Dead scientists
That another Iranian scientist has been assassinated is troubling (21 January, p 13). As your article points out, attempts to derail a nation’s nuclear programme by killing its scientists are a product of desperation and are counterproductive.
Both nuclear energy generation and nuclear weapons are based on mature technologies. While the targeting of specialised staff might delay such programmes, it will not stop them. The article also suggests these killings might deter young scientists; apparently that is not the case, as reports indicate Iranian university students are switching into the nuclear sciences, presumably for patriotic reasons.
Then there is the issue of blowback, or unintended consequences. The Iranian government holds Israel and/or the US responsible. These killings may put US and Israeli scientists at risk of assassination. Will US scientists avoid going abroad because of this?
We should be having a thorough discussion about the assassination of scientists and its future impact on science. Your article has done us all a favour by initiating this.
Chemical high
As a chemist I enjoyed Philip Ball’s article “Forbidden reactions” (21 January, p 30), but what brought me most joy was the fact that it was a cover story on pure chemistry, a very rare event.
Admittedly there is less public interest in chemistry compared with the other sciences because of its seeming lack of answers to the “big” questions, as David Phillips said in the related editorial (21 January, p 3). 91av did well to publish an article which expressed some of the more elegant aspects of chemistry, which are sometimes deemed less useful than practical applications.
There seems to be a consensus amongst scientists that theoretical physicists and biologists can be granted free rein to research what they like, but chemists must be doing something useful.
No K-T, no dinos?
Your feature on the idea of progress in evolution included palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris’s suggestion that ice ages would have killed off the dinosaurs and allowed mammals to take over the world if there had been no K-T extinction event (21 January, p 35). This is physiologically and palaeoclimatologically naive.
Dinosaurs were tachyenergetic, with fast metabolisms like birds and mammals, and some were insulated with feathers and dinofur. Dinosaurs of all sizes were able to survive Mesozoic polar winters with blizzards and permafrost. Had there been no K-T extinction, dinosaurs would probably still be a major component of land fauna all over the globe.
Might some of the bigger brained dinosaurs have evolved into civilised tool users? Or could small primates still have evolved into something human-like in a dinosaur-dominated world? Maybe. Or maybe not.
Keep the leap
Felicitas Arias of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures suggests we stop adding leap seconds to coordinated universal time (UTC), which is based on atomic clocks, to compensate for its drift from astronomical time, mainly on the grounds that telecommunications systems do not work well with leap seconds (17 December 2011, p 27). Why not use an invariant timescale for those systems instead, and leave the rest of us alone?
Arias states that most people would not notice the drift between UTC and astronomical time for many years. True, but that is not a good reason for doing something. Conversely most people do not notice leap seconds, either incorporating them into the habitual resetting of timepieces or owning clocks that are automatically adjusted.
The principle of leaving any decision on what to do about the growing gap between UTC and astronomical time to future generations is flawed, as it could result in leap minutes being required, or shifts in time zones by fractions of an hour. Both could cause problems worse than the 1-second adjustments.
The editor writes:
• Members of the International Telecommunications Union met in January and put off making a decision on the fate of the leap second until 2015.
Need to explore
In his letter, Brian Robinson says that, during a time of austerity, a hiatus in pursuit of the mysteries of the cosmos would not matter (28 January, p 33). I struggle to find anything that matters more.
On a practical note, I can think of no greater depressant to scientific education, and hence alleviation of austerity, than a world in which we remove the point from the pursuit of science. Does Robinson really wish to contemplate a world with fewer doctors, engineers and scientists?
Having pursued an education and career in science for most of the last 50 years, it is the prospect of solving the next problem that has got me out of bed every morning. The notion of no more progress in our understanding in the next 50 fills me with horror.
Sceptical view
Why are scientists and teachers resistant to mentioning intelligent design and climate change denial in school science classes (21 January, p 4)? They are wonderful examples to demonstrate the difference between pseudo-science and real science. Properly equipped teachers will not have to take sides, the students will work it out for themselves. Problem solved.
From Daniel Wheeler
Teaching students how to analyse and evaluate is a fundamental aspect of science education, but this does not mean that we simply accept the inclusion of scepticism in classes on climate change.
Unless scepticism can display the same level of analysis and evaluation as the current climate change theories, then it should not be part of any education model. To do so would go against the fundamentals of science, not promote it.
Moorebank, New South Wales, Australia
Beyond possible
Jesse Prinz offers that “philosophy tells us what is possible, and science tells us what is true” (21 January, p 26). This serves us well until we consider that all truth is bounded by its intrinsic context, and that the great expansions of science have come from those who look beyond the perceptual limitations of philosophy to conceive something new.
Toads for sale
I had no idea beetles could be such pests, as in the case of the bark beetle damaging North American forests (5 November 2011, p 38). But I might have a solution. In Australia we adopted some amazingly beautiful creatures to get rid of pests – in particular the cane beetle. They’re called cane toads. We don’t mind shipping a few million to you, for a small fee.
Kindle slip
I have another example of game transfer phenomena, in which facets of video game play spill over into real life (24/31 December 2011, p 76). I’ve been using a Kindle to read e-books for about a year now. The other day, while reading a paperback for a change, I pressed the side of the right-hand page with my thumb to turn the page over, just as I would on the Kindle’s screen.
Here, watching us
Both Sepehr Ehsani’s letter (21 January, p 28) and the review of How to Build a Time Machine (10 December 2011, p 52) assume that travellers from the future will be visible to our senses or to our instruments. Is there any proof of this? Perhaps we are surrounded by trillions of gawpers. All the world’s a stage?
Perpetual motion
There is an obvious problem with the suggestion that a non-stop high-speed train could be boarded from a tram moving alongside it (3 December 2011, p 27) – the long parallel tracks required. A simpler plan might be for the passengers leaving the train to move to the last car, which would break off and become the tram going to the destination city.
It would be replaced by another tram containing passengers joining the service who, at their leisure, could then move into spaces in the main body of the train after docking.
Hawking philosophy
Further to Michael Dowling’s letter calling for the creation problem in cosmological theory to be left to philosophers rather than physicists like Stephen Hawking (28 January, p 32).
Hawking has already branched out into philosophy by espousing a theory called model-dependent realism, which holds there may be different, equally valid interpretations of reality.
In some respects this resembles the idealism of George Berkeley or Immanuel Kant, with a touch of American pragmatism.
Sadly, it communicates the misleading idea that reality depends upon the models we make of it.
Lost and found
Whenever I can’t find an everyday object – keys, paperback, spectacles – I create a vertical moving band using the side of my hand to scan my field of view. This causes my eyes to jump from object to object, which helps me find my quarry more quickly.
Your story “Slow down your search to find your keys” (28 January, p 15) provides the science I appear to have been relying on.
For the record
• Saul (not Sam) Winstein was the champion of unconventional carbocation chemistry (21 January, p 34).
• In the CareersGuide 2012 sent to subscribers in the UK and US (14 January and 24/31 December 2011), we should have said the right to pursue happiness is in the US constitution.
• In the feature “Creative sparks” (14 January, p 42), the photograph on page 45 should have been credited to “Thomas Struth/Art Institute of Chicago 2, Chicago 1990”.