation, and the existence of magazines such as 快猫短视频 in which the topic can be so well discussed, would not be possible in any universe in which a substantial part of reality could not be described in mathematical terms.
Honey alley
Fred Pearce describes the role of “honey-suckers” in recycling human waste as fertiliser in contemporary India (16 February, p 48). Less than a hundred years ago, this was a not-uncommon practice in the urban UK. Houses built in central Gateshead in the 1890s, and still standing, typically have two hatches in the wall separating them from the back lane. The upper was for deliveries of coal, the lower for taking out human faeces, to which ash from the coal fire had been added.
Those doing the removal were called “honey-pot men”; the euphemism has clearly travelled and lasted. In the mining town of Ashington, Northumberland, a narrow-gauge railway ran down the back lanes between rows of houses, to take the closet contents for use as fertiliser on the mine company’s farm.
Pearce does not mention pharmaceuticals and the risks they pose when using human effluent as fertiliser. There are, for example, fears that the contraceptive pill and hormone replacement therapy are linked to feminisation of male aquatic life.
Humans also consume large amounts of antibiotics: what will these do to your vegetable patch and to those who eat the produce? The last thing you want to do is use our effluent to grow crops.
I am lucky to have a weekend farm to escape to, with free-range sheep and cattle defecating all over the place.
Our faeces go straight onto my flower beds: the flowers love it!
Perth, Western Australia
Heart failure
Feedback wondered whether one would be fit to talk after suffering “heart failure” (9 February). You were probably thinking that heart failure means cardiac arrest, which renders you very unfit indeed. As a medical term it means deficient functioning of the heart resulting in symptoms such as weakness, shortness of breath and accumulation of fluid in the ankles and legs (oedema).
For the record
鈥� We reported Ed Lu of the B612 Foundation saying that when talking about spotting Earth-bound asteroids, he feels “a bit like the people in New Orleans who said the levy should be fixed before Katrina” (23 February, p 8). He was of course talking about the levee: the person responsible has been sent to a folk and blues re-education camp.