A new starting point for young minds
As someone who completed a PhD in organometallic chemistry in the late 1960s, I was immediately drawn to your interview with Omar Yaghi about metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). One time I was leading a curriculum development project in which pupils aged 14 to 15 were required to design, but not make, products and services they considered to be beneficial to society based on a new and emerging material or technology (31 January, p 38).
These young minds conceived a wide range of innovative ideas, including clothing that changes colour as you dance, car tyres that sense their internal pressure, an epileptic fit detector, a self-weighing suitcase, an arthritis treatment device, keep-fit apparatus, a depth-sensitive submersible and an internal heartbeat monitor. I wonder what such minds would devise given MOFs as their starting point.
Why we're in a universe of the third kind
Ernest Ager remarks that a “one in a billion” chance of life arising isn’t as much of a hurdle as Bryn Glover considers it to be, given the vast numbers of star systems in the universe. Since the article that this one-in-a-billion figure comes from provided no scope of space or time, it is meaningless. A one-in-a -billion chance that it will happen in the local swimming pool next Thursday, or that it has happened anywhere else in the age of the universe?
However, the notion that our universe is just one in a multiverse of all possible universes offers a different approach. We may guess that the vast majority of universes produce nothing of much complexity; that an overwhelming proportion of those that do are quite inimical to life; that in all but a tiny fraction of those where life could arise, it remains so unlikely that it only happens once; and so forth. On that basis, the odds are that we find ourselves in a universe of the third kind (Letters, 24 January).
The mystery of how time flows, made simple
Time isn’t an illusion or mystery, and we don’t need an arcane physics theory to explain why it flows in only one direction. At sub-atomic to intergalactic scales, all matter is in motion relative to most other matter, as described by Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, making future motion and events predictable (31 January, p 28).
Since antiquity, humans have found it useful to measure and divide the intervals between recurring natural events such as day and night, phases of the moon, tides and annual seasons, and these measurements have become formalised by the development of calendars, sundials, clocks, etc. The choice of which recurring events to use for time measurement is an arbitrary one, so, although time and change due to relative motion are real, time measurement as we experience it is a human invention.
The mystery of how time flows, made simple (2)
I have my own simple theory of time as an amateur theoretical physicist. Time is the result of the movement of matter, and the movement of matter creates the effect of time for us to measure. Any traditional clock or timepiece has a mechanism that is called its movement; even atomic clocks measure the vibration movement of a crystal. The term space-time should be modified to space-time-motion. Time is real, not an illusion. If it were not so, the entire universe would be static or not exist at all.
Putting yourself in the place of a starship captain
Regarding the sci-fi stories inspired by the “Blueprint Problem” that Annalee Newitz decries because of their preference for placing human beings at the centre of the story rather than robotic spacecraft: I have found that the sci-fi stories that made the biggest impact on me were those that asked the question: “How would I have acted in [name your favourite protagonist here]’s place?”
One of the best examples is the Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”, in which Captain Kirk has to make a choice between his love for Edith Keeler and the future of the world. It is difficult for me to identify with Robby the Robot, but I can try to put myself in the place of a starship captain (27 December, p 16).
A systems-level view of the human body
The growing recognition that the human body functions as an integrated, communicative whole, rather than a collection of isolated organs, is a welcome and important development. This systems-level view helps explain why ageing and disease are often body-wide phenomena. What is especially striking is how much remains unresolved. This should encourage intellectual humility as well as curiosity (7 February, p 30).
On the adventures of Stone Age seafarers (1)
Michael Marshall speculates about how seafaring was learned. Could it have developed incrementally as rising water levels turned a society’s accustomed range into a series of islands (where once there were hills), with the gaps between them developing from dry land to a swamp to a small waterway to a larger waterway and then finally to a sea? They would be motivated to cross by their knowledge of exploitable resources, and maybe cousins to trade with on the other side (31 January, p 32).
On the adventures of Stone Age seafarers (2)
Marshall presents an enthralling story of Homo sapiens and other humans crossing the sea as they spread around the world, but I fear he may have fallen into the trap of assuming that prehistoric peoples were simpler than their descendants. Why should farmers have more advanced tools than hunter-gatherers?
A hunter who might bag game of various sizes (and temperaments) would need a larger variety of stone tools than a farmer to catch, dispatch, skin and butcher these various animals. Ancient hunter-gatherers would also probably have fished, which is a great incentive to invent some kind of boat. And if hominins were already fisherfolk, then crossing the sea in a canoe wouldn’t need much forward planning, as they would already have the boat and a means to catch food along the way.