Editor's pick: A final test of our universe's reality
Do we live in a digital simulation, asks Anil Ananthaswamy (3 September, p 30). Perhaps we could try to decide the question by crashing it.
Presumably, the more heavily we load the simulation, the more likely it is to fail. By running ever more digital simulations within our own universe, we might perhaps be able to bring our parent simulation to its knees – although we might then not be in a fit state to notice.
Doing too much quantum computing might also not be wise. Even thinking too much and making too many decisions could be dangerous. If such seemingly innocuous acts really do spawn universes by the gazillion, we should spare a thought for our poor host simulation.
Of course, it could be that what's really going on bears no resemblance to our limited concept of what a simulation can be like – whether that be a digital one with detectable granularity in space and time, or an analogue one with inherent noise giving rise to underlying randomness.
Felixstowe, Suffolk, UK
The editor writes:
• The Silicon Valley rumour mill that there are already well-funded projects looking for ways to “break us out” of the simulation. Bad news for those of us who like living in it, perhaps.
In defence of burning wood
Regarding the carbon accounting scam you report (24 September, p 20), it should be recognised that mature trees take in less carbon per hectare than young, fast-growing ones. Restocking woodland after harvesting seems to be a better sequestration bet than simply leaving trees standing.
Better still is to use the harvested timber in furniture and buildings. That has the added benefit of displacing carbon-heavy materials such as concrete.
In defence of burning wood
False accounting? I cannot see how you can argue that releasing carbon from coal, which has been sequestered for 300 million years, is ever preferable to burning a tree that gives ground to saplings, which in turn will sequester as much carbon as released by that tree, over the next 50 years.
False accounting is not allowing for the carbon emissions tied up in imported goods we consume. False accounting sets the price of carbon-neutral electricity from wind and photovoltaics side by side with coal, oil and gas to show how “expensive” it is, taking no account of the planetary havoc caused by releasing fossil carbon.
I'm keeping my log burner with a clear conscience.
In defence of burning wood
You do not take into account the rigorous external scrutiny and internal commitment to sustainability demonstrated on an ongoing basis by the biomass sector and its leading companies. Regulation strictly prohibits using any wood or biomass from primary forests, highly biodiverse grassland or protected nature for energy generation.
The wood used is typically from thinnings, treetops, limbs and sawmill residues, as well as misshapen and diseased trees not suitable for other use. The UK government holds the British biomass industry to some of the highest standards in the world. The wood and bioenergy sectors do not claim to be completely carbon-neutral: there are some emissions from transporting and producing the fuel.
First class post
Why did we lose this fight for elephants and lions with all the evidence of tragic rapid population decline?
Shani Rosenzweig that the CITES conference didn't ban trade in elephant and lion parts (8 October, p 6)
The tragic fiasco of trans fats
Luke Allen calls for a ban on trans fats (10 September, p 18). This is long overdue. In 1993 my company Whole Earth Foods launched a trans-fat-free spread, branded Superspread. Other manufacturers objected to our advertising: the Advertising Standards Authority .
We presented the ASA with the medical evidence, which was abundant 23 years ago. They accepted its validity but said we violated their code because we were “appealing to fear” by suggesting trans fats could damage your heart health.
When Denmark banned trans fats the food industry replaced them with coconut and palm fats, and the EU was faced with a rapeseed oil glut, as that was the oil that was mostly hydrogenated. So the required rapeseed oil to be blended with diesel.
That requirement overshot. So we are now deforesting Indonesia to grow palm oil to make up the quota for vegetable oil in diesel.
If there is anything to be learned from this tragic fiasco that continues to cost tens of thousands of lives annually and blights many more with ill health, it is that agricultural policy should never trump health policy.
Nostalgia is no worse than it was
Teal Burrell reports that there is evidence of a “genuine trend” towards nostalgia becoming more common (24 September, p 36).This can hardly be surprising given that we are living longer, so having more experiences to be nostalgic about and more time to indulge ourselves in nostalgia.
And I suggest, although without research to support this claim, that in all manner of fields – technology, society, politics, the arts – the old is being replaced by the new at increasing rates. Even without longer lives, we would be able to reminisce about ever more lost features of our past. Modern communications make it easy to provoke nostalgia in others by drawing their attention to the things that are going or have gone.
DNA's discovery has twists in its tale
Rosalind Franklin's images of DNA in 1951 were not the first (27 August, p 39). William Astbury obtained blurred X-ray images of DNA in 1938.
My father Maurice Wilkins, with Raymond Gosling, obtained the first clear X-ray diffraction image of DNA at King's College London in 1950. He presented this at a conference in Naples, Italy, in 1951. It suggested a regular molecular structure and sparked the interest of James Watson. Franklin was invited to King's the same year to help build on these promising initial results.
In 1952, Wilkins also obtained clear “X” shape images from Sepia sperm and shared these with Crick and Watson, who said they “should provide sufficient detail for a rigorous interpretation of the pattern”.
The story of DNA's discovery has parallels with the molecule itself: it's full of twists and turns.
Cars that are just a bit driverless
Hal Hodson says that Uber customers in Pittsburgh may “find themselves picked up by a driverless car – with a human driver on standby” (1 October, p 24). It is noteworthy that most trials of the technology require the subjects, sorry, passengers to sign waivers of liability against loss, injury or death before setting off. Coverage of this guff reminds me of the 50s when credulous folk were told we'd be buzzing around in personal flying cars by 1980.
The gap between achieving 90 per cent of true driverlessness and the 99.999 per cent that will be required by insurers and, I hope, by legislators, is much harder to cross than the 0 to 90 bit we have covered so far.
The population of Utopia was what?
Andrew Robinson makes an interesting case for 700 years of peace and equality in the Indus Valley civilisation (17 September, p 31). It would be nice to believe it. But I'd expect a settled peaceful population to have a high birth rate: it's hard to see how this would not lead to conflict for finite resources.
Might they have had effective birth control – or very strong social discipline, as Thomas More proposed in his original ? It would be good to know, since living within finite resources is a problem that we have yet to solve.
Less slippery consciousness
Is consciousness “real” or “a trick of the mind” (3 September, p 28)? The idea of mind itself is slippery, so explaining slippery potential entity 1 as a trick of slippery potential entity 2 quickly gets into murky territory.
The word “trick” is loaded with implicit value judgments: might a better word be “byproduct,” or perhaps “epiphenomenon”?
It may be more accurate (although admittedly still slippery) to say the mind is an emergent phenomenon of certain recursive processes of the brain, and that consciousness in turn is a byproduct of a mind that has achieved enough density and complexity to become aware of its processes of awareness.
Consciousness, considered this way, is simply our sense of being a being that is aware of being an aspect of space-time.
Making bread for the dead
Emily Benson says that some loaves of ancient Egyptian bread “were made with ingredients we would consider inedible today, like chaff and straw” (20 August, p 25). Isn't it possible that these ingredients were used only for ritual burial bread that no one was actually going to eat?
Darwin's burial and earthworms' woes
Caroline Waddams finds it a tragedy that Charles Darwin was interred in a “sterile” vault in Westminster Abbey, instead of with worms in a churchyard (Letters, 24 September). Darwin himself would not have been sterile, especially if he had food inside him at time of death.
Worms do not live deeper than the nutritional topsoil, which is usually about 30 centimetres deep. So the worms would have considered themselves buried alive 6 feet under, which would have distressed Darwin if he had a particular fondness for them.
For the record
• Attempts in the 1990s to create babies using DNA from three people led to two foetuses with genetic disorders (1 October, p 8).
• The Harvard neuroscientist studying children living in Romanian orphanages is Charles Nelson (1 October, p 5). Apologies.
• Getting warmer: it is the increase in global temperature above baseline that is expected to soar way past 2 °C (1 October, p 6).