Editor's pick: Love of change is natural too
I have to disagree with your generalisation that “fear of change is a natural impulse” (18 June, p 5). Our neurology is geared to notice difference, not to fear it.
Many people spend their lives craving change. There are those who constantly change jobs and friends, move houses, pursue different interests and always go on holiday somewhere different.
Of course, if you are the kind of person who has had a similar job all your life, always lived in the same place, been married once, keep in touch with friends from university and have a timeshare that you go to on the same dates every year, then none of this will make sense.
A spectrum of preference drives our behaviour, extending from craving change to wanting everything to stay the same. What is important is to notice where you are on that spectrum.
The deception of free will
Nicolas Gisin seeks to rescue free will (21 May, p 32). But the fundamental question is: of what constraints could free will be free?
Our decisions are certainly constrained by our intelligence, personality, the information we have, upbringing, culture, peer pressure; and by any effects from brain injuries, drugs, food influences or parasites we may have. In other words we do what we do because we are who we are.
We feel “free will” simply because our self-awareness gives us a limited experience of our decision-making process within those constraints. If a demon with a perfect model of our brain and the factors influencing a decision could predict it, we would still have to actually live the moment in which we “made” it.
The deception of free will
I must assume that Gisin is no adherent to any many-universes theory. As I understand it, if a particle has a 50 per cent probability of “collapsing” into one of two states on measurement, the observer's physical brain will recognise this new state as A in 50 per cent of “worlds”, and as B in the other half. The collapse seems random because the observing brain heads off into its newly created universe, oblivious to the almost identical brain that firmly believes the particle assumed the opposite state.
In this picture there is no randomness and no need for free will. Of course, this may be just an idea that some capricious and haphazard mind dreamed up.
The deception of free will
Gisin presents free will as either a mysterious concomitant of consciousness or an illusion. There may be another possibility, involving probability, pointed to by game theory.
Free will arises in situations where there are a set of possible actions and somehow we choose one, apparently consciously “deciding” which. Humans are constantly presented with situations in which we need to make a decision but lack complete information about all the relevant factors involved. In game theory, with such imperfect information the correct approach is to pursue a “mixed” strategy: for example, if there are two alternatives you might calculate that it is optimal to select the first 20 per cent of the time and the second 80 per cent.
No one suggests we do game-theoretic calculations in our heads; but an unconscious mechanism might “decide” probabilistically, with the weights adjusted based on experience.
If such a mechanism did exist, it would be acted on by evolution. In this picture, the awareness of free will is just the later manifestation into consciousness of the unconscious probabilistic determination.
First class post
I have done ‘meaningful’ jobs for 46 years: retired, I finally have control over my own life
Penny Steevens by the argument that going to work is good for you (25 June, p 29)
Data fudging begins at school
A teenage reader related the creation of false experimental data by school science students (Letters, 4 June). I can assure younger readers that there is nothing new about this.
Back in 1964, my A-level physics practical examination required finding the local acceleration due to gravity, g, using the swinging pendulum method. At that time both metric and imperial units were on the syllabus.
Knowledgeable students were aware that g could be taken as either 981 centimetres per second squared or 32 feet per second squared. When we left the exam room, one of my friends boasted that he would probably be awarded full marks for this practical paper. Instead of “wasting time” doing the experiment, he had used his slide rule to create a beautiful straight-line graph. This might have impressed the examiner, had the value not been hopelessly inaccurate because the poor lad had got his imperial and metric units muddled up.
He failed the A-level physics exam and I have no idea what his subsequent career was.
Speech feedback lacks language
The idea that wearable technology could provide instant feedback to improve pronunciation in a foreign language is far-fetched (7 May, p 24). The SayWAT system you describe detects socially significant global features of speech, like overall volume. This is basically an acoustic task.
Alerting language learners “when they mess up a specific sound, like tones in Chinese or the Rs in French” would not just need more computational power: the device would have to know what you were trying to say. It will be decades before speech and language technology is ready to do anything like that.
How to get back there from here
Colin Stuart gives us yet another revision to the hypothesised process of the formation of our solar system, based on modelling its evolution (23 April, p 30). I wonder whether, even in a deterministic universe, it is really possible for the current state to have been arrived at in only one way. Surely there must, given the timescales involved, be millions of different initial states, any of which could have resulted in the current state, making all such speculation a little redundant?
Houdelaincourt, France
The editor writes:
• It is surprisingly difficult to get a set of initial conditions that exactly reproduces what the solar system looks like. So while there's no guarantee you have found a unique solution if the model ends up with what we observe, it's quite likely. You can be more certain by re-running the algorithm.
How small fingers could evolve
Andrea Stevenson derides the idea of future generations evolving smaller fingers through smartphone use (Letters, 14 May). This ignores the ubiquity of smartphones in the dating rituals of today's youth. Those with big fingers may indeed fail to reproduce, leaving only those with dexterous small fingers…
Prospecting for prime patterns
Jacob Aron discusses patterns in prime numbers (19 March, p 12). This prompted me to wonder whether the patterns would persist if you considered the last two digits in a prime number rather than the last one. For instance, 1097 is a prime number: what are the chances of the following prime ending in 97?
I checked all numbers up to 10 million and found 664,579 prime numbers. Of those I found one case of a prime ending in 11 being followed by another one, no cases at all of a 77 being followed by another 77 but 3577 cases of 01 being followed by 07. These are just a few examples. When you plot them out as a scattergram, a complex pattern emerges.
Your label does not compute
James Ball's photographs offer a fascinating reminder of life before the ubiquity of powerful and portable computing (28 May, p 26). They are also a tribute to the endeavours of those who preserve and operate the precursors of the computers of today.
However, for the record, the image you labelled as an ICL 7500 system showed an operator's console for a New Range (2900 series) mainframe computer, which was indeed based upon the 7500 series and is surmounted by a 7561 visual display unit.
I am documenting this system at .
Milk of synthetic human kindness
Chris Baraniuk discusses making synthetic wine (21 May, p 8). Instead of replacing attractive vineyards that take carbon dioxide out of the air, then producing a product that real wine drinkers will never want, they should instead explore making synthetic milk.
This would replace cows that turn valuable grain into methane and will produce something that people actually need. It may not be a big money-maker, however, since around here milk is cheaper than bottled water.
The spectre of clinical nightmares
Bryn Glover describes his recurrent nightmare featuring an undescribable taste or smell (Letters, 21 May). This is a clear and classic example of a minor temporal lobe seizure. And that raises the interesting question: are some or all recurrent nightmares clinical phenomena? Even normal dreams may perhaps share aspects.
For the record
• A clarification: the purple sector in the first of our diet plate illustrations would better be labelled “Added fats” (11 June, p 28).
• A “king tide” is simply a colloquial term for a very high tide (11 June, p 6).
• Katy Gonder of Drexel University in Philadelphia discovered a subspecies of chimpanzee in 1997 (11 June, p 33).