Cosmic potage
To all those people out there who, like me, don’t like the idea of a multiverse, a solution is at hand. If every possible universe is included, then one of them must be a universe which is not part of a multiverse and perhaps this is the one we inhabit. All credit for this solution must be given to our barber, who shaves all the men in the area who don’t shave themselves.
Sandy, Bedfordshire, UK
For the record
鈥� We weren’t quite up to speed with cosmic inflation (29 March, p 10). The universe’s early expansion was faster than light, not slower.
Shocking discovery
When I was an apprentice electrician many years ago, my finger strayed across live positive and negative terminals, and I cursed myself for being so careless. However, I suddenly realised that my raging hangover had vanished.
Given how well the voltage cure has worked for some (22 February, p 34), I now believe that the shock is what obliterated my hangover. I never dared to shock myself again deliberately in order to test my hypothesis.
Albion, Victoria, Australia
Unlikely odds
I was taken by Fred Pearce’s epithet of “a simple conceit” applied to the title of David Sedlak’s book Water 4.0 (15 March, p 50). I even looked up this phrase as I had not come across it before. Imagine my surprise when, on the next page, reviewer Jonathon Keats describes the title of David Hand’s book as “simply a conceit”.
Assuming that the two book reviews were independently written, I wonder what the odds are of finding this phrase on consecutive pages? David Hand would have enjoyed this example of his “Improbability Principle”.
Llanerfyl, Powys, UK
Unlikely odds
In his review of The Improbability Principle (15 March, p 51), Jonathon Keats discusses the mathematics behind the Bulgarian lottery which drew the same winning numbers on two consecutive occasions. An even simpler way of looking at this, if you are as lazy and as bad at maths as I am, is that the chance of last week’s numbers being drawn again this week must be the same as any other combination of numbers. You don’t need to know the actual probabilities involved.
Hull, East Yorkshire, UK
Bitter truth
Kit Devine (1 March, p 33) suggests drinking soda water, lime and bitters as a grown-up alternative to alcoholic drinks. However, my bottle of bitters shows an alcohol content of 44.7 per cent by volume. That’s why bitters are kept behind the counter at the shop, otherwise they’d be shoplifted by underage teenagers looking for a quick hit.
Turramurra, New South Wales, Australia
Bitter truth
Andy Coghlan’s discussion of giving up alcohol for a month as part of 快猫短视频‘s experiment (4 January, p 6) contains a seemingly throwaway comment: “The only negative was that people reported less social contact.” That’s a big negative. It seems that people are willing to accept alcohol’s detrimental health effects if drinking increases social contact. And without social contact, we don’t breed.
Featherston, New Zealand
No nukes please
You quote Wernher von Braun in Feedback (1 March), who argued that space exploration would become a means for human advancement, as “wars, which had somewhat similar ‘rallying’ effects, are no longer feasible”. If we accept that the UK doesn’t really need a nuclear weapons programme, but does need good jobs for talented scientists and engineers, could the same money and talent pool now working on nuclear arms be used to create a crewed space programme for the country instead?
Kobe, Japan
Room for intolerance
Arthur Krueger needs to clarify his definitions of tolerance (22 March, p 31). Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot may well have been atheist but their brutality was not committed in the name of intolerant atheism. Contrary to what Krueger is implying, atheism is not a belief system: to call it so is tantamount to calling “not stamp collecting” a hobby. Kruger accuses Richard Dawkins of lacking tolerance of religion. But Dawkins is morally and intellectually correct in this, given the irrational, violent and destructive influence of religion.
And if Dawkins is intolerant, I do not see evidence that he has called for the execution, suppression, torture and punishment of those who are not atheists. His intolerance clearly has much less severe consequences for those who disagree with him than the intolerance of the majority of those who have faith.
Unfortunately, those with faith often do have the political power to act upon their views.
London, UK
Musseling in
Martin J. Greenwood’s tale of the mussel-choked inlet at a gas plant (15 March, p 32), reminded me of working at Carmarthen Bay Power Station in the late 1950s, where one of my jobs was monitoring chlorine levels in the turbine cooling systems. The coolant was seawater, drawn in through screens to catch large fish 鈥� which those lucky enough to work in the pump room took home 鈥� and then through the machinery before being discharged back into the sea. Chlorine was added to prevent the growth of mussels.
Back then, there seemed to be no concerns about the ecological effects of this practice, which denuded large parts of the Burry estuary of much of its shore life, already devastated by a red effluent from a nearby factory. Thankfully, the power station is long gone and this beautiful stretch of coast has now become a coastal park. The Good Old Days? You can keep ’em!
LLangoed, Anglesey, UK
Cosmic potage
Joseph Silk’s article on cosmic conundrums (8 March, p 26) has me pondering on the concepts of causality and explanation. Classical causality relates a known precondition, an established regularity of nature, to the outcome: the apple became unsupported, there is a Newtonian force between masses causing acceleration, the apple fell.
Causality 2, if you will, as used in modern cosmology, simply says that we have cooked up a potage of maths that is consistent with observed reality. This would revert to classical causality were we able to observe a multiplicity of universes and identify a regularity among them. Regrettably, we do not currently have this luxury.
Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, UK
Enjoyed the trip?
Michael Slezak writes (8 March, p 40) that in New Zealand’s assessment of harm from novel drugs, reports of “cramp, unconsciousness or hallucinations score 2; coma, paralysis or deafness score 3. Any product that accumulates a score of more than 2 per 20,000 units sold is taken off the market”. For some drugs, failing to produce hallucinations would lead to them being taken off the market under trade description rules.
I have some recollection 鈥� from youthful experimentation, Your Honour 鈥� that hallucinations were frequently the entire point.
Name and address supplied
Game not over
As a computer gamer and hobbyist computer-game author, I was disappointed to see video gaming included in a list of apparently self-evidently bad things in your article on evolutionary traps (15 March, p 43). You might just as well have included fish-keeping or railway modelling.
Playing board games is generally considered a wholesome family activity, and television and film-viewing are mainstream. Why does 快猫短视频 succumb to portraying a combination of the two as the bogeyman of human hobbies?
Dunlop, Ayrshire, UK
Twin heresies
Thanks for a great article by Colin Stuart (15 March, p 38) on habitable planets. I keep telling people the idea of the habitable zone is outdated, and this feature sums it up brilliantly. But I was a bit perturbed that it kicks off with a couple of historical mistakes.
Galileo was never tried for “heresy”, rather for teaching the Copernican theory 鈥� muddling the two is a bit like confusing a conviction for speeding with one for causing death by dangerous driving. And Galileo’s telescope was not good enough to show “moons crossing the face of Jupiter”; he observed the moons alternately to the left and right of the planet, and concluded they were orbiting.
Loosley Row, Buckinghamshire, UK
Savings racket
Further to Reg Platt’s discussion of what he claims is the rising cost of energy, and whether this makes tackling emissions unaffordable, (15 March, p 28), we should realise that cutting domestic energy use has become a massive industry.
Last year in the US, almost $7 billion was spent on energy efficiency schemes, covering everything from insulation to demand management. The cost is passed on to consumers through their energy bills. None of these schemes requires any evidence that they succeed in reducing energy use.
Energy efficiency and consumer education are important, but they need to be based on good science and evidence, not industry press releases.
London, UK
Babies still booming
Wang Feng argues that China’s one-child policy “will go down in history as a textbook example of bad science combined with bad politics” (22 March, p 26). It may be an example of dictatorial tyranny, but it wasn’t an example of bad science.
It is not scientific for him to claim that “populations and societies shift to fewer births, once they see infant mortality rates decline”. It is simply a pattern seen in certain countries to date. Europe may no longer be facing a population explosion, but some other parts of the world still are, due to the poverty trap and their culture.
Les Essarts-le-Roi, France
True colours
In his article on disruptive camouflage (22 March, p 38), Ed Yong states that the dazzle painting on allied ships during both world wars was black-and-white geometric patterns. This is not entirely true.
Dazzle camouflage came in a whole range of colours including blue, green and buff. London’s Imperial War Museum holds a number of contemporary ship models showing the various patterns used.
Seaford, Sussex, UK
We have ignition
In discussing underground coal gasification (15 February, p 36), Fred Pearce misrepresents the process used to manufacture town gas from coal half a century ago. He says that people used to ignite coal, producing carbon dioxide and enough heat for the CO2 to react with steam to form carbon monoxide, methane and hydrogen. In reality, this was a three-stage process in the 1950s.
Simplifying the gory details, it involved blending coal gas (a mixture of gases released when coal is heated in ovens) with water gas (hydrogen plus carbon monoxide, released when steam is passed through white-hot coke) to produce the town gas supplied to consumers. Producing a flammable gas by igniting coal was a 19th-century technology.
Turning coal into carbon dioxide and then methane in a separate stage is thermodynamically misconceived.
London, UK