I, Science - Issue 1 (Spring 2005)

I, science Issue 1 Spring 2005

A science magazine for Imperial College

contents.indd 1

3/3/05 12:54:36 pm

8

16

31

I, science

REGULARS

INTERVIEWS

Catch up with the latest news from Imperial

The developmental evolutionary biologist on Mutants and whether the race question should be reopened

27

4 The I, Science Report 12 Armand Marie Leroi 5 Other news

A light-hearted take on research from around the globe

6-7 Events Tony Benn at Imperial 2005: Einstein year Richard Dawkins at LSE Events calendar

24-26 Opinion Religion

The Christian Union and the Buddhist Society debate science

Farming

Two opposing views on organic farming

Space

Is space exploration worth it?

28-30 Books Collapse

What can we learn about our own fate from the fall of extinct societies?

Monster of God

Our relationship with our predators

Blink

Spend too much time thinking?

Einstein’s Universe Relativity clear for all

Time travel

H. G. Wells’ classic revisited and a more modern interpretation

2 I science contents.indd 2

6

18 Darren Crowdy

Prize-winning Imperial mathematician on how he chose his career and the joys of complex analysis

27 Olivia Judson

Why science and the media sometimes don’t get along

9

31 Pallab Ghosh

The BBC’s science correspondent talks to I, Science about his time at Imperial and the BBC

IMPERIAL FEATURES

9 Saturn’s secrets

How the Cassini mission is revealing the inner structure of the gassy giant

11 It came from outer space!

Assessing the threat from rogue asteroids heading towards Earth

16 Mysterious metamaterials

The story of how Sir John Pendry found the key to an optical secret garden

23 Ozone food hole

A famine waiting to happen: the potential consequences of damaging ozone pollution

SCIENCE FEATURES

8 Punk science

The Dana Centre’s comedy wing try to overcome the odds and make science seriously funny

14 Hollywood science The extent to which Hollywood goes to make sure that movies are scientifically accurate – or not

20 Psycho science

Can science explain antisocial and psychotic behaviour?

21 Late spring

Changing climate affecting Britain’s wildlife

22 Open access

Are open access journals the wave of the future or unsustainable?

Spring 2005

3/3/05 12:54:40 pm

EDITORIAL

Editorial

A

SCIENCE MAGAZINE that has absolutely nothing to do with science. This was one of the ideas we touted around in our earlier group meetings before deciding to settle on the current paradigm for I, Science: a magazine that shows science in its societal context. With the possible exception of the metaphorical front cover, everything in this magazine is clearly related to science. From the comedy of the Punk Scientists through to the opinion pieces on the relationship between science and religion, and the interviews with prominent media scientists – the articles in this magazine show how science interacts with society, culture, the media and government.

Bearing in mind that an average Imperial student is already exposed to more science in one term than an average person on the street is in a lifetime (fact): why this magazine at Imperial?

The answer is quite simple: science is fascinating. However boring lectures can sometimes get and however irksome exams can be, the ideas, ethical dilemmas and new philosophical

ground generated by science and technology are changing our world-view like nothing else in modern culture. There is currently talk of a new ‘third culture’ emerging beyond the Two Cultures divide between the arts and the sciences described so famously by C. P. Snow. The third culture encourages scientists to communicate the significance of their ideas to the public and one another, and interprets the impact of empirical research on society.

Imperial is one of the best research institutes of its kind in the world. The ideas being generated here have consequences far beyond the four walls of the South Kensington campus. Some of the most amazing and influential research in the world is being done here at Imperial. But we don’t get to write about it and respond to it. This is a forum where we can communicate our enthusiasm for science; I, Science hopes to develop a ‘third culture’ at Imperial.

Aside from this, the magazine also places emphasis on presenting science in an interesting and entertaining way. Communicating science is an art form in itself and the magazine will hopefully give budding writers a chance to engage with a ‘scientifically literate’ readership.

However, this issue of of I, Science has shown that there is a great deal of scope for broad and varied content.

This is the first edition of the first ever science magazine at Imperial College. It would not have been possible were it not for the commitment and talent our contributors and editors.

It would also not be possible without the support of Felix. So, with this in mind, I would like to thank everyone involved for their efforts. I think you all have a magazine to be proud of.

I, science

We need your feedback and your contributions. Contact us with your thoughts and suggestions, and especially ideas for articles. We need features, news, opinion, reviews.

For further details contact:

science.felix@ic.ac.uk

I, science

Issue 1, Spring 2005

Editor-in-chief Darius Nikbin Managing Editors Dave Edwards Tom Simonite Design and Layout Alexander Antonov Section Editors Imperial Features David Osumi-Sutherland Samantha Bell Science Features Anushri Patel Rosemary Taylor Interviews Iain Taylor News and Events Zoë Corbyn Opinion Emma-Lynn Donadieu Books Nora Mulligan Brian Owens

Felix I, Science is produced and published in association with Felix, the student newspaper of Imperial College

COVER PICTURE Anastasia Sarkissian, Lisenced architect engineer, research student at the RCA Image: Construction site in Athens, showing the mesh-like fabric that envelopes the scaffoldings of a building which is under construction.

Spring 2005

contents.indd 3

Felix Newspaper Beit Quad Prince Consort Road London SW7 2BB Tel: 020 7594 8072 Email: felix@ic.ac.uk Registered newspaper ISSN 1040-0711 Copyright © Felix 2005 Printed by Stephens and George Magazines, Goat Mill Road, Dowlais, Merthyr Tydfil, CF48 3TD

I sCience

3 3/3/05 1:17:46 pm

NEWS & EVENTS

I, sci Imperial Report

Imperial to host sleep-inducing lectures

A FORTHCOMING conference at Imperial is sure to make delegates wish they were asleep, not through boredom, but because it will discuss the benefits of a good kip. Researchers from across the globe will gather to confer on the activity that takes up a third of our time but is little understood.

Organiser Professor Russell Foster said: “Sleep is such an important part of our lives, and the amount we get can make a huge difference, yet there is still so much about it that we don’t understand. We hope this conference will help raise awareness of the impact sleep disruption can have on health.”

Prof Stephen Smith, Principal of the Faculty of Medicine, added: “This will be a very exciting

Needles not to blame for sub-saharan HIV spread

Imperial scientist wins prestigious award, meets Prince

IN 2003 some scientists controversially claimed that poor medical practice was driving the rapid spread of HIV in Africa, in the face of the conventional opinion that unprotected heterosexual sex was responsible.

New research from Imperial College has shown that use of ‘dirty’ needles is not an important factor in the spread of HIV in subSaharan Africa.

Working in collaboration with researchers in Zimbabwe, Imperial scientists used a three-year study containing nearly two thousand people to see if those receiving any kind of injection were more likely to contract HIV. No evidence was found for a link.

Dr Simon Gregson, from the Biomedical Research and Training Institute in Harare, Zimbabwe, said: “Clearly, it is still possible for an individual to get HIV through unsafe medical injections, but, overall in Zimbabwe, unsafe injections are not an important cause of HIV infection.”

THE TRIBOLOGY Gold Medal has returned to the UK after 19 years out in the cold thanks to Prof Hugh Spikes of the Mechanical Engineering Department. He was presented with the award by HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, at Buckingham Palace.

The victorius Prof Spikes explained what he had studied: “Tribology is the study of what happens when things rub together and it pervades our lives. How to design more efficient car engines of course, but also quieter and safer tyres and roads, the design of hair conditioners, why silk feels smoother than wool, the eye blinking on a contact lens. Tribology is concerned with analysing and understanding all of these.”

Prof Spikes has contributed much to the field, one example of his work is the research into the friction and wear properties of diesel fuels that permitted the development of low-sulphur diesel.

Imperial also managed to bag the second spot on the podium

Needles: blameless?

Prince (Ed: is this the right one?)

4 I, science News_and_Events_final.indd 4

conference, and I am very much looking forward to attending.” He did not comment on whether he is losing sleep as a result of his anticipation.

Many topics will be discussed at the conference, including brain mechanisms of sleep-wake regulation, how sleep deprivation can affect your health, the impact of sleep disorders on fatigue, and ways to deal with sleep disorders.

Two new studies, from Bristol University and the University of Chicago, have shown a striking connection between amount of sleep and levels of appetite-regulating hormones in the body. The findings suggested that chronic sleep deprivation could lead to putting on fat.

The conference will take place

this year after Dr Philippa Cann, a principal research fellow, picked up the Silver medal. One of the UKs leading experts in the field of grease lubrication, her research focuses on understanding lubrication mechanisms in rolling element bearings. She commented: “Research into grease lubrication has been neglected in recent years, so it is a great encouragement that my work in this area has been recognised by the Tribology Trust.”

Business school calls for old people to become internet savvy NEW RESEARCH from Imperial’s Tanaka business school has found that older and disabled people are at serious risk of being left behind in the digital revolution.

The paper, titled Teleshopping for Older and Disabled People,

by Professor James Barlow of the Business School, has identified the problems of replacing costly council home shopping services with new internet-based approaches.

Professor Barlow said, “Some Councils have responded by trying out internet and phone shopping schemes, but much more needs to be done. The Government is introducing initiatives to combat this ‘digital divide’.

“If they really want to be customer focused, then the major supermarkets need to adapt their systems to help housebound people and substantially improve their quality of life. And this could

in the Mechanical Engineering Builiding from 31 March to 1 April.

Trivia about sleep ü On average we spend 25 years of our lives sleeping ü Dolphins sleep with one side of their brain at a time, using the other half to keep swimming ü The record for staying awake is 264 hours (11 days) ü A 1989 experiment into total sleep deprivation showed rats died in 10-20 days of being forced to stay awake

well prove a growing market niche for the supermarkets over the next few years.”

Tanaka: savvy

Dysentery uses ‘sword and shield’ approach to cause infection A TEAM from Imperial College London (that’s where you study, by the way) have found that the bacterium that causes dysentry uses a ‘sword and shield’ mechanism to infect cells.

In a paper published in Science at the end of February, the researchers found that the bacterium, shigella, was able to infect cells by using a secretion system to inject proteins into human cells (the sword), while lipopolysaccharide on the surface of the bacteria acted as a shield to protect it from the body’s immune system.

Dr Christoph Tang, a researcher in the group, said, “This is the first description of bacteria able to use this sword and shield approach, showing how dysentery is able to infect the body so effectively.”

Spring 2005 3/3/05 12:51:50 pm

NEWS & EVENTS

•and in other news...

Monkeys pay for celeb booty MEN ARE ALL too willing to hand over cash for pictures of scantily clad and sexually attractive women. Now monkeys have been found to display similar behaviour, swapping their precious fruit juice for pictures of female behinds.

PG Tips chimps aside, scantily clad is never an issue for our simian cousins, but the male rhesus monkeys at Duke University, North Carolina, certainly know what floats their primate boats.

The nether regions of particularly attractive females were shown to be worth more juice, while the subjects were unwilling to pay juice for images of unattractive or low-ranking individuals.

As well as appreciating the female form, the monkeys would also pay for images of important faces in their social group.

Monkey societies are structured by kinship, dominance and reproductive status. Evolutionary economic theory predicts that monkeys should selectively acquire information about individuals according to these attributes. Information about close relatives, dominant individuals, and the sexually desirable come top of the agenda.

Monkey: perving

Death Star orbits Saturn NASA’s CASSINI mission has captured an image of the planetblasting space station known as the Death Star orbiting Saturn.

The new pictures confirmed suspicions started by 1981 pictures taken by the Voyager missions.

Differing stories are emerging from the agency.

Some sources report efforts to pilot a space shuttle down a trench-like indentation on the Death Star’s surface, and launch a proton torpedo down a ventilation tube to destroy the battle station.

Others report that the images

Spring 2005 News_and_Events_final.indd 5

depict one of Saturn’s innermost moons, Mimas, given its Death Star-like appearance by a massive crater called Herschel. This version of the story has it that the 80 mile wide crater, a third of the diameter of the moon, was produced by an impact that probably came close to destroying the moon, believed to be composed mostly of ice.

Mimas

The Death Star

Musos conquer new frontier THE UNSUCCESSFUL Beagle 2 probe took with it a speciallycomposed song by popular beat combo and interplanetary imperialists Blur. Now the success of the European Space Agency (ESA) Huygens mission to Saturn’s moon Titan has taken attempts to colonise the galaxy with music to another level.

Aging mastermind Mick Jagger explained why: “Music has always been at the centre of cultures all over the world and it will continue to play an important part in thousands of years time. Music has a role in the same way as technology and science in reflecting the age we live in and generally exploring new areas beyond the accepted boundaries and beyond Earth.”

Musicians Julien Civange and Louis Haéri composed four songs (Lalala, Bald James Deans, Hot Time and No Love) that took the 4000 million kilometre trip, landing on Titan on 14 January.

They were specially composed to survive the journey, to avoid the problems that faced Beagle 2.

Civange explained how they had matched the music to the space environment:

“La-la-la echoes the preparatory stage: the music is simple and bouncing, the basic chords of rock. The people in white overalls, like Playmobil figures, that build a space probe in giant hangars made me think of what I like best in rock: the pure madness that makes a dream real, cost what it costs.”

The second piece, Bald James Deans, was intended to evoke the dramatic tension of the separation between the Cassini spacecraft and the Huygens probe on Christmas Day. The more experimental Hot Time relates to the exploration of the ground on Titan. Finally, No Love is a placid and melancholic piece that raises questions related to space exodus.

Jagger: ageing

circles into rings. The project is part of a government-funded project to increase awareness about the wider questions posed by tissue engineering. Interested couples can find out more, and apply to participate, at www. biojewellery.com. So far there is no intention to start a commercial venture.

No need to wait to turn your dearly departed into diamonds though – just visit www.lifegemuk.com. This company uses the carbon in cremated remains to make artificial diamonds. The remains are heated to produce graphite – the form of carbon used in pencils – which is then subjected to high pressure and temperatures to produce a raw diamond, later cut and polished into the final stone.

Gravity wave search comes home

SCIENCE CONTINUES to transform human relationships in ways you probably never thought of before. Make your commitment to your partner more meaningful by exchanging marital rings grown from your own bone. If you make it to ‘till death do us part’, the bereaved can turn their loved one’s ashes into a diamond as a lasting memorial.

Ian Thompson, a bioengineer at King’s College, London, will grow bone cells harvested from willing couples on ring-shaped scaffolds that eventually dissolve. A ring of living bone is left behind. Jewellery designers will then fashion the rough

ALBERT EINSTEIN’s general theory of relativity predicted the existence of gravity waves – ripples in the fabric of space and time. In theory, astronomical events like colliding black holes, exploding supernovas and rotating pulsars send gravity waves travelling through space.

No one has yet managed to detect gravitational waves directly, but three collaborating observatories (two in the US, one in Germany) are hoping to do so using perpendicular laser beams kilometres in length.

Theory predicts that gravity waves will fractionally alter the length of the beams. The longer the beams, the greater the sensitivity.

More data is produced than the project’s computer power can deal with, so private computer users have been asked to help out. A screensaver program uses your idle computer time to analyse small bits of the data. An onscreen marker shows the part of the sky your computer is busy analysing data from.

Help prove Einstein right at www.einsteinathome.com.

Your dear departed: ‘blung’

Gravity waves: missing

Science turns people into ‘bling’

I, science

5

3/3/05 12:51:51 pm

NEWS & EVENTS

Is innovation really benefitting society?

We need a more open dialogue between engineers and politicians, and an education system that trains future generations to question. Nino Mancino attends a talk by Tony Benn.

O

N 17th February the Mechanical Engineering department hosted a special lecture by Tony Benn, former Labour MP. The theme of Benn’s lecture was Engineering and Society and the way in which technology effects the evolution of societies.

He started his lecture by observing that the most successful nations throughout history have been the most industrially advanced for their time. Britain created an Empire that lasted almost 200 years because it was the premier industrial powerhouse and developed an outstanding navy.

During the 20th century the US established a similar hegemony, and Benn believes that in due time other nations, notably China, will experience similar fates.

Benn acknowledged the genuine benefits gained from improvements in technology and science, but went on to say that the world today remains blighted by the same age-old problems of poverty and injustice. In an era when we can land probes onto distant planets, this begs the question – why?

According to Benn, the problem stems partly from the, at best, naive and, at worst, selfish motives that feed the relentless drive to create products and services that are cheaper and more convenient.

The central question he posed is: are the entrepreneurs of today creating better technology in order to improve society or are they doing it to amass more wealth for themselves and their shareholders? Have we become so obsessed with synthesising easier lives that we’ve lost sight of where we should really be channelling our talents?

Wouldn’t it be better for example to solve the world’s energy needs, rather than spend time and money on making mobile phones that take photographs?

According to Benn, innovation for innovation’s sake creates more problems than it solves because with it we lose the critical capacity to question why we are improving technology. Drawing on his experiences after World War II, serving in the RAF, he compared the modern world with Britain in 1945

which “didn’t have two pennies to rub together”. Despite the desperate post-war economy, the country was fuelled with an innovative spirit that transformed the nation.

This period saw the birth of the NHS, the comprehensive school system and the welfare state. And it happened because society knew where there was need and got on with it. Benn believes that today we have forgotten, or simply do not know, how to discern between what we can and should do with regards to improving technology.

“innovation for innovation’s sake creates more problems than it solves” Part of his solution rests with the relationship between engineers and politicians. Engineers are responsible for making these improvements in technologies, but it is politicians who ultimately decide how they should be used.

A more open dialogue between the two should enable better use of resources. This new working relationship requires engineers to be more engaged in the political debate so that unnecessary

projects can be filtered out, allowing for extra research on endeavours more beneficial to society. It is also vital for politicians to raise more questions and to demand greater rigour from their aides. In the experience of Benn, the aides are too eager to place a proposal for funding onto the Minister’s desk without having considered themselves why that particular project is worthy of attention.

Education is the key to solving these problems. We must, according to Benn, create an education system that trains future generations to question and to develop better judgement, rather than just accept whatever information they are given. Only by creating generations of genuine thinkers, who engage in debate and are fully informed could we solve the myriad of problems that plague us.

As one would expect from Tony Benn, the issues raised were varied and profound. With deft skill, he was able to extend effortlessly the scope of his talk to include the themes of democracy, nuclear power, the influence of multinational corporation and the role of the elderly in society. Provocative without being rude, argumentative without being disrespectful, he remains compulsive viewing and is a vanguard of open, constructive and reasoned debate. The House of Commons’ loss is our gain! ■

2005: A year dedicated to physics Anushri Patel on the events celebrating the achievements of the archetypal genius.

W

HEN ASKED to name a prominent scientific equation, most people will quickly grab E = mc2. A hundred years down the line, this equation still epitomises the scientific acehivements of Albert Einstein. As a schoolboy, he was

6 I, science News_and_Events_final.indd 2

never regarded as particularly intelligent, but at the tender age of just twenty-six, Einstein had published three revolutionary papers that shaped modern physics – describing Brownian motion, special relativity and the photoelectric effect. Marking the centenary of these publications, over forty physics societies around the globe will be celebrating 2005 as the World Year of Physics.

The UK and Ireland’s contribution to the world celebrations has been to designate 2005 Einstein Year. Hundreds of events and activities, co-ordinated by the Institute of Physics, will be motivating young people about physics, dispelling common myths and highlighting the contribution of physics to society.

In order to do this, some corporate organisations are offering financial incentives. The Pirelli Relativity Challenge has €25,000 waiting for someone that can

best explain the theory of special relativity in a five-minute presentation. The Rambert Dance Company is also getting creative about physics. Constant Speed, a dance production celebrating a century of Einstein will receive its world première at Sadler’s Wells in May. Within Imperial College, events are being organised to make physicists and their work more visible to the public. Our very own PhySoc has already been heavily involved in organising an outreach programme. Students have ventured into local schools and given a series of lessons and demonstrations on physics.

The outreach scheme will culminate in the Big Day of Physics, on Saturday 12th March. In the morning, school children will take part in a two hour challenge, building demonstrations of physical concepts of their choice. After lunch and a judging session, lectures will run for the more mature

audience. Topics include: ‘Life as a Quantum Mechanic’ and ‘Physics and Creativity’. You can also listen to a lecture on Brownian motion, and learn precisely what all the fuss was about back in 1905. If lectures aren’t your thing, smaller seminars and group discussions are running at the same time. Two cover environmental issues, one is on music and one on life as a physics student. There will also be lab tours running every half hour, so you can revel in the delights that are superconductors and see the infamous lasers in optics for yourself!

PhySoc are currently looking for volunteers to help with the Big Day, so it isn’t too late to get involved!

If you’d like to help in any shape or form, email Brett Manning on brett.manning@imperial.ac.uk. ■ For further event listings and details, visit www.einsteinyear.org/ events, or www.physics2005.org.

Spring 2005 3/3/05 9:40:11 am

NEWS & EVENTS

How predictable is evolution? ...asked Dawkins at the LSE on 23rd February. Sophie Hebden was there for I, Science.

W

HAT DO archer fish spitting water at passing insects and diving bell spiders waiting for their prey underwater in the comfort of a silken ball of air, have in common? According to Professor Richard Dawkins, they are both examples of unpredictable evolution. He explained to a packed public audience at LSE that these amazing creatures are so different they are evolutionary one-offs.

Most characteristics have devel-

oped along many evolutionary pathways. Sight has evolved 4060 times, and navigation using sonar is common to both bats and dolphins.

The progression of evolutionary diversity resembles an arms race.

The preyed-upon will survive best if it can run fast, and the predator if it can out-run its prey. Adaptations and counter-adaptations appear add-infinitum, with each improvement cancelling out the advances made by their opponents.

•Events

With so many science events going on all the time how can a mere mortal get a handle on anything? Fear not.

I, Science has selected some of the best for the next two months.

MARCH

Week in Einstein Year.

A short history of nearly everything

12-13 March, 10am-5pm National Maritime Museum Free Further info: www.nmm.ac.uk

Hear Bill Bryson talk about the challenges and fun he had in creating his award-winning book.

10 March, 6.30pm The Royal Society Tickets are free Doors open at 5.45pm Further info: www.royalsoc.ac.uk

Binge drinking: epidemic or just fun?

An expert panel takes a closer look at our changing (or should that be unchanging) drinking habits.

10 March, 7pm – 8.30pm Dana Centre FREE, must book in advance Further info: www.danacentre.org.uk

Spotting sunspots Observe the sun close-up with Royal Observatory staff. Weather permitting. Part of National Science Week in Einstein Year.

12-20 March, 2.30 -3.30pm weekdays, 2 - 3.30pm Saturday and Sunday Royal Observatory FREE Further info: www.nmm.ac.uk

Science and democracy

National Science Week

A topical debate to launch “The March of Unreason”, the controversial new book by Dick Taverne, Sense about Science.

Speakers include James Wilsdon, Demos. Part of National Science Week.

A whole week of opportunities for all ages to take part in fun science, engineering and technology related activities

14 March, 7pm-8pm Institute of Contemporary Arts For tickets contact the ICA: 020 7930 8619

11-20 March Further info: www.the-ba.net

GM organisms: the risks we take with our environment

UK goes to the planets News and views from the spacecraft exploring the planets during 2005. Part of National Science

Spring 2005 News_and_Events_final.indd 3

An in-depth look at risk analysis of GMOs, as well as moral, ethical and economic issues. For both statisticians and non-

Some evolutionary solutions crop up in different situations that pose the same problem for survival. Imagine re-running species development in a virgin continent. Starting, say, with only rats, we would expect some to evolve traits like poisonous venom or flight to enhance their chances in the fight for survival of the fittest.

The independent evolution of the mole is a real world example.

Mammals that are great at digging and living in tunnels have statisticians. Part of National Science Week.

16 March, 2pm – 3.30pm, registration at 1.30pm The Royal Statistical Society FREE, should book in advance Contact Debra Hurcomb: d.hurcomb@rss.org Further info: www.rss.org.uk

The IgNobel Tour 2005 This is the London leg of the 3rd annual Ig Nobel Tour. Join past Ig Nobel winners for what promises to be a night of raucous laughter. Part of National Science Week.

16 March, 7.30pm-9pm The Dana Centre FREE, must be booked in advance Further info: www.danacentre.org.uk or www.improbable.com for 2004 Ig Nobel Prize winners.

The latest from Saturn See the sky through the University of London Observatory telescopes and hear all about the Cassini mission. Part of National Science Week in Einstein Year.

17 March, 6.40pm – 8.20pm University of London Observatory, Mill Hill FREE Contact Valerie Peerless: vmp@star.ucl.ac.uk

Science, ethics and social responsibility Hear scientists debate the social role of science and their relationships to ethical, moral and social questions.

23 March, 7.00pm The Royal Institution £8/£5 (concessions) Further info: www.rigb.org

evolved independently three times on different continents. The marsupial, African and European mole all look very similar but they have entirely different genetic ancestries.

So are humans a predictable evolutionary outcome in our thought experiment? Dawkins says no. Our ability to examine the world as a whole and take evasive action for the long-term good are evolutionary one-offs. So don’t worry, you’re not predictable. Not yet. ■

APRIL Nano-games: Play the nanotechnology card game

Play the Democs game to find out about the ethical issues surrounding nanotechnology.

5 April, 6.30pm Dana Centre Tickets are free but must be booked in advance Further info: www.danacentre.org.uk

Naked science: protecting the planet Hear environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg, who ranks climate change as the lowest of global priorities, debate Mark Lynas, campaigner for greater action.

13 April, 7pm The Dana Centre FREE, must be booked in advance Further info: www.danacentre.org.uk

FameLab The London auditions for the national competition to find the UK’s best new talent in science communication. Enter as a competitor, or come along as part of the audience member and take part in judging.

14 April, 11am The Dana Centre FREE, register on the day Further info: www.danacentre.org.uk and www.famelab.org

Einstein for the terrified An opportunity to finally understand relativity.

18 April, 7pm Royal Institution Cost: £8 or £5 (concs) Further info: www.rigb.org

I, science

7

3/3/05 9:40:11 am

FEATURES

Is science funny? Tom Simonite went to the Dana Centre to watch the unclear fusion of science and comedy.

A

MAN STANDS in a stylish Kensington bar, with a look of stern disapproval on his face. The target of his censure dances close circles around him. With an expression of childish pleasure, he is waving two bright orange plastic balls. The rest of the bar look on in confusion, until a helpful American advances with a baseball bat and fills in the back-story: “Right now, Dan and Jon are being an atom.” The drummer in the corner strikes up an ominous beat.

This is the Dana centre, a collaborative venue between the Science Museum and the British Association for the advancement of science. It is dedicated to bringing science to a wider audience through a variety of events. The men in this show, Ben Samuels, Dan Carter Hope, and Jon Milton (pictured left to right) are performing a show called Punk Science that uniquely blends sketch, stand up, and science.

Ben, the previously-armed American, is the theoretician of the outfit, and seems to have the firmest idea of what Punk Science is trying to achieve: “We all have some sort of background in communication, drama, or journalism. But this came out of the explainer unit in the science museum – a hands-on gallery for kids,” Jon adds, “Punk Science is the extension of that, but for adults”. Dan provides a glimpse of the lower-end of their material, chipping in with “the adult strap-on, if you like”. Longhaired Dan is the ‘clown’ of the group and the most confused by science. A bluff northern counterpoint to Dan’s zany interjections is provided by Jon, but he can oscillate unnervingly into an entirely different manic persona.

The punk scientists’ show emerges naturally from the mix of their characters. They finish one another’s sentences, and constantly interupt one another and wisecrack, creating an overwhelming, but very funny, whole. A serious bit of science is always defused by a joke, keeping both comedy and science flowing: “Being a theoretical physicist Einstein didn’t try things out in a lab, instead he did ‘thought experiments’. That’s like Stephen Hawking dancing, ok?” Auxiliary member Brad watches from behind his drum kit in the sidelines. Half sceptical observer, half performer, his good-natured taunting and musical interludes punctuate an

8 I, science Features_final.indd 14

otherwise freewheeling performance.

Einstein’s three seminal papers of 1905, describing Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and his theory of special relativity are celebrated in the show. No easy subject material, but from the outset the punk scientists make it clear this won’t be too heavy going. Bounding onto the stage, they announce that by the end of the show, the audience will have “a pub understanding of theoretical physics”.

A surprisingly rounded portrait of the iconic physicist is presented. Non-scientific Einstein coverage usually comes from the ‘physics genius, fallible man’ angle. Recounting his eccentricity and less-than-perfect marital and educational records. Impressively, the Punk Science manages to blend this material with accurate and entertaining explanations of his three 1905 papers and other major theories.

“...Einstein was neither a pipe nor pot smoker, but he could control small animals with the power of his thoughts.”

Brownian motion (the way gas or liquid molecules buffet small particles so they are constantly moving) is explained with a bit of audience participation, and a lot of beach balls.

Anarchic scenes ensue as air molecules (audience members) enthusiastically buffet smoke particles (beach balls) around at random.

Beach balls aside, some of the explicitly educational parts of the performance are less entertaining, but the Punk Scientists aren’t likely to drop them. There’s no question over which comes first out of science and comedy. Ben: “You have to ground it in science otherwise you end up with the comic ideas first and it’s ‘crowbar the science in and no one will notice!’

It makes for a more informative and satisfying show when it starts from the science and we’re wondering ‘how the fuck are we going to make this funny?’” Sometimes they manage it with apparently impossible material. Their take on Einstein’s Nobel winner, the photo-electric effect,

featuring the unusual model of atomic structure already mentioned is one example. For the record, the baseball bat represented photons knocking electrons out of an atom, or orange balls from the hands of the cowering Jon. Not all the participation is as educational as a game of beach ball. As well as lacking a seat with a bad view, the Dana centre boasts handsets for audience votes. Drummer Brad regularly interrupts proceedings with a kazoo rendition of a popular tune, and a question for the audience.

They never fail to bring out the childish side of the majority, and it’s well catered for by most of the multiple choice questions posed. The people’s voice tells us that Einstein was neither a pipe nor pot smoker, but he could control small animals with the power of his thoughts. Rather than our hero or Jesus winning a fight between the two, they went out for a cosy coffee.

Some of the best material comes when the trio relate how they took their comic crusade to explain Einstein into the real world. Inspired by the young Einstein dreaming up his 1905 papers while at work in the patent office (“imagine a 25-year old man being bored at work”), the punk scientists read out the stiffly formal reply to their letter to the British equivalent, asking whether they can offer anyone as visionary.

A memo from Einstein to his first wife is translated and sent to a counselling service. It lays out an agenda for their future, ordering her to never come near, speak to, or make any demands on him. The carefully worded reply – “there is clearly a lack of understanding in your relationship” – is rebutted line by line by Dan playing a self-righteous Einstein. With material like this, the show hits a human note in its portrayal of Einstein, and a rich seam of laughs.

Without testing the audience members on licensed premises, it is hard to tell whether they gained the intended “pub understanding of theoretical physics.” Most of the show goes down well, but in occasional patches the consensus expression is jaded. At one point one Punk Scientist could be heard to whisper to another “they look really bored”. However, this was the exception not the rule and the applause at the end made it clear the audience decided to give them more than just the benefit of the doubt.

The show really does manage to mix real science with real laughs – no easy feat.

But what’s next for Punk Science? The Punk Scientists clearly have no idea. “I’d love to do evolution,” says Dan, before Jon suggests something entirely different “I think it might be more soft science like genetics” and Ben explains the party line, “we haven’t decided what the next show is going to be.” Whatever they do take on, it promises to be an equally entertaining and educational ride. n

Spring 2005 3/3/05 3:06:14 pm

Peering into a gas giant

David Osumi-Sutherland reports on research at Imperial College to reveal Saturn’s inner secrets using data gathered by the Cassini mission.

S

aturn, 30 June 2004: After a seven year, 3.2 billion km voyage through the solar system, the spacecraft Cassini is about to pass in between Saturn’s outer rings and enter Saturn’s orbit. If all goes to plan, Cassini will orbit the ringed planet for at least the next four years, but this is the closest it will ever get. Back on Earth, Professor Michelle Dougherty and her team at Imperial College wait anxiously for measurements of Saturn’s magnetic field to be beamed back. She has called this “the single most important [magnetic] data collection of the entire mission”. They hope that, among other things, it will contain precious clues to the nature of Saturn’s interior…

“A lot of people don’t realise the potential of magnetic data for studying the internal structure of planets,” explains Dr Edward J Smith, a plainspoken scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. “Combined with gravitational data, it’s really the only way to find out about the interior.” This type of work has been Smith’s passion since at least the early 1970s, when NASA launched the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes to Saturn – missions on which he was in charge of magnetic measurements.

Michelle Dougherty, who is based in the Space and Atmospheric Physics Group at Imperial, holds an equivalent position on the Cassini mission.

Here’s the field, so where’s the magnet?

So how can magnetic data be used to peer into the 120,000km-wide ball of gas that is Saturn?

Most planetary scientists believe that the magnetic fields of planets are generated by the motion of electrically conductive fluids deep inside the planet. On Earth this conductive fluid is a layer of molten iron known as the outer core.

It is constantly being mixed by convection currents, much like a pan of boiling water on a stove, and also by rotation of the planet. The combination of these motions is thought to create a dynamo effect, generating electric currents and a magnetic field.

One way that we can infer the depth of this layer on earth is by listening for the echoes of earthquakes. Sound waves generated during large earthquakes travel deep into the earth.

But when such waves hit a boundary, like that between the outer core and the mantle, some of the wave bounces back. Knowing the speed that the waves travel, one can locate the boundary by measuring the time it takes for the sound to bounce back.

It is quite easy to extrapolate measurements of the earth’s magnetic field made at or above the surface to work out what measurements would be like at the edge of the core. By doing this, Earth scientists have found that the edge of the conductive fluid layer coincides with a distinct transition in the magnetic field.

Physicists can extrapolate from the magnetic data collected by Cassini while close to Saturn to find out where in the planet this distinct transition in the field occurs. Assuming that Saturn’s planetary dynamo is similar to Earth’s, this is the depth at which the conductive fluid layer begins. The data that will allow scientists to calculate this can only be collected from close to the planet – hence Dougherty’s assertion that Saturn orbit insertion was the single most important magnetic data collection point of the mission.

Exotic material In the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune), the conductive fluid is believed to be an exotic form of hydrogen which behaves like a liquid metal. It is predicted to form at the very high temperatures and pressures found deep inside these planets. Studying this exotic substance in the lab is extremely tricky. The first report of any being made on Earth came in 1996, when a group of scientists in California managed to produce some for about a millionth of a second.

This was achieved using cold war missile testing technologies to generate a temperature of thousands of degrees Centigrade and a pressure of over one million atmospheres. Their successful conditions were at odds with contemporary theories of how liquid metallic hydrogen forms.

Knowing the depth at which the conductive fluid layer begins in the gas giants will allow physicists to understand the precise conditions under which liquid metallic hydrogen forms, u and to adjust their theories accordingly.

Photo: ESA

Features_final.indd 15

3/3/05 12:21:29 pm

The magnet

Atmosphere

(conductive fluid layer)

Boundary

Rocky Core

Looking into Saturn Measurements of Saturn’s magnetic field collected by Cassini (above) will allow scientists to peer inside the planet to measure its magnetic core, and to look for evidence of an ancient rocky core.

During the four year mission (20042008), Cassini will be orbiting Saturn and building up a picture of the planet’s magnetic field to unprecedented detail.

Photo: ESA

Where do gas giants come from?

Magnetic measurements can also reveal whether a planet has a solid central core, and if so how big that core is. A solid core will change the motion of the metallic fluid layer above it, so changing the magnetic field towards the poles, compared with the equator. The extent and pattern of that change will allow scientists to calculate the size of any solid core present.

Unlike previous missions, Cassini will not just get a snapshot of data, but can build up a consistent picture of the field at many latitudes over four years of orbiting. It should therefore be able to find evidence of any solid core and, if so, to predict its size.

This will allow scientists to choose between two different models of planet formation. In one model, the seeds of planets are formed by the random collision of rocks, which gradually build up into mini-planets. As more rocks hit, the size of these mini-planets increases, increasing the gravitational pull of each one, attracting still more rocks and gas. A solid core would support this theory. Another school of thought believes that gas giant planets could be seeded by the subtle gravitational pull caused by higher concentrations of gas in one part of the early solar system. The lack of a solid core would support this theory.

Bad Luck …Earth, 1 July 2004 – the long anticipated data collected during Cassini’s entry into Saturn’s orbit arrives. To the great disappointment of Dougherty and her team, half the data is missing. The scalar magnetometer – the supersensitive instrument that was to measure the magnetic field on Cassini’s closest encounter with Saturn, has failed to switch on as planned.

“It was very frustrating,” admits Dougherty.

“Ed [Smith], was especially disappointed. The scalar magnetometer is his baby.” But, she adds philosophically: “Nothing ever works perfectly

Features_final.indd 16

on such a complex mission. I guess it was just our turn.”

While this was a setback, it won’t ruin the plans of Dougherty’s team and other interested scientists. On 17 February, Cassini had another close encounter with Saturn. To the delight and relief of Dougherty and her team, this time the scalar magnetometer worked beautifully. This should be the first of many successful encounters for Cassini.

Some of the most interesting data for Dougherty and Smith will be collected near the planned end of the mission in 2008, when Cassini will collect magnetic data for latitudes between the equator and the North Pole. This should provide data on the presence of a solid

core. It should also give some of the best data for mapping the depth of the conductive liquid core. Still, Dougherty’s frustration at the early setback is clear. “It’s hard to have to wait for the end of the planned mission to get enough data,” she sighs.

Cassini’s End Researchers may carry on getting data from Cassini after 2008. Dougherty is negotiating to extend the mission to 2010. Although it has not yet been decided, she thinks that the mission may end with Cassini being deliberately crashed into Saturn, collecting data as it goes.

Cassini could end by becoming part of the planet it has spent years studying. n

Photo: ESA

Do those stripes go all the way through?

Ed Smith hopes conclusions from the magnetic data can go further than just measuring the depths of Saturn’s various layers. Some scientists have suggested that the zones, belts and other features we see on the surface of Saturn and Jupiter extend deep into the planet – possibly all the way through. This could occur if convection in the atmosphere is tied to convection in the fluid core. If this is correct, then it should be possible to correlate surface features with variations in the magnetic field.

Pictures from the Hubble telescope showing the changing aurorae on Saturn over six days. Aurorae are caused by particles from the solar wind being channelled into the planet’s poles by its magnetic field.

3/3/05 12:21:54 pm

FEATURES

How real is the threat?

Research at Imperial is pioneering methods of assessing the threat posed by rogue asteroids. Laura Cobden talks to the scientists and reveals how worried we should be.

I

N 1908, a relatively small asteroid, about 20m in diameter, exploded as it passed through the atmosphere over the Tunguska river region of Siberia. The energy released was equivalent to 1000 Hiroshima bombs, and generated a shock wave that felled trees over more than 1000 square kilometres, an area roughly the size of London. If a small asteroid could destroy a city the size of London, what kind of damage could larger ones cause?

An asteroid over 200m across wouldn’t even have to hit a city directly. An object this size landing in an ocean could generate tsunamis that would be capable of devastating coastal communities around the entire ocean rim.

Then, of course, there are really huge asteroids, a kilometre or more across. One of these would cause global devastation wherever it hit.

So how worried should we be? Work by Dr Phil Bland of the Earth Science department at Imperial College and his colleague Dr Natalya Artemieva of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow may give us a precise answer.

“The impact hazard is unique,” says Dr Bland, “Because in terms of destructive potential it’s unlimited [but] it’s highly predictable…[so] we can dodge the bullet, in terms of acting to stop a catastrophe occurring.” This can be done by predicting the trajectories of asteroids, potentially giving us enough warning of a disaster to evacuate areas predicted to be affected. To understand what size asteroids are the most important to map, we need to have some idea of how often different size asteroids arrive at the Earth’s surface.

Bland and Artemieva set out to fill a serious gap in our knowledge: the risk from mediumsized objects tens to hundreds of metres across.

Since asteroids a kilometre or more across fall through the atmosphere unimpeded and leave large craters at impact, we have a reasonably good idea of the frequency with which they hit the Earth. The risk from such objects is miniscule. As an illustration, the ten kilometre asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago is the largest to have hit Earth in, at least, the last 100 million years.

At the other end of the size scale, small meteorites, a metre or so across, land frequently enough that we can estimate their rate of arrival by observing and collecting them. With medium-sized objects this is a not an option.

They don’t fall frequently enough for direct observation to be useful. Neither can we count craters because processes like erosion and plate tectonics destroy them relatively rapidly.

In the absence of these tools, previous estimates of impact rates for medium-sized meteorites have mostly been based on linear extrapolation from data on very large impactors. But we know from studying the size distribution of craters on the moon and on other planets that this is probably unrealistic – the relationship between object size and impact rate is far from linear.

What we do have are good estimates of the rate at which medium-sized objects arrive at the upper atmosphere from telescope and satellite observations, and from the crater record of the moon. To get from that to an estimate of how many hit the ground, and what state they are in if they do, we need to understand how meteorites interact with the atmosphere. The

Spring 2005 Features_final.indd 17

You’ve seen it in the movies, but how likely is it you’ll see it in real life? (Image: Don Davis) atmosphere will have little effect on very large bodies, but aerodynamic stresses can fragment smaller incoming bodies. The interaction between the atmosphere and incoming objects can also release enough heat to burn up the

“Bland and Artemieva set out to fill a serious gap in our knowledge: the risk from medium-sized objects tens to hundreds of metres across.” fragments before they reach the ground.

This is where Bland and Artemieva’s work comes in. Artemieva has produced a model that can realistically simulate the interaction between meteors and the atmosphere as they fragment.

Until recently, most simulations of the interaction between a fragmented meteor and the atmosphere treated the meteor fragments as a low-density, deforming fluid. Such simulations are dubbed ‘pancake models’, because of the way the fluid spreads out into a flat, pancake-like shape as it descends through the atmosphere.

Pancake models for meteors are good for calculating the altitude at which a body disrupts, but they give very little information about the properties of the material actually arriving at the Earth’s surface: how fast it is moving, what size crater will be produced, and so on. These are all factors which are critical when assessing the impact hazard.

Dr Artemieva’s model is different. It calculates the aerodynamic force acting on each individual object, compares this with the strength of the object, and then determines whether the force is large enough for fragmentation to occur. If it is, the calculation is repeated for each fragment produced, and so on, until the fragments burn out or reach the ground.

The new model has been applied to two ob-

served meteorite falls. The close agreement between the outcome of the simulation and what actually happened on Earth suggests the model is realistic.

After this encouraging result, Bland and Artemieva decided to use their model to estimate the arrival rate of medium-sized meteorites at the Earth’s surface. To do this, they used the arrival rate of material at the top of the atmosphere to run the model many times for a range of meteor sizes and compositions. The result was a new estimate for impact rates at the Earth’s surface.

Previous estimates put the frequency for impacts by 200 metre-wide objects (the size most likely to result in a dangerous tsunami) at around 3000 to 4000 years.

Bland and Artemieva’s work shows that a much larger proportion of middle-sized meteors fail to make it to the ground than was previously thought. As a result, the odds of impact by a 200 metre object have been reduced by around a factor of fifty. In other words, we can only expect such an impact every 170,000 years.

It is reassuring that the chance of an asteroid-induced tsunami is significantly lower than previously believed. But what about the chances of an event like the one at Tunguska, hitting a city? Bland and Artemieva’s work suggests that events of this magnitude probably occur around every 500 to 2000 years anywhere on Earth. But unlike a tsunami-generating hit, the target area is small compared to the whole surface of the Earth. Urban areas cover only around 0.4% if the Earth’s surface, meaning that a city is likely to be hit once every 125,000 to 500,000 years.

Results like this are important when it comes to deciding how to allocate resources. Bland says, “We might now decide that it’s not worth mapping orbits of all the asteroids down to…

100 to 200 metres. It might be better to map everything above, say, 200m.”

Ultimately, it is only through research like Bland and Artemieva’s that we can know enough of the threat from asteroids to decide on a sensible policy to track them, and so potentially ‘dodge the bullet’. n

I, science

11 3/3/05 11:20:02 am

INTERVIEW of long essays which pretend to review books, but are really an excuse for elegant 3000 word pieces on some topic tangentially related to the books. I wrote to The London Review of Books saying “your coverage of scientific books is defective; I think I can remedy it” and so I started by writing a couple of reviews for them.

Mutants, race and human diversity Prize-winning author and Imperial lecturer Armand Marie Leroi talks to I, Science about writing, Mutants and whether geneticists should reopen the race question.

What does your current research involve?

I study worms.

Was that what your students were dissecting in your lab just now?

No, they were cuttlefish! I teach a course called The Development and Evolution of Animal Form which is very closely related to my research. The course is a combination of two fields: developmental and evolutionary biology.

Developmental biology is about how genes and molecules are used to build animals. Evolutionary biology is about how they change. Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Evo Devo) asks what is the molecular basis of evolutionary change? It’s an important question. But if students are to make sense of it, they have to know something about how animals are put together. At the very least they should be able to look at one and tell its mouth from its anus.

To make sure they can I’ve re-introduced classical zoology to the curriculum.

When I was doing zoology at university, this was pretty unfashionable.

It’s still unfashionable. And, since you have to kill things and cut them up, not a course for vegetarians.

What does it teach us about human development?

All animals are pretty much built along the

12 I, science Interviews_final.indd 2

same lines. So by understanding their geometry, you get a much deeper, intuitive insight into the very complicated events that happen in the development of creatures, including human beings.

Last year you published Mutants, which was very successful. What made you write it?

Poverty. I was a junior lecturer. I felt there had to be a solution.

More that than a desire to inform the public about your work?

There’s that as well. Motives are always mixed.

I’ve always had a bit of a literary bent, much more than most scientists. As a boy, I admired the popular science tradition, especially the British essayists such as J. B. S. Haldane and T. H. Huxley. It was natural that, sooner or later, I’d try my hand at it.

Have you done any science journalism?

Written for any newspapers?

Very little. As an undergraduate I spent my summers doing marine biology at an idyllic and remote marine station at the edge of the Pacific rainforest on the West coast of Vancouver Island. I wrote book reviews for a small village newspaper there. Later, I became an avid reader of journals such as The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, journals

When did you decide to write Mutants?

Having proved to myself that I could write, I got the idea for this book while giving lectures on developmental biology here at Imperial.

Most developmental biology is about worms and flies. But in the late 1990s, as the genes responsible for various inherited disorders were cloned, it became clear that you could tell stories about how humans were put together as well. For example, there is a disorder called Cyclopia, which causes kids to be born with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads.

It’s caused by mutations in a gene called Sonic Hedgehog. Well, knowing that enables you to tell a story about how our faces are made.

And students love these stories. There’s only so much worm and fly biology you can take!

Telling stories of this sort is an obvious thing to do. I don’t claim it was a big intellectual breakthrough, Mutants just told the public how developmental biologists think about things. Mutants was very timely – that was its main virtue.

Were you trying to tap into the public’s imagination about these ‘mutants’, or were you trying to help remove the stigma attached to these people?

Neither, at first. And yet, the book has I think, done both. I came up with the title Mutants very early on. It just seemed right. Of course, some people objected that I should not use the term ‘mutant’ because it comes freighted with so much cultural baggage: X-men, mutants from Mars; type “mutants” into Google and you get a load of science fiction. A more subtle objection is that there is no such thing as a human ‘mutant’. Worm mutants are defined by reference to some arbitrary wildtype genotype, and everything that is deviant to that is considered a mutant. But there is no ‘wildtype’ human strain, just a lot of people with a lot of genetic variation. Even so, there is, I think, a coherent way in which we can speak about human mutants. I also felt it would be good if we could speak of ourselves as being mutants without any negative connotation. The term recognises an important part of human life and diversity.

Was it a conscious decision not to have many photos in the book?

I made a decision not to use standard clinical photographs of severely deformed children – they’re really ugly and hard to look at. The photos are done in such an unsympathetic, clinical way that the subjects become more repugnant and more dehumanised than they need be. Instead I chose to illustrate the book using 19th century lithographs and early 20th century platinum prints. In effect, I aestheticised deformity by using accurate, but beautiful images. Was this dishonest? A little bit. Should one put an aesthetic veneer over disturbing material? Perhaps not. But I think the effect was to make the illustrations more humane. The issue came up most strikingly in a book review that criticised me for using photos without black strips over the eyes, common in clinical genetics textbooks, to disguise the identity of the subject. I see the point, but reply by saying that while putting a strip over someone’s eyes may hide his identity, it really does dehumanise him and reduce him to a clinical object. These are hard issues.

Yet I think that I made the right decisions.

Spring 2005 3/3/05 9:31:49 am

I have read that you would like to see geneticists reopen the question of race?

What do you mean?

First of all, let me make it clear, I am not remotely interested in genetic based cognitive differences or any potential behavioural differences between races, not least because it is an empirically intractable question. What I am interested in is human physical diversity.

Domestic dogs aside, humans are the most physically varied species in the world. This is because humans have spread fast, colonized and adapted to different environments and areas of the world. The result of this is people who look very different from one another.

People such as the ‘giants’ of Terra Del Fuego reported by Magellan, who weren’t really giants at all, but just seemed so to short Spanish sailors. And the tiny Negritos who live in the Andaman Islands. I’d like to know what accounts for these differences. The reason I’d like to is because we just don’t know anything about the genetic basis of normal human physical variety. It’s really striking: we know the genetic basis of 1500 genetic disorders, but we don’t know what makes blue eyes blue.

Population geneticists spend years on the number of bands on snail shells investigating the differences, but we are not allowed to study the physical diversity amongst us.

I think it will happen. Last October Nature Genetics devoted an issue to this question of race. Reading between the lines, the academic niceties and the jargon there seemed to be a consensus that, yes, race is worth studying.

Of course, race is such a crude way of cutting up the world, but it’s an important part of human diversity. And neglecting racial differences can be dangerous. Not all people can take the same drugs; for example Afro-Caribbeans can’t take Beta-blockers. Different races have different propensities for different diseases: African-Americans are less susceptible to multiple sclerosis, but more susceptible to hypertension and prostate cancer than Europeans. Are these differences genetic? I suspect so. Of course, I’d be delighted if it were not, then we could target the socioeconomic inequalities that are responsible.

That would be technically easier to solve than genetic differences.

Do you think the public trusts geneticists?

Geneticists working for a large agro-pharmacutical company? No, not at all. But a clinical geneticist working for the NHS? Yes, I think there’s a great deal of trust. And I think it will increase. As we learn more about mutations, geneticists are going to become a bigger part of people’s lives. Increasingly, kids are not going to be merely ‘funny looking’, ‘difficult’ or ‘slow’, instead they will be identified as having a specific mutation. I suspect that in 10 years time, most parents and children will have encountered a clinical geneticist somewhere along the line.

In Britain, do scientists specialise too early at the expense of being able to write properly?

No, I don’t think so. Having taught British, Canadian, and American students, I think I can safely say that British students write very well. Levels of general literacy are very low among US students. You can see this among our scientists. In comparison to Americans, British scientists have a very strong public voice. Over here there are four or five respectable newspapers that scientists can write for and several television channels they can appear on. I think this is reflected in a far more scientifically aware populace here in Britain than in the US.

Spring 2005 Interviews_final.indd 3

I, science

13 3/3/05 9:31:50 am

FEATURES

Scientists on the set How far does Hollywood go to ensure that movies are scientifically accurate?

Jenny Jopson on the changing attitudes of film-makers toward scientific realism.

D

INOSAURS, volcanic eruptions and apocalyptic meteors heading for Earth: themes that have featured in some of the most high profile Hollywood films of recent years. However, with the box office profits come disgruntled members of the scientific community. While programmes like the BBC’s Hollywood Science take sadistic pleasure in heaping ridicule upon the scientific improbabilities disseminated by the Hollywood machine, they are the light-hearted side of real concern about the portrayal of science on the big screen.

Science is exciting, powerful and mysterious to the lay public, and as such often finds its way into the plot lines of Hollywood blockbusters in a way that is perhaps necessarily and inescapably sensationalised. ‘Screen science’ reaches a far wider audience than professional or academic research ever could, so given its potential to influence the public perception of science, concerns are understandable. However, a growing trend may provide some reassurance.

Far from playing fast and loose with the principles and practitioners of science, film-makers are increasingly hiring consultants drawn from the scientific community to act as high profile members of the production crew.

According to the Internet Movie Database, twenty percent of the top grossing films of all time have had scientific or technical consultants, including the critically acclaimed Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind. The use of consultants in the entertainment industry is no new phenomenon, with advertisements in 1950 for Destination Moon proudly proclaiming that it was “produced under the supervision of Physicists, Engineers, Rocket Experts and Astronomers”. But it was not until recently that it became commonplace.

These consultants are no mere cosmetic addition to the publicity junket of a film. Filmmakers are surprisingly willing to incorporate their recommendations, often at considerable cost. After a screening of Finding Nemo, a scientist complained that kelp, found only in cold water, was completely out of place on the coral reef featured in the film. Suitably chastened, Miramax subsequently removed the offending

14 I, science Features_final.indd 8

seaweed from every frame (and pity the poor minion who was stuck with that job) before the film was released on DVD. Such attention to detail may seem absurd considering that it was in the context of a cartoon featuring talking fish and vegetarian sharks, but it is indicative of how far film-makers are prepared to go in their efforts to ‘get things right’.

So why do they bother when, in the words of one screenwriter, “fiction is quicker than the truth and cheaper”? One motive lies in the artistic sensibilities of the film-makers, who insist on accuracy to meet their own standards of cinematic perfection. Film-makers may also strive to avoid the criticism of the scientific community through a sense of pride – the director of Mission to Mars expressed his desire to “pass the JPL (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) laugh test”. However, as with most things in Hollywood, the most compelling explanation lies in commerce.

Bad publicity from a prominent member of the production team could have dire consequences for a film’s success. Things didn’t look good for Armageddon when it found itself heaped with criticism for its failure to employ meteor consultants. Jurassic Park also came close to undermining its much trumpeted ‘scientific message’ on the evolution of birds from dinosaurs, when animators added flickering lizard-like tongues to the velociraptors to make them look more menacing. The disgusted consultant threatened to walk off the set and expose the film’s cavalier disregard for the facts.

In an industry where profit is priority, the consultant got his way, and the scene was cut.

There is a general belief in the industry that moviegoers do care about accuracy and will indicate that preference at the box office. When it comes to the nitty gritty of scientific detail, increasingly canny and critical audiences expect and demand a basic level of realism. They would prefer for laboratories to look a certain way, for example – even within a film with a highly fictionalised central plotline. Film theorists call this the ‘reality effect’, the construction of a plausible basis for the more fantastic plotlines of the film. This enables the audience to temporarily disregard the artificiality of the film, and buy into the substitute ‘reality’ of the cinematic world. Avi Arad, the producer of Spiderman, X-Men and The Incredible Hulk, said “we are asking the viewers to make a leap of faith, but one that is backed by enough information that it makes sense”. If basic realism is absent, the jarring factual inaccuracies will prevent the audience from being able to sufficiently suspend their disbelief in order to invest in the film. This goes beyond mere appearances; the central plotline itself needs to have at least a nodding acquaintance with scientific reality. Steven Spielberg claimed that the success of Jurassic Park was due in part to “the wholly credible aspect of cloning from DNA”.

Believable scientific content is necessary to draw the audience in, and subsequently keep them thinking about the film long after they have left the cinema.

Virologist Peter Jahrling, of the US Army Medical Research Institute, was the consultant on the 1995 release Outbreak, which featured a storyline about biological weapons. Accord-

“...when animators added flickering lizardlike tongues to the velociraptors to make them look more menacing. The disgusted consultant threatened to walk off the set and expose the film’s cavalier disregard for the facts.”

Spring 2005 3/3/05 9:19:34 am

ing to him, “if there is a ring of truth about a film, people will leave knowing it was a story, but thinking, God – it could happen though, couldn’t it? If it’s just sci-fi the public will write it off and think no more about it”. Believable scientific content can spell the difference between a film being embraced or excluded by an audience. A degree of exaggeration for the purposes of dramatic effect may be unavoidable, but this can only go so far before incredulous audiences vote with their feet.

What about the contribution of these films to the public understanding of science? Joshua Colwell hoped that his consulting work on Deep Impact would help inform the public about the dangers of comet impacts: “Earth faces a threat due to comet and asteroid impacts. The fact that the movie made an effort to portray all this realistically helps convey this message to the public and raise awareness of a real issue”. The power of film to make certain areas of science more attractive is clear – the release of Jurassic Park caused a surge of applicants to palaeontology courses, particularly amongst women (perhaps as a result of the strong female character depicted in the film). Whether this ‘glamourisation’ of science is effective in the long run is

another matter. How many of those eager new recruits stayed for the long haul once they realised their course did not feature real live dinosaurs?

However, the movie industry’s primary concern is entertainment (and hence box office profit). One producer who overruled his consultant’s advice said in his defence, “I know we’re stretching it, but hey, we’ve got to sell some popcorn!” It is perhaps inevitable that, despite the high profile of science consultants on the production team and the willingness of film-makers to incorporate their views, the priority interests of entertainment and mass audience appeal will win out. After all, the purpose of the Hollywood machine is not to help brush up its audiences’ high school science. As one film’s consultant admitted, “it’s not exactly a documentary, but it wasn’t meant to be… you have to take it for what it is – entertainment”.

As the old adage goes, you can’t please all of the people all of the time. But with the growing visibility of science consultants, and the ridicule heaped upon films that arrogantly plough on without recourse to specialist advice, the scientific community may begin to find itself pleasantly surprised. n

STUPID STUNTS Here’s a taste of the plethora of Hollywood foolishness that can ensue when filmmakers ignore basic scientific principles…

Dante’s Peak Foiled by a sneaky landslide blocking the road, Pierce Brosnan’s dashing volcanologist attempts to take the scenic route to safety across the lake in an aluminium dinghy. To his horror, gases produced by the recent volcanic blast have turned the water into acid, and the dinghy begins to dissolve!

What’s the catch?

Luckily for Brosnan, while the basic chemical principle is sound, an enormous amount of acid would be necessary to strip the aluminium off the boat – much more than you could reasonably expect to find in a lake of that size.

Cool Hand Luke Our hero Paul Newman undertakes a spectacularly pointless bet: to eat 50 eggs in under an hour, without throwing up.

Why – who knows? More importantly, is it scientifically possible?

Short answer: no.

He would have needed to specially train his stomach beforehand to hold the equivalent of four litres of food, assuming he didn’t run out of saliva first. And the formidable amount of malodorous hydrogen sulphide gas he would have produced would have made him a very unpopular victor!

Die Hard Bruce Willis’ tough New York cop pulls off a death-defying escape from a high-rise building under siege – he wraps a handy firehose around his waist and leaps off the roof, seconds before it explodes in a mass of searing flames.

What’s the catch?

Bungee jumping works because the elasticity of the rope decelerates the falling body and acts as a shock absorber. While firehose would certainly be strong enough to support Willis’ not inconsiderable bulk, its lack of elasticity would most likely result in him being neatly sliced in two as he came to the end of the line.

Speed Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock are sharing their bus with a bomb, and are faced with a nail-biting choice – to attempt to clear a 50ft gap in the uncompleted freeway overpass, or risk letting the bus slow to below 50km/hr and activating the bomb!

Do they make it?

Well, yes they do. This is Hollywood after all. But they shouldn’t have – to clear the gap they would have needed an angled surface to take off from. Jumping from a flat surface (as it appears in the film) would have resulted in a downwards trajectory, causing them to crash into the abyss below.

Features_final.indd 9

3/3/05 9:20:29 am

FEATURES

The key to the secret garden When the laser was invented back in the 1960s, it was labelled a ‘solution in search of a problem’. Thirty years later, it has happened again.

Metamaterials have been brought into the world. Now we just need to know what to do with them, writes Anushri Patel.

“W

HEN I got the results, I emerged from my study and said to my wife, ‘this will either make me or break me.’” Sir John Pendry, of the Condensed Matter Theory group at Imperial College, believed he had found a way of creating lenses capable of generating high quality images – images with perfect resolution. How? Using materials with specific nanometre scale structures, known as metamaterials. And why was this so controversial? Because, according to the current theories of physics, it is widely accepted that the perfect lens will never exist.

16 I, science Features_final.indd 4

Miraculous metamaterials?

The way that a material interacts with electromagnetic (EM) radiation (visible light, radio waves or microwaves, for example) is fundamental to its uses in technology. A piece of glass can be shaped into a camera lens or into a fibreoptic cable to manipulate visible light in ways that a piece of metal cannot. However, unlike the glass, the metal could be used to make a radio antenna to manipulate radio waves.

These differences are dependent on two main properties: the permeability (how easily a material becomes magnetic in response to a magnetic field) and the permittivity (a measure of how much a medium changes to absorb energy when subject to an electric field). For example, iron would have a large value of permeability as it can easily be turned into a magnet, but a low value of permittivity, as it is quite conductive, and so does not absorb much energy.

Normally, when a material is required to do a certain job, scientists will put on their hunter-gatherer outfits and raid nature’s riches.

But no-one has yet found a natural material with both negative permittivity and permeability. Just because such materials do not occur naturally, doesn’t mean they can’t exist. In fact, as far back as 1968, work by Soviet physicist Victor Veselago suggested that there are no theoretical reasons why such materials cannot exist.

In 2001, a group at the University of California in San Diego announced that, by using Pendry’s theories, they had succeeded in making a material with both negative permittivity and permeability, out of an array of tiny copper loops and wires.

Theory suggests that materials with both negative permittivity and permeability have some very peculiar properties, including a negative refractive index (see inset). The California group’s experiments appeared to show that their metamaterial could negatively refract microwaves.

Resolving resolution Negatively refracting materials make natural lenses. A simple slab of metamaterial will act as a lens without needing to be curved like a

Spring 2005 3/3/05 9:15:41 am

FEATURES

“Pendry thinks physicists now have ‘the key to the secret garden.’ The key is metamaterials, but the secret garden of negatively refracting lenses needs to be explored.” traditional glass lens. Pendry’s theories predict a much more striking property for metamaterial lenses: unlike conventional lenses they will break the limit of resolution, projecting a perfect image. They can do this because they grab the elusive near-field.

Conventional optical technologies rely on the ‘far-field’ – EM radiation transmitted over large distances – to create images of objects.

The ‘near-field’ contains the finer details of the object which are required to create a high resolution image. But this information doesn’t escape from the surface of the object. Until recently, nobody knew how to harness the details contained within the near-field, imposing a limit of resolution.

All of this has been controversial. As Pendry explains: “To announce you could break it [the resolution limit] was just asking for trouble.

However, there is nothing in the laws of physics to say there should be a limit to resolution.”

As he sees it, the problem was that scientists were solving equations for lens designs currently in place, using what they knew about existing materials. “It was a function of design, not of anything to do with physics,” he says.

Physicists in opposition Unfortunately for Pendry, not everyone was impressed with his discovery. Prashant Valanju and his colleagues at the University of Texas strongly opposed the theory and experimental evidence. They suggested that there was something fundamentally wrong with the literature on negative refraction.

According to Valanju’s group, Pendry and his colleagues had ignored the fact that EM waves are a mixture of individual waves, with each component having its own wavelength. When researchers measure the direction and strength of the main wave, they actually record a combination of these components.

The group modelled what would happen when a wave with two components of different wavelengths entered a material with a negative refractive index. They found that although individual components would indeed be refracted negatively, they would combine to give a total wave that was positively refracted. They also criticised the Californian group’s experiments, suggesting that their results were an artefact of bad experimental design.

“That really caused a lot of problems,” explains Pendry, “because in the meantime, the Californian group had obtained funding from the US military to set up and do some more experiments. Now the military were worried they were funding people chasing something absolutely wrong.”

Pendry and his colleagues responded with their own theoretical analysis, which has subsequently been backed up by experiments.

Since 2003, two independent groups in the US, have reported negative refraction in their own metamaterials.

In Pendry’s opinion: “What could have been a very unpleasant argument was settled the proper way – by a rigorous experimental procedure.”

Spring 2005 Features_final.indd 5

AIR

Refraction from air into conventional material (e.g. water)

Negative refraction into metamaterial

When a beam of light enters a conventional medium, it refracts and bends. In negative refraction at the interface between metamaterials and air, the direction of the beam is reversed.

A glimpse of the secret garden Pendry thinks physicists now have “the key to the secret garden”. The key is metamaterials, but the secret garden of negatively refracting lenses still needs to be explored.

The biggest problem when attempting to create a perfect lens is absorption. A lens that absorbs most of the light (or other EM

“And the most interesting application of metamaterials?

You could make things invisible.” radiation) that hits it wouldn’t be much use.

The challenge for scientists designing metamaterials is to make them sufficiently transparent for the particular type of EM radiation being used.

There is a wealth of opportunity for applications in the medical sciences. Professor Jo Hajnal’s group at the Hammersmith Hospital are currently looking to use metamaterials in order to conduct MRI scans. By using metamaterials to focus the magnetic field more precisely, a less powerful field is needed. This would mean less claustrophobic, more compact and financially viable MRI units, with increased compatibility with nearby electronic equipment.

The lenses could also lead to amplified an-

tennas, minute mobile phones and augmented optical data storage.

And the most interesting application? You could make things invisible. Take a building with pillars for example. You need the pillars for structural purposes, but visually, they may not be as appealing. If they were surrounded by a metamaterial designed specifically to re-route visible light around the pillar, they would become invisible.

Immediately, it became obvious that there could be rather interesting use for these new materials – the possibility of creating invisible clothing. To the likely disappointment of voyeurs and spies everywhere, Pendry doesn’t believe this is possible.

He did mention, however, that you could become invisible in an indirect sense. In terms of military stealth, it may be possible to make soldiers invisible to radars operating on microwaves.

So, for the time being, voyeurs and spies will have to stick to good ol’ binoculars, or in the case of Imperial students, perfectly aligned, hidden webcams. n John Pendry’s articles can be found at www. cmth.ph.ic.ac.uk/photonics/references.html.

You can find Valanju’s paper, and other literature on negative refraction, at http:// physics.ucsd.edu/~drs/nim_pubs_2002.htm.

Metamaterials publications: http://metamaterials.mit.edu/metamaterials/papers/ papers.html.

Above: A conventional lens where positive refraction occurs, and the curved surface allows the image to be magnified.

Right: negative refraction through a metamaterial lens. The light bends in the opposite direction This lens can remain flat yet still magnify, giving a better quality image.

I, science

17 3/3/05 9:15:58 am

INTERVIEW

When complexifying simplifies the problem Alexander Antonov talks to Dr Darren Crowdy, one of the two recent recipients of the Leverhulme prize in the Mathematics department, and finds out about complex analysis and its real applications.

What attracted you to mathematics?

A few things, I guess. It may sound strange but, contrary to the common perception that mathematicians are ‘geeks’, as a teenager I remember thinking it was really cool that people could be fluent in, and communicate ideas in, some weird esoteric language of symbols.

When I was fourteen, I remember we had a maths class at school straight after the upper sixth formers so, when we walked in the room, the board was always covered in all kinds of calculus stuff that, at that time, I had no idea about. I remember wanting to learn it.

Was there anyone in particular who inspired you to pursue a maths career?

Now that you ask, I don’t recall making any conscious decision at any time to ‘pursue’ a maths career. I guess I subconsciously floated into it, urged on by people around me who recognized my talent. I’ve just turned 34, and sometimes I think I should stop messing around with mathematics and get a proper job. I’m only just realising that this is a proper job: it’s just a really great one. I’m paid to think about whatever I think is interesting and give a few lectures.

What motivates you to do the research that you do?

In my last two years as an undergraduate I focused on applied mathematics – I wanted to do something that was useful to the real world.

To be honest, I felt disappointed by what I learned. The real world is messy, the governing equations are difficult, and few have nice closed-form solutions. Science was losing its attraction for me. I first learned about complex analysis in my second year at Cambridge, from a lecturer called Alan Beardon – one of the truly great expositors of the subject. Then, to my delight, I realized that a small group of ‘applied mathematicians’ use those beautiful ideas from complex analysis to find remarkable solutions to problems arising in the physical sciences. Forget Fermat’s Last Theorem: you can also use ideas from algebraic geometry to solve

18 I, science Interviews_final.indd 8

problems that physical scientists actually care about! My love of applying complex analysis to problems arising in physics has never deserted me, and it guides all my research.

Why is it important to study complex analysis?

When I’m in the pub and people ask me what I do, after telling them (and after they’ve then told me how crap at maths they were), one of the most frequent questions is “what the hell are complex numbers all about?” I was even asked this by an immigration officer when I re-entered the US on the way back to Caltech after one Christmas break! People think: you can’t just make up new “imaginary” numbers to solve your mathematical problems and inconsistencies. Well, that’s true. Just making up new numbers to patch things up would be a sham.

But the beauty of it all is that you only have to invent one new number. Invent the square root

of -1, make it obey some natural mathematical rules, and everything fits into place.

Complex analysis is one of the most beautiful, rationally coherent, powerful and widelyused areas of mathematics that exists. Have you ever wondered why every decent scientific university everywhere in the world teaches its undergraduates, not just mathematicians but physical scientists and engineers, to understand complex numbers? It’s because it’s so important and powerful. Unfortunately, a typical undergraduate never gets to fully experience its true power. In the fifties and sixties theories of complex analysis were studied really hard.

Computers weren’t anything like they are now, and scientists spent their lives trying to find nice analytical results: complex analysis was really powerful. In this day and age people have veered away from it, and they just do things numerically now. It always disappoints me that most engineers see of complex analysis is a few boring inverse Fourier transforms.

I see that one of the problems you have applied complex analysis to is the study of bubbles. Can you tell me more about your research in this area?

One of the cases where bubbles arise is in very viscous flows. For example, think of something like glass heated up to a very high temperature so that it becomes molten. If you want objects with rather complicated shapes it’s often not efficient to machine them, so people usually get glass or metal powder, put it in a kiln and then heat it up (this process is called sintering). What happens is that the connecting region between the spherical powder particles becomes a region of fluid and, since there are surface tension forces on the boundaries, this opens it all up. Gradually, the regions or pores in between the particles will close up, and eventually you’ll get a contiguous object with no holes and in the right shape.

This process can take quite a long time, so manufacturers want to minimise the time it’s in the kiln and optimise the time to full densification (when all the pores have closed up).

They don’t want any holes inside the material after the process has finished because it will compromise its strength properties and, if it’s a metal, its conductivity. So people need to understand how regions of very viscous fluid move around when the driving force is surface tension on the boundaries.

In 1990 this guy showed that the problem, if you start with two cylindrical particles just touching, can be reduced, using complex analysis, to two easily solvable ordinary

f(z,t)

A conformal mapping translates the unit circle to the interface between two bubbles.

f(z,t)

A conformal mapping translates the unit annulus maps to the interface between three bubbles.

Complex analysis techniques facilitate the study of involute time-evolving fluid-air interfaces.

Spring 2005 3/3/05 9:29:18 am

differential equations (ODEs) using conformal maps. These maps take a simple geometric region like the unit circle and translate it to the more complicated interface between the coalescing particles. The maps therefore encode all the information about your changing fluidair interface. You can then study the dynamics of these maps, which is a lot more analytically tractable because you can apply the known techniques of complex analysis. Previously, people have been using things like the finite element method, 256x256 meshes, and you can now do it by integrating two ODEs! Do you see the power of these things?

The question that my adviser put me onto was whether any results that are as impressive as these exist for the more general problem.

The problem with the 1990 solution is that it only applies to two particles, so there are no pores between them, and you need at least three to have a pore. Topologically, in the twoparticle problem you have a simply-connected region, which means it hasn’t got any holes, but in a three-particle case it’s doubly-connected, which means it has one hole. From a mathematical point of view you need completely different technologies to cope with these.

Does it not matter that you’re modelling this in 2D? In the viscous sintering problem, where you have spherical particles, the three-dimensionality is of course crucial. But many of the insights that you have from how the pores evolve in two dimensions can be carried over in a qualitative way in three dimensions and because studying the 2D problem becomes so easy now, you can do lots of simulations really quickly. Most complex analysis problems are in 2D, but that’s OK. For example, in vortex dynamics, if you’re modelling the atmosphere, its stratification means that actually storm systems are quasi-2D. So a lot of vortex dynamics that you model for meteorological purposes is done using 2D models with extra effects added in to account for the 3-dimensionality.

How do you attack a new maths problem?

There’s only one way to solve a problem. Think of a theory or idea and find whatever way you can to test it, starting with the simplest cases first. That’s how most mathematicians, pure or applied, operate. The most important thing you learn as a researcher is that the path to discovery, even of the most elegant end-results, often involves hopelessly clumsy, circuitous and long-winded routes. You piece together clues, experiment, and see where it leads. The most important thing a PhD student must learn, for example, is to trust his or her own instincts and never to be afraid to invest time testing their own ideas.

Have you been tempted to try any of the Millennium problems?

No. I’m aware of them, as any professional mathematician should be, but they’re too difficult for me. In any case, it’s my natural instinct to be turned off by something that’s in the public consciousness. It’s the same reason I haven’t read any of the Harry Potter books.

Gauss famously declared that maths is the queen of all the sciences. Do you think that’s true and why?

Undoubtedly. Physicists, in particular, are famous for coming up with wacky new theories often based on hand-waving arguments and a smattering of empirical evidence. But it’s not usually considered an established and accepted theory unless it is underpinned by a mathematical formulation, which can make verifiable predictions. In that respect, mathematics rules.

Spring 2005 Interviews_final.indd 9

3/3/05 9:29:19 am

FEATURES

Antisocial behaviour orders are being slapped on kids as young as ten and London Underground is resorting to Pavarotti’s music to chase away deliquent youths. With government figures also showing violent crime on the increase, Sonja van Renssen finds out more about the science of psychopathic and antisocial behaviour.

W

HAT DO we know about the underlying causes of psychopathic and antisocial behaviour? It is easy to interpret this question as yet another example of the classic nature versus nurture debate, but what does scientific research tell us about the origins of cruel and unusual behaviour?

Studies of psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder provide detailed information on the areas of the brain involved, the role of genetics and the influence of the environment.

While we cannot explain all violence or attribute it to one type of group or individual, we can use this knowledge to develop better prevention and punishment strategies.

Besides guiding policy, an understanding of the causes of antisocial behaviour also satisfies a basic human need to assign blame. We tend to distinguish between ‘natural’ evils we can do nothing about (like the recent Indian Ocean tsunami) and ‘moral’ evils that are a conscious choice. Consider the contrast between the recent tsunami disaster and the terrorist attcks of 9/11. Our instinctive association of intention with responsibility means that a biological explanation can transform a ‘moral’ evil into a ‘natural’ evil and thereby remove blame.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Daniel Tranel’s study of a man who had lived an exemplary life until, at 65 years old, he murdered his wife, threw her body out of the window and went to work as usual. The man showed a distinctive lack of emotion when he was arrested.

A medical investigation determined he was suffering from a massive tumour pressing against the temporal lobe of his brain.

“...a man who had lived an exemplary life until, at 65, he murdered his wife, threw her body out of the window and went to work as usual” The temporal lobe is home to the amygdala (pronounced: uh-mig-dulluh), a part of the brain with a key role in regulating emotions, automatic responses to external stimuli like sweating and reward/punishment learning. A dysfunctional amygdala has been linked to increased violence as well as conditions like narcolepsy and phobias. Studies in psychopaths reveal that it is usually smaller than usual and not fully functional.

The amygdala is just one of 38 parts of the brain that has been implicated in violent behaviour. Lesions to the frontal lobes are also correlated with violence. The best known study in this field concerns a construction foreman called Phineas Gage and dates back to 1848. Gage had a 3.5ft long, 1.5in thick iron rod propelled into

20 I, science Features_final.indd 12

his face when a charge of dynamite accidentally exploded. It pierced his left cheek, travelled behind his eye and flew out the top of his skull to land 25-30 yards behind him. He didn’t lose consciousness and could walk and talk almost immediately afterwards.

But Gage had changed. He had been transformed from a popular, hard-working man into an irresponsible, vulgar ruffian. In 1994, the husband and wife team of Drs Hanna and Antonio Damasio built a 3D replica of Gage’s skull on a computer with a normal brain inside it. When they replayed the accident in virtual reality, they saw that Gage would have suffered extensive damage to his frontal lobes.

Gage typifies what is called impulsive violence. Frequently associated with frontal lobe damage, this kind of violence is explosive, periodic and without purpose; but the person is aware of acting strangely – ego-dystonic. It sits in contrast to instrumental violence, which is planned and has an objective. Serial killers never show any frontal lobe impairment, leaving their ability to plan their crimes unimpaired.

The cases of Tranel and Gage both fall under the umbrella of psychopathy, described by expert Robert Hare as “a socially devastating disorder defined by a constellation of affective, interpersonal, and behavioral characteristics, including egocentricity; impulsivity; irresponsibility; shallow emotions; lack of empathy, guilt, or remorse; pathological lying; manipulativeness; and the persistent violation of social norms and expectations”. Intellectual impairment is not a feature of psychopathy.

Antisocial personality disorder is less serious, but is defined as a mild form of psychopathy. The American Psychiatric Association defines patients with antisocial personality disorder as psychopaths with the added ability to form meaningful emotional attachments. An estimated 75-80% of the US male prison population is thought to suffer from antisocial personality disorder.

Research on British patients not only emphasises the importance of brain structure but also suggests a strong genetic component. 40-60% of antisocial personality disorder patients have antisocial parents.

Behavioural genetics and cross-cultural surveys reinforce the argument for a biological component to criminal behaviour. Many studies of non-relatives raised together, or identical twins raised apart, have produced correlations between genes and criminal behaviour. One large study, based on a sample of 3586 twins from the Danish Twin Register, showed that identical twins had a 50 per cent chance of sharing criminal behaviour compared to 21 per cent for non-identical twins. In every known society and in every historical period, crimes have been overwhelmingly committed by young males, usually between the ages of 15 and 25.

Genes may influence behaviour by affecting

brain chemistry. A Dutch study correlated extreme violence with the absence of a gene to produce monoamine oxidase (MAO), an enzyme that breaks down neurotransmitters like serotonin. Genetic makeup may also protect an individual from harmful environmental influences. A New Zealand study tracking more than 1000 children from birth to adulthood, found that those abused at a young age, who carried a gene known as MADA, showed less violent behaviour in adult life than those similarly mistreated but lacking the gene.

“Serial killers never have any frontal lobe impairment, leaving their ability to plan their crimes unimpaired.”

This reminds us to acknowledge the impact of nurture on nature. The New Zealand study is not alone in indicating a direct correlation between maltreatment and violence. Adrian Raine, a psychologist from the University of California, has shown that antisocial personality disorder, despite having a strong genetic component, occurs mainly in the lower socio-economic classes and is associated with poverty and malnourishment at a young age. Its physical characteristics, like an abnormal amygdala, arise from a complex interaction of genetics and the environment.

Raine has demonstrated that environmental enrichment for children aged three to five, in the form of measures like dietary improvement, educational input, and group playing, reduces crime rates when the children reach their teens.

Dr Sean Spence of the University of Sheffield believes that “If we wanted to reduce violence tomorrow, the one thing we could do is improve child care.”

Of course the majority of abused, neglected, or traumatised children grow up to lead perfectly normal, healthy lives. Equally, there is no evidence that amygdala and frontal lobe dysfunction explain the most common types of violence: drunken Friday night mayhem and domestic abuse.

But a complete understanding of the interplay of nature and nurture in the creation of antisocial behaviour is not necessary for us to address its prevention and treatment. Scientific research has already provided us with plenty of knowledge to act upon. We know that improving child care should be at the top of the agenda. We also know that certain kinds of violence, related to a specific genetic defect or brain dysfunction, may be tackled by medication or surgical intervention. What we don’t know is whether our political and social priorities will make scientific sense. n

Spring 2005 3/3/05 3:12:07 pm

FEATURES

Springwatch Climate change is causing seasonal shifts, making life difficult for Britain’s wildlife, Anna-Marie Lever writes.

S

PRING is in the air. Warmer weather invites us outdoors and Britain’s wildlife wakes up. Ladybirds stir from hibernation to search for a mate, screaming swifts swoop over meadows, and Peacock Butterflies’ flit in flowery banks. But is the pace of Spring hotting up?

The international Climate Change Conference in Exeter last month announced that temperatures have risen by 0.7°C in the past century and a rise of 0.6°C is expected in the next 30 years. This rise in global temperature is due in part to the effect of carbon dioxide emissions. In Britain temperatures are rising faster than the global average.

The mean January-March temperature in the 1960s was 4.2°C, but 5.6°C in the 1990s.

“If ecosystems are becoming asynchronous then processes like competition, predation, and parasitism will become unstable.”

One of the many complex questions about the impact of climate change is its potential to alter seasonal patterns. In the UK there is evidence that spring is arriving earlier with dramatic effects on wildlife. According to Jill Attenborough, of the Woodland Trust, “Spring is coming about two weeks earlier than 30-50 years ago.”

Phenology is the study of seasonal plant and animal activity, for example the date the first snowdrop or frog spawn of the year appears.

Records date back 250 years and compared with climatic data, provide a sensitive indicator of the effects of climate change. Jill Atten-

Oh, Kyoto!

I

N FEBRUARY, the Kyoto Protocol limped comically into effect, and for those who generally believe in the predictions of science, the decrepitude of the Kyoto Protocol hurts like a laughter stitch.

It is pathos at its most excruciating. It is a satire on itself.

For thirteen aching years, the creators of the agreement have been at the throbbing nexus of economic, scientific and political information. Armed with the sword of reason, and set against a backdrop of impending disaster, these trusty guardians of our future have tirelessly negotiated the Protocol’s details. They’ve thrusted, they’ve parried, they’ve compromised, they’ve traded, they’ve amended, they’ve pushed, they’ve pulled and they’ve come up with a reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions of 4.8 per cent below the 1990 level.

Most scientists in a position to comment will tell you this is not enough. In fact it’s hilariously inadequate. It’s ‘duck and cover’

Spring 2005 Features_final.indd 13

borough continues, “The fluctuations in the timings of seasonal wildlife events from year to year mirror fluctuations in temperature.”

The phenology of a species evolves through natural selection, producing a match with environmental conditions that maximises fitness. If conditions change, an individual with phenological timings that match best is more likely to survive and pass its genes to the next generation. A gradual change in phenological timings at the species level will occur.

But results from the Woodland Trust show that species respond to climate change at different rates. Generally, insect response is fastest, then plants, and then birds. “In Britain, for every degree Celsius increase in temperature, it appears that leafing occurs six to eight days earlier and the arrival of migratory woodland birds, like chiffchaff and blackcap, occurs 2 to 3 days earlier,” says the UK Phenology Network.

If ecosystems are becoming asynchronous then processes like competition, predation, and parasitism will become unstable and species may become threatened or even extinct.

In seasonal environments, the main selection pressure on the timing of egg-laying by birds is synchrony between peak offspring food needs and peak food abundance. Timing of egg laying is cued to a sequence of spring events, which climate change can alter. For example, blue tit hatching no longer coincides with peak caterpillar numbers, since caterpillars are responding to temperature change faster than blue tits.

Changing phenology may also disrupt competitive balance between species. If one gains a new advantage in warmer conditions rare species may be wiped out completely.

Jill Attenborough continues, “Oak trees, horse chestnut trees and sycamore trees are coming into leaf much earlier than some of their neighbours, like ash and beech, and

for humanity. Even if fully implemented for a hundred years it wouldn’t be enough. Even if it included the United States, China, India and Australia it wouldn’t be enough. In fact, plot the predicted rate of temperature rise without any reduction in carbon emissions, next to the temperature rise with the Kyoto targets, and the lines stay as close as Laurel and Hardy. But here is the punch line: the protocol is set to expire in 2012 and due to American sabotage no plans have yet been made for a replacement.

“...it’s hilariously inadequate” As if that wasn’t painful enough, some critics estimate that this piecemeal gesture will cost $1 trillion. So geared is the global economy to the release of carbon into the atmosphere that even this vague gesture towards sustainability costs roughly four percent of the combined GDP of the countries involved. This is why the US stayed out.

Some in the US are also concerned that Kyoto is European and Eastern imperialism through the back door (amusing when

are shading others out. I think we’ll see a change in the tree composition of our woods.”

Woodland animals could also be affected.

While science is starting to understand how certain species respond to temperature changes, more information is still needed.

Springwatch, Britain’s largest survey into the arrival of spring across the UK needs your help to build a more complete picture. Springwatch has been initiated by the Woodland Trust, UK Phenology Network and the BBC. Springwatch asks you to record the first appearance of six key species as spring unfolds. From January onwards, sightings of the bumblebee, frog spawn, and the seven spot ladybird can be made. From March look for peacock butterflies, hawthorn blossom and swifts. You can take part by observing one, two, or all six species. “Every recording counts,” says celebrity birdwatcher Bill Oddie, “the more people involved, the more information we can give to conservation organisations to help them protect our threatened species.”

Record your findings and get a species guide at the BBC Springwatch website, www.bbc. co.uk/springwatch. The earliest sightings of the six species will be revealed in ‘Springwatch with Bill Oddie’ on 25th March, BBC2. n

Peacock butterfly: available from March

set against the imperialist implications of a twentieth of the world’s population using a quarter of its energy output). But mainly, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, one among many to torment Kyoto: it’s the stupid economy.

Here lies the central paradox that is the cornerstone of this epic tragicomedy. All our main economic models are based on infinite resources and infinite capacity for pollution to provide everlasting economic expansion. This is the banana skin providing all the laughs. It’s Basil Fawlty’s desperation, David Brent’s vanity, and Frank Spencer’s well-meaning clumsiness together. It is assumed that science will provide the answers to make economies grow forever.

But now it’s telling us there are not infinite resources on the planet and no infinite capacity for pollution. Kyoto’s feeble doddering comes from trying to square an infinite model with the finite world. And, to someone who believes in science, it seems the economic model has to change. I don’t know how, but there must be someone out there clever enough to work it out, if only because the hapless fumbling of international policy makers is becoming less and less funny. n

I, science

21 3/3/05 9:22:36 am

FEATURES

Time for open access?

As scientists and students, we take our learned journals on tap in the library for granted. But what about members of the public or researchers in resource-poor countries? How can they access the research literature when it is locked away in expensive journals? Zoë Corbyn reports on the growing open access movement, what is at stake, and where we are heading.

U

NDER THE pricing structures for most journals, users pay to access the research results. Authors pay nothing to publish. The biggest ‘users’, university libraries, are inevitably squeezed on both sides. Academics demand the journals, whatever the cost, while publishers keen to exploit this are ever increasing their prices and adding new titles.

As subscription rates have fallen, journal prices have gone up about 200% in the last 10 years.

Enter the open access movement. Developing fast and with the libraries on its side, it has got the real powers of the scientific world, journal publishers, in a tailspin. The movement argues that research results published in the journals should be freely available over the internet to anyone who wants them, in much the same way open access is provided to the Human Genome project.

Why and how?

The main argument for open access runs something like this. The public funds the research through taxes, so why shouldn’t they get to see the results? Dissemination of the findings back to the public is as important as the research itself.

Dr Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust and open access enthusiast, explains the position: “The results are an intrinsic part of the research and we want them to be made available free of change to the end user, to the maximum number of people.”

According to Walport, 90% of research in the UK is funded with public money of some kind (for example, through the NHS or by charities).

Yet only 30% of the results reach the public domain and only 40% of NHS funded research is available to NHS staff. If knowledge is power, refusing the public access severely disadvantages them. Similarly, Walport argues the current system hinders research in third world countries. A team working on malaria treatment in India, for example, needs access to the results in the research literature, yet in many cases the journal costs are prohibitive.

There are two basic routes for open access.

Under the first, the authors of the research pay to publish. Walport suggests there would be a fee of about $550 per paper and a submission fee of about $175, equating to about 1-2% of research funding over the life of a project. He claims this will lead to a saving of about 30% on journal prices.

The other route is to establish electronic free-to-access repositories or archives for the papers, alongside the current journals. This is complicated because publishers, not authors, own the copyright on the papers. In some cases, authors may be prevented from archiving them.

Both models are, to a limited extent, already in use. In the US, for example, the Public Library of Science (or PLoS for short) runs a number of author pays open access electronic journals that are stringently peer reviewed.

Similarly, the US National Institute of Health

22 I, science Features_final.indd 6

OPEN ACCESS operates PubMed Central. This is an online repository of about 90 peer reviewed biomedical and life sciences journals freely available to the public. Moves are afoot to establish a European site. There are also repositories for pre-print manuscripts, which accept papers yet to undergo peer review.

A solution looking for a problem?

Critics of open access are quick to point out the flaws. With some repositories, versions other than the final version can be deposited, so the whole system can lack quality control. The advent of ‘Google scholar’, for example, may mean researchers can find archived electronic papers, but what is to say they are the published, peer reviewed versions?

The ‘author pays’ route is where heels really start to dig in. Critics argue that it is fine if you are funded by a big institution, but what if you are not? How can scientists who aren’t funded in this way ever hope to meet the publishing costs? Rhonda Oliver, Managing Director of Portland Press Ltd, the wholly owned publishing subsidiary of the Biochemical Society, argues that there are people who won’t have the good fortune to be in receipt of a Wellcome Trust grant or something similar.

One way round the problem is to waive costs for some researchers, but this too is fraught with difficulty. “You can factor in free papers,

ACCESS DENIED!

but who makes the decisions and how do you make them? It is bound to be arbitrary and unfair” says Oliver.

Similarly, she argues that the profits societies make from their journals often get injected back into science through the ‘not for profit’ activities of the society. Moving to open access would mean an important revenue stream was lost and the activities of the society would suffer. Open access supporters don’t dispute this, but argue that by buying the journals public libraries are invisibly subsidising the societies, and this needs to be brought into public view.

According to Oliver there is already a great deal of free access anyway. In fact, so much that open access is simply: “a solution looking for a problem”. Certainly, some journals are now releasing papers after six months or a year. Oliver cites the fact that Biochemical Journal papers are available free on line the day they are accepted for publication.

“The public funds research through taxes, so why shouldn’t they get to see the results?”

The longevity of the scientific record is also a sticking point. Critics argue that electronic archives lack the long-term stability of paper archives. To move away from paper puts the scientific record in jeopardy. But Walport does not see this as a problem: “No one is saying paper copies will go away. The question is actually how many libraries do you need? There are shelves and shelves of books, yet where did I go to get a copy of the first page of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society? It wasn’t from a paper copy, it was actually electronic. So what we need is electronic publications and a small number of paper archives such as those in the national libraries.”

Common ground There are a few areas where there is, at least superficially, some consensus. First of all, both sides agree that the value of peer review is paramount. Whether journals are conventional or open access, there still needs to be a rigorous way of ensuring quality. For all its faults, peer review is the best available.

Second, it is accepted that someone has to meet the costs of peer review – be it the authors or the users. At approximately 25% of the expense of journal publication, peer review is expensive and rejection rates in conventional journals are high. In the proposed open access model, as only the accepted authors pay the full publication fee, there is a perverse financial incentive for journals to publish reduced quality papers to collect the returns. There is a legitimate worry that editorial boards may face subtle pressure to compromise on quality.

Spring 2005 3/3/05 9:17:47 am

FEATURES Lastly, there is an obvious case for treating other journal content such as news and editorials differently to research results. Yet while charging users for this ‘value-added’ content is not in dispute, the case for review articles - where a leading scientist in the field undertakes a review of recent research, is murkier.

Walport, certainly, would like to see these also made freely available.

Sustainable publishing Ultimately though, open access publishing cannot be sustainable unless the books balance.

Oliver thinks Walport’s figures for an author pays system are completely underestimated, and not sustainable. Journals provide extensive administrative support for the peer review process, which hasn’t been properly factored in.

She cites PLoS, charging $1500 per research paper and still not breaking even. “There has been quite a lot of confusion over the cost of abandoning print. To get your information online costs the same whether you are giving it away or are charging someone”. Walport argues that the costs have so little transparency at the moment that it is impossible to know.

It seems that the current mix is likely to continue for some time. A larger swing towards open access would likely require an overhaul of the system. Library funding would undoubtedly be cut substantially and the money redirected to research institutions to fund paper publication costs (the UK alone publishes 70,000 journal articles a year). But with disadvantages carefully considered and the author-pays model refined to avoid them, open access does hold real promise. Promise for a more equitable system that benefits the public, poor countries, and ultimately our scientific culture. n

An ozone hole in food supplies

Miles Austin reports on research at Imperial College suggesting that future global levels of industrial activity, combined with hotter weather, may produce ozone smogs that could destroy crops throughout the globe.

W

HEN YOU HEAR the word ‘ozone’ you might think about a hole somewhere above Antarctica caused by mass use of spray-on deodorants in the 1980s. Whilst pondering the environmental damage wreaked by the pong-free new-wavers of yesteryear, you probably won’t pause to worry about the effect ground level ozone could have on harvests in the developing world. You should. You should actually worry a lot. And this is why.

Above cities with high levels of traffic pollution or industrial activity, photochemical smog starts to form on sunny days. This forms when sunlight catalyses reactions between nitrogen compounds (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) present in the pollution. One of the products of these reactions is ozone. The clouds of photochemical smog drift off into the countryside and, as they do, the ozone concentration rises.

The first inkling anyone had that photochemical smog could adversely affect plants came from observations around Los Angeles in the 1940s. Many species were discovered to be highly sensitive to ozone, shown as visible damage on leaves. The following decade, white or brown flecks began to appear on cigar wrapper varieties of Tobacco grown in eastern USA. Again, this damage appeared on sunny days, and rendered the plants useless.

In some cases whole crops were lost, costing the industry millions of dollars. The tobacco industry leapt into action to track down the cause of the costly “weather fleck”, and ozone was rapidly fingered as the culprit. Their solution was to develop ozone-resistant plants, side-stepping the problem of pollution. During the breeding programme, a super-sensitive strain was also developed, which could act as a biological indicator for the presence of ozone.

This tobacco strain was called Bel-W3.

The reaction in the UK to the news was characterized by complete disinterest. It was regarded as an American problem, not relevant to the UK. Enter Professor Nigel Bell from the Environmental Science and Technology Department of Imperial College. In the 1970s, following on from research with Dr Tony Cox, Bell and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments at Silwood Park to test the effect of ozone on wheat and peas. To do this he grew these crops in large Perspex chambers. One set with normal air being pumped through, one with filtered air, and a third open to the elements to act as a control.

Spring 2005 Features_final.indd 7

The crops in the unfiltered air were invariably smaller than the crops in the clean filtered air.

Ozone was the key culprit.

On sunny days with easterly winds, Silwood Park gets a hefty dose of ozone-laden air from nearby London. Bell wanted to know how widespread this phenomenon was. So, using ozone sensitive Bel-W3 tobacco plants from California, he devised a system for estimating ozone concentrations. The more

“Ozone levels in the future could easily reduce crop yields enough to cause major famines...” spots on the tobacco plant, the more ozone was present. In 1977 and 1978 Bel-W3 strain tobacco plants were distributed throughout the British Isles. With the exception of northern Scotland, damaging levels of ozone were present in every part of Britain.

Bell went on to do experiments on rice and soya in Pakistan, and once again he demonstrated that ozone was having an effect on

Damaging ozone, damages potato leaves.

growth, this time reducing yields in wheat and rice by up to 40%. In a further experiment some of the crops were given a chemical that made them immune to the effects of ozone.

This experiment showed a 60% reduction in yield was taking place. Other experiments in India, on mung beans,wheat, spinach beet, and mustard, showed that NOx and sulphur dioxide also reduced yields. In the case of wheat, the carbohydrate content of the crops also dropped. Not only was the yield dropping by up to 60% but the food that was produced was less nutritious.

When Bell realised the full implications of these studies he described the findings as being truly terrifying. Ozone levels in the future could easily reduce crop yields enough to cause major famines in India and other rapidly developing Asian economies.

Elsewhere, ozone pollution caused by China’s expanding transport and industrial sectors has the potential to damage crops across the Yangtze Delta, one of China’s most productive agricultural areas. In a best-case scenario, these countries might be able to buy food from unaffected neighbouring countries. But the effects of pollution may be multinational and, possibly, global.

During summer, ozone smogs drift across mainland Europe, affecting areas many hundreds of miles away from their source. The predicted levels of industrial activity in countries such as India and China, when combined with hotter, drier and sunnier weather (courtesy of global warming), may produce ozone smogs so large that they engulf a whole hemisphere.

So, what is being done to prevent an international disaster? The answer to this is: not much. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has ozone safety limits for humans.

Plants are more sensitive to ozone than humans so, although the WHO safety levels will reduce direct ozone damage to humans, they do nothing to stop it damaging crops.

However, the risk of widespread crop damage, and resultant famine, could be reduced. The WHO could amend ozone safety levels to allow for the sensitivity of existing crops, and there is nothing to stop new strains of ozone resistant crops being bred, as has already been done with tobacco.

There is nothing preventing the implementation of such solutions, but no one is driving the necessary changes. Hopefully, the impetus for change won’t come from a major disaster. n

I, science

23 3/3/05 9:17:48 am

OPINION

religion Science: a leap of faith Do scientific theories form the basis for your world view? IC Christian Union writes.

T

ODAY it is popularly assumed that science and Christianity have always been in conflict and that science has won hands down. Yet there have been plenty of ‘Bible believing’ scientists, including Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Euler and Pasteur. So have we been misled?

Back in the late 1800s, two influential publications promoted this conflict thesis. Fitting with the secularist aspirations of many at the time, it was sold as the truth. However, recent mainstream academics recognise that this view, at best, is too simplistic and at worst highly misleading.

The problem is that we have convinced ourselves that science is an unshakeable and objective foundation, and the only source of reliable knowledge. “It is objective since it is based on evidence”, we tell ourselves.

But are we justified in thinking this way?

All scientific disciplines are built on common foundations that include assumptions such as the principle of induction. It is the principle that allows us to make that ‘jump’ from observing something that has happened in the past to predicting what will happen in the future. The more often we observe the behaviour occurring the more confident we are that it will happen again. The principle of induction might seem so obviously and instinctively true that it is not even worth questioning, yet without this principle we would have no laws and therefore no science.

“Shockingly, those who deny the necessity of God have never succeeded in justifying the principle of induction.”

Here lie the crucial questions: What allows us to make that ‘jump’ from observations to predictions? What leads us to believe that the universe in the future will be anything like the universe in the past? In other words, how do we know that the principle is actually true? Shockingly, those who deny the necessity of God have never succeeded in justifying the principle of induction.

If you entrust your destiny principally to the discoveries of science, you base your trust on a principle that was accepted in blind faith. Suddenly the common claim that Christians take ‘blind leaps of faith’ becomes rather ironic. Perhaps such a dilemma should have been obvious all along, for on the one hand any scientist denying the evidence of God’s existence must believe that the universe is unguided and purely a product of ‘chance and time’. On the other hand, scientists are deeply committed to using the so-called ‘laws of nature’, which assume the universe is highly ordered and predictable. Surely, this is where the conflict lies.

As Christians, we do not believe the universe is an unordered product of chance, but that God the Father through His Son Jesus Christ created and ordered it for a purpose. We are therefore quite justified in understanding the universe using ‘laws’. But if science presupposes the living

Jesus and the disciples: not the 1980s prog-rock group

24 I, science Opinion_final.indd 2

God who has made a predictable world, why do people attempt to act and think as though at best His existence is only probable?

The Bible explains a hard truth. We do not want God to tell us how to live, we want to be in charge of our own lives and denying his existence scientifically is an intelligent way to justify our motives. Even though knowledge of God’s existence is inescapable, we convince ourselves that he hasn’t plainly revealed Himself. We get so good at this it becomes second-nature. But God has made himself patently clear to us not only in creation but by promising and then sending His Son into the world. He is the ‘logos’, the Word and revelation of God to man.

Has science killed God? No, scientists kill God, as do we all, that is why he lovingly put His Son in the dock of our murder trial so that ‘whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.’ (John 3:16) n

Buddhism and science The IC Buddhist Society looks at the shared concepts in science and Buddhism.

W

HEN WE come across new ideas, we should be open and objective, yet realistic and discriminating; likewise with Buddhism.

Buddhism is more than just a faith, it can be seen as an education system. And the goal of Buddhist education is to attain wisdom. The Buddha once said: “Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumoured by many...(or) found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” [Quote from the Kalama Sutta] Buddhism not only concentrates on theories, but also emphasises both knowing and implementing. The two are interdependent; full knowing is awakening, and full awakening is the Buddha. After studying the theory by reading the sutra, one experiments and investigates through meditation, chanting and visualization, to test the hypothesis.

When the Buddha first accomplished enlightenment, he said that all sentient beings possess the Buddha nature, and that it is only due to their delusions that they have not attained enlightenment. This implies that everyone can become a Buddha if only their delusions are discarded, and proper understanding of the cycle of life and death is resumed. As stated in the principle of dependent arising, all things and phenomena come to exist through a series of causal relationships.

Science concentrates on the investigation of the physical and material, whilst Buddhism explores the mind and the nature of perception with non-discriminating wisdom. Where science seeks to broaden knowledge of general phenomena, Buddhism focuses on seeking, deeply understanding, and ultimately eradicating the root causes of suffering.

“After studying the theory by reading the sutra, one experiments and investigates by meditation...”

Sune Nordwall in the article, ‘What is Science?’ describes scientific activities as encompassing either observation and perception, or the thought surrounding them. Science is therefore driven by improved instrumental methods of ‘seeing’: phenomena such as microscopes or methods of measurement as well as analysis and hypotheses about past observations.

In the same way, Buddhism revolves around sharpening mental faculties like concentration and awareness, developing the human potential, as well as carefully thinking about what one experiences and the causes thereof. Of crucial importance is the need for complete honesty about what one observes and sees against ones beliefs.

Let us now look at the idea of causation.

Everything in this world comes into existence as a result of the interaction of a variety of causes and conditions. Nothing can therefore be said to have a truly independent existence. When the relevant causes and conditions that bring about a phenomenon dissipate, that phenomenon will no longer exist. Furthermore, phenomena that have newly arisen will effect new causes and conditions which, when interacting with those of

Spring 2005

3/3/05 9:27:20 am

OPINION existing phenomena, will lead to further new causes and conditions. The complexity of such chained interactional relationships underlies the basic explanation to the formation of what we know of as the universe.

This profound and impartial rationale behind causation is what we call ‘dependent origination’ or ‘dependent arising’. This was exactly what the Buddha evidenced when he first accomplished enlightenment under the Bodhi tree on a starry night.

So far, advances in science have been consonant with the Buddha’s teachings from the wave-particle duality to relativity and ideas in cosmology. If you spend some time studying Buddhism, you may find invaluable knowledge. n

farming What’s wrong with organic?

An Imperial student and farmer argues against the merits of organic farming.

W

HEN I tell people that I’m a farmer the first question they ask is “Is it an organic farm?” When I tell them that we are partially organic they generally give a little eyebrow raise and a deliberate nod as if to say “Well done I’m glad you said that”; they view me as a better, more trustworthy person for being an organic grower. Why and how has organic farming claimed the moral high ground leaving the remaining farmers to wallow in a mire of prejudices?

As a nation, we have a romantic notion that our food has come from a traditional farm, which looks like something from a child’s storybook.

People assume an organic farm is a close approximation to that ideal.

“But the reality of organic farming is a well-kept secret.”

But the reality of organic farming is a well-kept secret. It is not in the interests of supermarkets or growers to dispel the myths of organic farming. Only conventional farmers could gain from pricking the organic bubble, but they are not taken seriously and are viewed with suspicion by a cynical public.

Examine a few of the common assumptions about organic farming and you may be surprised: Many people avoid conventional produce due to fear of contamination from agrochemicals. They believe organic produce is not sprayed against pests and diseases. This is a myth: organic farmers are allowed to use extremely toxic chemicals on their crops. Until recently, Derris has been used on organic crops. If used incorrectly, it could kill you, me, earthworms, rabbits, beetles; you name it and Derris kills it. Yet it was legal to use this spray within an organic regime. Since becoming an organic grower, the amount and number of sprays I use have increased on the organic sections of my farm.

Another myth is that organic farmers are considered hard working, honest, and caring, both for the environment and each other. But in my experience (dealing with organic growers and packers) they are just as likely to lie and cheat as anyone else. We also often hear about the

Spring 2005

Opinion_final.indd 3

massive subsidies that farmers receive, yet organic farmers collect far higher subsidies than conventional ones.

Organic farming is also often presented as sustainable, but the amount of fossil fuel used by organic farmers is often greater than that used by conventional ones. Organic weed control involves mechanically disturbing the ground, an intensely energy consuming process; or using gas fired burners, fuelled by propane and pulled by tractors, which only scorch the tops of weeds - a process that has to be repeated when the roots re-grow.

Furthermore, organic produce is flown from across the world, but those eating it believe that they are helping the environment! It is hard to understand the mentality of a system that will not allow use of chemical fertilisers (since they use up fossil fuel in their manufacture) but allows the produce to be flown around the world once it is grown.

Everything is not great about conventional farming, but organic farming is not the way forward. It is a backward step to a bygone age that was not as blissful as we would like to imagine. We should embrace all that is good about modern farming and discard all that is bad about traditional farming, to produce an agriculture system that looks after the environment and produces healthy food efficiently. n

Organic: just common sense Good for the environment and also good for your health, says James Berry.

T

HE UK ORGANIC FOOD MARKET has been growing faster than bamboo on Viagra in the last five years, now pulling in over £1 billion each year. And yet it still seems incapable of shaking loose its squeaky clean, holier-than-thou reputation, with its products marketed towards both the ‘reassuringly expensive’ and ‘anti-global activist’ demographics. But although switching to organic may seem like a pricey lifestyle choice, it really should be a matter of common sense.

The countryside’s improved level of biodiversity is organic farming’s most obvious benefit. Organic farming works by growing nitrogen-fixing cover plants out of season for soil enrichment, rotating crops to prevent pest populations from growing, and supporting natural pest predator populations with set-aside areas of natural habitat. Some water soluble natural pesticides are permitted as long as they degrade rapidly. Also, unlike the synthetic novel chemicals of conventional agriculture, our bodies have evolved to cope with the active ingredients of natural pesticides. The highly intensive conventional approach may seem more efficient but with the reduced soil fertility associated with mechanisation and the continual struggle to out-innovate spray-resistant pests, conventional agriculture may prove less sustainable in the long term.

“Studies have shown that food from organic crops is healthier...”

However, self-motivated consumers are probably more concerned by the quality and health benefits of their food. Studies have shown that food from organic crops is healthier than conventionally produced crops, with increased levels of iron and vitamin C; which is nice but fairly superficial in a modern age without scurvy. However we still have cancer, and organic foods as diverse as maize and strawberries have been shown to have increased levels of anti-carcinogenic substances. They may taste better too. Although free range pigs raised under organic standards have a lower feed to body mass conversion rate than their incarcerated contemporaries, the opportunity to exercise develops their muscles, producing a leaner, redder meat that consumers prefer.

An even more potent argument for organics is the damage that we may do without them. The BSE disaster story, that has so far claimed 148 British victims, could not have happened under an organic farming practice.

The bovine disease is thought to have originated from cows’ feed that contained remains derived from carcasses of sheep infected with Scrapie.

The practice was banned by the EU, but has always been outlawed by organics.

Vegetarians may sigh with smug vindication, but if the great GM crops experiment goes wrong, it will affect everyone. A powerful gene promoter DNA sequence used to boost transgenic gene expression in GM crops has turned up in non-GM maize in Mexico. We know that horizontal gene flow of transgenes is a reality, and crops have long been known to hybridize with related weeds. The only question yet to be fully answered is whether the flow of transgenes has any undesirable ecological or

I, science

25 3/3/05 9:27:20 am

OPINION agronomic consequences. In any case GM crops are not even wanted in Britain. The only GM crop to be approved so far for commercial use, a herbicide-tolerant maize variety by Bayer CropScience, was quickly withdrawn shortly after approval in 2004 as it was not commercially viable.

Conventional agriculture is all about the short term; the soil’s shortterm productivity maximised by the farmer and maximising short-term wealth for the consumer. But for those with a more long term outlook, choosing organic food may seem like a more consistent option. n

space

Money lost in space Is space exploration really worth the astronomical price-tag? Emma-Lynn Donadieu thinks not.

I

T LANDED on the 14th January. An international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian space agency, the Huygens probe successfully touched down on Titan and was hailed by many as the next giant leap in space science. However, I have my doubts.

The original raw photos we received from this seven-year mission were decidedly unimpressive. Black and white grainy photos, somewhat resembling pictures taken by someone on a drunken night out with a camera-phone are not what we expected from a $3.2 billion initiative (it took 7 years to reach Saturn, by which time the digital camera had become impressively geriatric). Admittedly, the digital re-mastering and image ‘clean-up’ processing were excellent and the media was satisfied with tarted-up colour photos. But just how much faith can we have in digital photos that have been excessively tinkered with? Test images taken by the camera team on Earth before the mission to Saturn underwent one year of ‘cleanup processing work’ going far beyond the odd touch-up in Photoshop. With this amount of editing are we not merely viewing the work of space scientists’ fantasies?

“It is not just the Huygens probe that’s offensive, but space science in general.”

So what have we learned? Well, not that much actually because half of the data channels were not working. Instead of 700 ambiguous images, we received only 350. From these we have ascertained that there ‘seems’ to be evidence of drainage channels, ‘perhaps’ the presence of a shoreline and canyons that were ‘possibly’ carved by fluid. Caveat heaven for space scientists.

It is not just the Huygens probe that’s offensive, but space science in general. A multi-billion dollar ego-trip for Western civilisation which exploits the ideology of the exploration of space for the greater good, to research more sinister defence strategies. Perhaps a slight exaggeration? The U.S. Space Command in its ‘vision for 2020’ report did not hide its wish to establish military supremacy in space, and development is already underway for a range of chemical lasers, particle beams, and military space planes.

One also has to question Bush Junior’s motives behind a manned mission to Mars with its estimated price tag of $1 trillion. What exactly will it achieve other than footprints in Martian soil and a photo-shoot with the

26 I, science Opinion_final.indd 4

stars and stripes? They may bring back dusty samples containing the odd microbe - but then what? Putting aside the risk of Earth being contaminated by Martian pathogenic life, how will this discovery help the average person here on Earth?

Wasting money in space is not only an American hobbyhorse. Us Brits and our colleagues at the European Space Agency are equally to blame after the disastrous mission of Beagle 2, which bit the dust on Mars in 2003. A £50m investment including £25m of taxpayers’ money was literally ‘lost in space’ and added to the mounting junkyard of technological debris scattered around our solar system.

Without disputing the accomplishment of overcoming the inherent difficulties of space exploration, why do we need to put so much time, effort, and money into going into space? Those citing the honourable efforts made in search of comets and asteroids hurtling towards our little planet may do so. Unfortunately, should a comet or asteroid ever hit, it is likely to be one of the thousands we have not yet identified. And even if we did see one heading this way, there is not a lot we could do about it.

There are times I believe, when ignorance is bliss.

My one positive comment on space science is the everyday technology it provides for Earthly citizens’. Where would we be without the mechanical voice relaying directions via our car GPS systems, the joys of satellite TV, Teflon, and that ‘Frog’ ringtone emanating from our mobile phones? n

The rock in the cube Exploring the heavens is worth every penny we spend on it, argues Iain Taylor.

T

HE MUSEUM of Dar Es Salaam was dark and dingy, but refreshingly cool. In no particular order were cabinets of stone hand axes, AK47s, and pottery. But in the middle of the room, there it was: the perspex cube containing a lump of greyish-brown rock.

The gold plaque underneath read “Given to the United Republic of Tanzania by the United States of America.” A group of school-children crowded around and stared at the exhibit while their teacher talked about the solar system. What were they thinking? Staring at the moon-rock, I tried to appreciate how humans were capable of collecting an object from space and bringing it back to Earth.

What does this rock stand for? Has society directly benefited from our lunar landings and space exploration? The space race undoubtedly catalysed the development of computers and provided us with new technology, but will the findings of the recent Huygens mission really make any difference to our lives?

Space exploration epitomises a pure search for knowledge, which is a reason in itself. The successful Huygens mission represents a step towards an increased understanding of the solar system. It was a truly collaborative venture, enabling scientists to land a probe a billion kilometres away to learn about a moon of Saturn. This year, another spacecraft will intercept a comet travelling at 37,000 km/h, inside which they may find the building blocks of life.

“Space exploration epitomises a pure search for knowledge...”

Conspiracy theorists argue all these missions are really concerned with is pointing galactic missiles at people, but I don’t buy it. Today, space exploration is not about money or war. Star Wars, the Reagan pipedream, was dying even before the Berlin Wall collapsed. Space research is about the international pursuit of knowledge to shed light on the origins of the universe, and the search for extra-terrestrial life. Likewise the Hubble space telescope is not about material gain. It was built to disclose the secrets of the universe, and has revealed its spectacular beauty, generating pleasure and intrigue across the globe through its images.

The pieces of moon-rock scattered across the world’s museums represent more than significant milestones of space exploration: they represent what we are capable of in the search for knowledge. The lunar landings are also synonymous with pictures of the Earth from space, and perhaps we underestimate their impact on our consciousness. Images of our interdependent, frail blue planet in dark space heighten the realisation that we need to protect our Earth.

One thing that makes us human is our desire to explore and discover, to learn more about our surroundings and push back the frontiers of knowledge. In space, we continue to do this. As humans, it is natural for us to contemplate our own existence: where did we come from and what created our universe? These are the questions that have fascinated us for millennia, creating the foundations of the belief systems that supported our first societies. Space will one day provide us with the answers. n

Spring 2005

3/3/05 9:27:20 am

INTERVIEW

Olivia Judson ...talks to Basil Safwat about the complex interface between science and the media.

You’ve had an academic as well as a journalistic career.

When did you start writing?

I started freelancing during my first year as a PhD student. I was a biological sciences undergraduate in the States, then I came to the UK for a post-grad, doing my DPhil at Oxford. In the first year, as is often true, things were going badly, and I wanted to have something else in case things didn’t work out. So I started freelancing, writing a piece every few months, and I really enjoyed it.

Was that for the college paper?

Actually, I started freelancing for The Economist. So I was very lucky. Every year it has a three month internship for scientists who want to learn to write. You have to be under 25 and it’s all anonymous: no mastheads, no by-lines in The Economist. I was short-listed for the internship and went for an interview but didn’t get it. But having seen my writing, the science editor sent me a letter asking whether I’d like to freelance.

Can freelancing be demoralising?

It can be initially. But there are two parts to journalism: the first is knowing what is a good story and the second is writing it up. I was sending stories even though I couldn’t write them very well. But they almost always ran, and the best way to get better at writing is to write, getting feedback from editors. Also, if you are writing for an audience knowing it’s going to be published, you make more effort and concentrate harder which improves your writing.

Your father was a writer and had a long career in journalism. What influence has he had on your career?

I promised myself never to be a writer because it was an unpleasant thing to do! I still think it is.

I also avoided writing for years because I thought I wasn’t good at it. For years, my father would comment on my writing at school and that had an effect. I resisted like mad and I hated it, but over a long period of time having someone talking to you about what makes good writing helps.

Do editors spin science stories and look for negative effects research has had on people?

One of the nicest things about working for The Economist is that it’s very writer-driven. Unless

Spring 2005 Interviews_final.indd 7

someone has a big objection, you just go ahead and write the story you want to. It’s not nearly as subject to the constraints of selling headlines. Some newspapers just want to sell headlines, leading to the temptation to sensationalise.

The Economist is somewhat free from these tensions.

There was no pressure to take a political line?

We had arguments about things like cloning. The editorials would have to take a line arguing whether it should be illegal, but the same wasn’t true for the science section reporting on it. Another big argument was about whether vaccinations should be compulsory. I’d written a piece about the MMR scandal, and whether or not it causes autism – that scandal was real scaremongering of the worst kind.

Are scientists are out of touch with the public and the media?

With respect to becoming media savvy, the main thing is to able to talk honestly about what we actually feel and know. Somebody like Sir Jon Krebs, who was the first head of the Foods Standards Agency was very good, very direct and honest about what we know and don’t know. And the fact that Organic food is basically a rip-off.

Many science journalists have no background in science.

Do you think you have an advantage or disadvantage over them?

There are advantages and disadvantages of having a science background. You do have a good sense of what’s happening and what’s important. But a disadvantage is that sometimes you’re too close to the people you’re writing about and not terribly objective about the whole scientific enterprise. But the greatest scientists were also great writers. This is clear reading Peter Medawar, Francis Crick, or Jim Watson: The Double Helix is a masterpiece of science writing. It’s their ability to use simple language to transcend any technical jargon and their ability to know what the reader doesn’t know.

Do science journalists have different responsibilities to other journalists? Do they have to give equal credence to opposite views?

The standard journalistic approach of ‘someone says this, someone else says the opposite, and the truth is somewhere in the middle’ doesn’t work with science. The easiest science journalism is ‘this has been discovered, here are the implications’. With big features on something like the greenhouse effect, you can acknowledge that not everyone agrees, but you have to get some impression of where the majority of opinion lies. I think this has important implications.

The President of South Africa once suggested HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, a claim only a couple of scientists support. When The Sunday Times gave so much space to these people saying there wasn’t a connection, then you could argue they have contributed to a large number of deaths by giving additional credibility to the fringe and not to the consensus. This is one of the tensions within science journalism: what makes a good story is not always good science. We have to tell the difference and the obligation has got to be better science, not the story.

The research indicates that MMR is a good thing, but the public has absorbed a different view. Is it the fault of scientists or the media?

During the mad cow disease disaster, instead of saying “we don’t know, we don’t know… okay, now we have some data,” the government said “it’s safe, it’s safe…oops it’s not safe.” As a result, there’s not much confidence in public health pronouncements made by the government. Once the suspicion has been planted in people’s minds, it’s very difficult to remove it. The problem is that it’s easy to scaremonger and harder to say what the situation is. It’s the same for genetically modified crops – lots of scaremongering, ‘Frankenstein foods’ etc. The real situation is a complicated thing for journalists to explain: why it probably works, what we know about it, what we think the risks are – that’s much harder to explain than saying we’re tinkering with nature. I don’t know what the fuss is about GM food, to me it just sounds like an incredibly good idea!

Do scientists mostly prefer not to engage with the media?

I think most scientists don’t like talking to journalists. But if they get public money they should talk to the journalists covering their work. On the other hand there are nuances. For example, if someone phones me up to comment on something I know nothing about then I won’t talk.

I certainly have colleagues who don’t engage with the press.

I, science

27 3/3/05 9:29:49 am

BOOKS

Collapsed Ecologist Jared Diamond asks what we can learn about our own fate from the collapse of extinct societies.

Tom Simonite is by turns bored, stimulated, and a little worried.

Collapse

by Jared Diamond, Allen Lane ISBN 0713992867

W

HILE THE overall historical trend has been for the human race to ever increase its numbers, not every society has been a success story. Throughout history societies all over the world have over-stretched their resources, gone to the wall, and collapsed. Modern society is safe from such dangers though, isn’t it?

Diamond’s book draws upon examples of collapsed societies past, and near-collapses present, to show that perhaps we shouldn’t feel so secure. Many factors at play in the former are also at work in the latter, and could potentially drive our own society to collapse. As well as the ecological approach to human history used successfully in his last book, Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond draws on extensive economic evidence, but seems reluctant to dabble in politics.

In an introductory chapter Diamond describes the shape of his book as “a boa constrictor that has swallowed two very large sheep”. These corpulent sheep are manifested in an opening chapter on Montana, as rugged and mountainous as its subject, and the equally weighty chapters on societies past that follow it. His metaphor is sometimes unfortunately apt. These two massive sections would have been more effective after a little butchery, leaving just the juiciest cuts.

Huge numbers of facts are presented for each case study, and Diamond’s usual award-winning ability to present them readably seems to have malfunctioned. His writing is thickened by too many over-long, over-complex single sentences – this is a man who loves to list. He is unafraid to liberally deploy the full arsenal of commas, hyphens, semicolons and brackets even within a single sentence.

“...our society merrily continues to endanger its own existence.”

There is much of interest in these sections though. The environmental and attendant economic problems facing modern Montana, and the attitudes of its inhabitants, help the reader understand what those people in the historical examples that follow must have been feeling.

Having said that, many of the past happenings he describes are thoroughly alien to the modern, developed world reader. Diamond’s account of the denuded Easter Island landscape, after its inhabitants cleared every last tree, is slightly reminiscent of the UK, another formerly forested isle now much barer. Even after devolution, it is harder to picture warring regional leaders emerging. Competing to build ever bigger ceremonial statues at any expense, depleting all the resources until they are forced to resort to cannibalism for survival.

Other past collapses somewhat agonisingly paraded past the reader include the Native American Anasazi; the Mayan creators of the wellbuilt cities that decorate Central America’s forest 1200 years after construction; and the Viking colony of Greenland, the economy of which is singled out for an explicitly detailed dissection.

Although the modern examples of environmentally-caused disaster suffer from the same stylistic afflictions, they are more interesting, not only through their more obvious relevance, but because of the way Diamond brings his ecological approach to new territory. For example, he has a different interpretation to the usual political one of the mass killings that paralysed Rwanda in the mid-nineties. Just like some of the historical examples, it is rendered down to over-population causing economic problems and tensions between the haves and the have-nots over access to resources. This is not a case of a scientist reducing everything to ‘just science’. Diamond takes pains to explain that he is not being “ecologically determinist” and that the economic and population factors are just two

28 I, science Books_final.indd 2

of many at play. Ethnic tensions were important, but politicians could only play on them because of mounting desperation in an over-populated country running down its environment.

This example demonstrates something the book manages to achieve throughout – to ask the reader to look at our society in a different way.

Instead of being just peripheral issues, the way we use our resources and the mark this leaves on the world are brought firmly centre-stage. For Diamond these are the most important issues for any discussion of society, modern or ancient. Past societies that did not give them sufficient thought paid the price. If our society is to avoid a similar fate, perhaps we should take them a little more seriously.

This argument is built up in the fascinating final chapters, which consider the ‘practical lessons’ taught by the examples making up the bulk of the book. Diamond (at last) skilfully interprets the information vomited at the reader in the previous sections to describe the environmental traps that societies have consistently fallen into. It is all too easy to see that they still threaten society today. We still fail to anticipate problems and then fail to recognize them when they appear; even when we do, selfishness, short-term thinking and the self-absorption of those in power ensure we do not address them.

So, unsurprisingly, human nature is responsible for the way our society merrily continues to endanger its own existence, but not all Diamond’s examples are negative. Big business might be expected to take the role of villain, but examples of bad corporate behaviour appear alongside stories of other companies making money while safeguarding the environment.

The examples are good, but Diamond works hard to assert that shareholder demands for profit need not be compromised by making business sustainable. Similarly, he asserts that good management will ensure a sustainable future for all without anyone suffering a reduction in living standards. He demands a great deal of change, but seems to draw the line at any consideration of significant change to the politics of the developed world. In light of the huge volume of depressing facts about the number of people in the world and our suffering environment, it sometimes feels he is being too conservative.

This may be intentional. Collapse differs from Diamond’s other popular works because it has an agenda. He is arguing, and showing, that we need to do something about the environmental issues that have occupied much of his life as a scientist. While he presents his ecological and economic evidence in a balanced ‘scientific’ fashion, he understandably does not attempt this trick with the political issues involved. In fact, he largely skirts around politics. While it could be alleged that this leaves out a major piece of the puzzle, it is probably for the best. Most of his case is largely indisputable – unwieldy things like politics are left to the reader’s interpretation.

So should you rush out and buy this book, or tinned food for when Blair and Howard start building the statues? Despite presenting a case able to give even the most sceptical of environmentalists food for thought, Diamond reassures us that he is cautiously optimistic, but that considerable effort is needed to solve our problems.

His conviction that it is within our reach to solve them is reassuring, but this book will certainly not leave the reader feeling entirely secure. n

Monsters

David Quammen looks at our relationship with man-eating predators from a conservationist perspective. Iain Taylor is devoured, yet a bit hungry.

Monster of God

by David Quammen, Hutchinson ISBN 0091799570

T

HERE IS something about being eaten that really isn’t very nice. Being killed is one thing, being killed and eaten another. Yet, while looming in our worst nightmares, terrifying monsters that eat human flesh have fascinated us for millennia – from Beowulf to Alien. Man-eating beasts are as captivating in Hollywood blockbusters as they were in ancient folklore.

Monster of God by David Quammen explores the role of man-eating predators in our consciousness, providing a history of our conflicts with real “man-eaters”, and addressing our conservation efforts to preserve them. Quammen does not fully explore man-eating. Instead, the award

Spring 2005

3/3/05 9:09:53 am

BOOKS

Siberian tigers: not your ordinary pussy cats winning author of The Song of the Dodo focuses on conservation by taking us on a world tour involving Siberian tigers, brown bears, saltwater crocodiles and Asiatic lions.

This charismatic quartet provides the backdrop for Quammen’s investigation of man-eating as he visits researchers and people living amongst large carnivores. We meet some amazing characters living in remote places, typically shepherds trying to eke out a living in the wilderness. We share tea and vodka around their campfires and are regaled with predator anecdotes and tales of near misses.

“We meet some amazing characters living in remote places... we share tea and vodka around their campfires and are regaled with predator anecdotes...”

Quammen skilfully relates these anecdotes and describes the characters he meets and the lives they live. Almost a conservation travel writer, his Bill Bryson-like understatement and self-deprecating humour make this book very funny in places. His tale of a trip on the back of a snowmobile driven by a vodka-swilling Siberian tiger scientist is a particularly good example.

While Quammen is visiting this researcher in the Russian far east, a radio-collared study animal leaves his territory, walks into the village and eats the researcher’s dog. A seemingly vindictive act of retaliation for being darted, drugged, and collared by the researcher a few weeks before.

This amusing and well-related story highlights a serious problem facing Siberian tigers: they like the taste of dog, and happily go into villages to find one to eat – which often gets them shot. Throughout Monster of God, Quammen uses anecdotes like this to get across a serious conservation message: tigers and other animals are being killed through their complex co-existence with human civilization.

The book is also full of morbidly fascinating information. We learn that when a tiger attacks a person, it “will jump up and beat the human around the head or shoulders…a single blow is usually enough to shatter the skull or break the collar bone.” Similarly gruesome information on bear-mauling and croc attacks is also provided. In passing we are told that the ‘Champawat Tigress’, a record-breaking man-eater from Nepal, killed and ate over 200 people before crossing the border into India and claiming another 236 victims. She had killed at least 436 people before she was shot.

More so than the other three species, Asiatic lions seem to have been on the receiving end of human persecution. 2000 years ago, lions lived in Greece, Turkey and throughout the Middle East to central India. Slaughtered for centuries by the Romans and Assyrian Kings, the British colonial administrators finished off the last Middle Eastern lions in the 19th century. They would have probably completed the lion extermination across Asia had the Gir forest been better suited to hunting on horseback. The ‘sport’ of hunting lions and tigers was a popular pastime in colonial India.

While solitary tigers lived in inaccessible forests, the less secretive lions

Spring 2005

Books_final.indd 3

lived on open ground and suffered worse. Only a handful of survived and today there are around 200 wild lions in Asia. While discussing this systematic extermination and providing staggering statistics of the numbers of lions shot, Quammen argues persuasively that part of colonising a new land and its people is conquering the ecosystem itself. Big flesh-eating beasts that rule the woods, rivers and swamps need to be exterminated before you have truly colonised a land. You haven’t conquered a people and their place until you’ve exterminated their resident monsters.

Monster of God’s section on Asiatic lions vividly describes the relationship between India’s Gir forest lions and the Maldhari people who share the forest. The lions’ diets mostly consist of cows and goats belonging to the Maldhari. Armed with sticks, Maldhari shepherds try to protect their herds from these lions, sometimes resorting to a crack over the head to scare off the more persistent. Despite this, the Maldhari tolerate the lions and the two manage to co-exist. Regrettably, Quammen fails to make comparisons with the situation in East Africa – a glaring and frustrating omission. Like their Asian cousins, African lions are in conflict with poor rural people, but significant cultural differences affect how and why these cats are tolerated less in Africa. The complex relationship between the Maasai and lions would have illustrated this, further strengthening Quammen’s argument that a historical and cultural understanding of human-wildlife conflicts is vital in conservation.

While extremely readable, Quammen has tried to cram two books into Monster of God – one on large carnivore-human conflicts, another on man-eating predators. Livestock predation, not man-eating, is the main source of conflict between people and carnivores and perhaps this weak connection leads to neither being fully explored. Man-eating and the stigma it carries in many cultures is not really discussed, and Quammen seems reluctant to follow his exploration of the human-wildlife conflict to its logical conclusion – that the survival of many large animals depends on their being used as a resource. While I somewhat agree with Quammen when he says “the word ‘harvesting’ is an agronomic euphemism that intrudes constantly into discussion of wildlife exploitation”, it is vital the local people who have to live with large carnivores have incentives to put up with them.

Nonetheless, Monster of God is informative and highly enjoyable, and illustrates the complexities of modern conservation. It is an excellent introduction to large carnivore conservation, exposing the economic, political and social considerations needed to protect these impressive animals.

Unless we strive to protect them, large carnivores will be resigned to myth and zoo exhibits. Do we really want a world without monsters? n

Speed reading?

How long do you take to make decisions?

Nora Mulligan discovers we may all spend too much time thinking.

Blink

by Malcolm Gladwell, Allen Lane ISBN 0713997273

C

OLLECT ALL the evidence. Observe the situation from all angles. Evaluate the benefits and risks. Don’t rush your decision. Follow these steps and you are guaranteed to make the correct choice.

Right? Not necessarily.

Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer for The New Yorker, examines the time-old adages “haste makes waste” and “don’t jump to conclusions.” He reveals the unconscious mind’s ability to assemble a vast amount of information in a split second.

Each day people make multiple decisions. They can be fast and trivial, or serious and well thought-out. When people think consciously, they are using one system of thought. But a second system operates beyond our awareness. This is the adaptive unconscious. In a process termed ‘thinslicing’, the unconscious mind finds patterns in millisecond periods of experience. From this it can assemble a more accurate version of a situation than a two month analysis.

The adaptive unconscious is what provides us with the eerie feeling that we know something, even if we can’t figure out how we know it. A variety of people assert that this ‘hunch’ is closer to the ‘truth’ than the conclusions of lengthy rationalisation. The unconscious mind reads signals and processes things we are unaware of. Also, first impressions are unbiased, untainted by the rational preconceptions of a social history.

I, science

29 3/3/05 9:09:54 am

BOOKS Gladwell sketches the power and behaviour of this kind of rapid cognition using a series of vignettes that under different circumstances. He opens with a story that challenges the notion that science can reveal all.

A statue is deemed authentic by all the evidence and documentation.

But, several art experts feel immediately that it is fake. They turn out to be correct. Something in their first glimpse of the piece told them, even if they could not instantly prove or explain how they knew it was counterfeit.

One may be sceptical at first. Some examples fit the theory a bit too easily. Besides, we’ve been programmed our whole lives to make decisions rationally, weighing up all options carefully. Gladwell acknowledges this and provides instance after instance to persuade the reader otherwise. He weaves stories of psychology, car sales tricks, marketing tests, mathematical algorithms, orchestral auditions, and medical case studies to illustrate the prevalence of thin-slicing. He also tells the other side of the story – situations where the adaptive unconscious fails and more importantly, why. Suspicion put me off at first but Gladwell’s case is a richly illustrated, coherent and readable whole.

“The unconscious mind finds patterns in milliseconds of experience...”

One must be cautious though. This book is not a manifesto on tossing out the rules and living by gut instinct alone. The adaptive unconscious has limitations. There are situations in which it gets thrown off track, for one reason or another. Yet, the process of rapid cognition can be honed by practice. People can learn to see and understand the signals in the first seconds of an encounter that they were once unaware existed. And the information gained in this millisecond can make all the difference. n

tear up. In it he looked for the appearance of another genius to succeed Einstein. This hopeful outlook is still visible in the rest of the book, which is full of chirpy 1970s optimism about the future of theoretical physics.

The old-fashioned feel of this work does not detract from its central message. Despite the slightly musty style, Calder’s explanations of Einstein’s theories remain possibly the clearest available. Using easily understood analogies, Calder makes the hazy landscape of relativity plain without talking down to his audience. By avoiding the patronising tone of other popular science books, Calder’s work is just as readable and enjoyable as it must have been 25 years ago.

He also provides an authentic feel for the man who created these timeless and complex theories – a humbling experience for the reader. Albert Einstein was born in 1879, one hundred years before me. By the time he turned 26 in 1905 he had published three seminal papers and turned the world of physics on its head. I’m now the same age as Einstein was when he came up with Special Relativity, and I can’t help feeling like I have some catching up to do. n

Time travel spans the centuries Nora Mulligan does the time warp with an old classic and a new arrival.

Einstein for dummies Brian Owens on a book that achieved the almost impossible.

Einstein’s Universe: The Layperson’s Guide

by Nigel Calder, Penguin Press ISBN 0141020563

E

INSTEIN’S THEORIES are notoriously difficult to understand. As Nigel Calder suggests in his opening chapter: “with hindsight it seems that a generation of mathematical physicists had no vivid grasp of the theory themselves.” For years it was assumed the theory of General Relativity was too dense even for scientists, let alone ordinary people.

A quarter of a century ago, on the centenary of Einstein’s birth, Nigel Calder set out to change that by making relativity clear to all.

By all accounts, he succeeded. The 1979 edition of Einstein’s Universe was hailed as a groundbreaking work. For the first time, he explained Einstein’s propositions about time, gravity, and high-speed travel in a way that could be understood by a wide audience. It became a classic of popular science writing, an introduction to Einstein for scientists and non-scientists alike. To celebrate the International Year of Physics and the 100th anniversary of the publication of those three famous papers, Penguin is re-releasing Einstein’s Universe to help a new generation get to grips with relativity.

“For the first time, he had explained Einstein’s propositions... in a way that could be understood by all.”

Calder has kept the book essentially unchanged. The only alteration is a new after-word discussing the experiments in relativity over the past 25 years. It replaces the final chapter of the original, which Calder had to

30 I, science Books_final.indd 4

The Time Traveller’s Wife

by Audrey Niffenegger, Vintage ISBN 0099464462

The Time Machine

by H. G. Wells, Penguin Books ISBN 0141439971

“C

AN A CUBE that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?” The concept described by the Time Traveller in the opening scene of The Time Machine by Imperial College alumnus H. G. Wells is a fascinating one. Can something exist in only three dimensions? Isn’t the fourth dimension of time necessary? What makes this dimension different from its more familiar length, width, and height counterparts? If you can move in space, why is it not possible to move in time?

Over a hundred years after H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine (rereleased by Penguin Classics on 31 March), time travel continues to fuel great and intricate plots. In her debut novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger explores the concept of time travel within the context of love and biology. While H. G. Wells’ Time Traveller builds a working Time Machine used to travel forward and backward in time, the Niffenegger’s ‘Chrono-Displaced Person’ travels involuntarily. Henry DeTamble has a genetic disorder that causes him to literally disappear into thin air, leaving his clothes and anything else he has on his body behind.

Unlike the Time Traveller of the 19th century, this modern traveller has no control over when he leaves his chronological present or to which time he travels, making for some tricky situations.

Both authors use time travel to explore issues beyond the complexities of moving in the fourth dimension. Wells anchors his plot in social and political questions of evolution and the ideal society. When the Time Traveller first arrives, he believes he’s travelled to a world where society has no class divisions, where everything is equal. Instead, he is in a world where the human species has diverged into two flawed lineages, evolving backward from perfection.

Niffenegger uses her narrative to examine the emotional issues Henry DeTamble faces in trying to maintain ‘normal’ relationships with the people in his life, especially his wife. Within these relationships, the characters struggle through many moral and emotional situations. Most powerfully, the ethics surrounding gene therapy become vivid to the reader as the couple contemplate the risks of conceiving a child. These parallel many of the controversies within genetics today.

Each March, plant shoots push through the earth. Animals come out of hibernation. Spring is a time for renewal, rebirth. My advice: grab a comfortable patch of ground and immerse yourself in a thought-provoking, poignant new novel and revisit a classic tale to contemplate how you envision time. Maybe, like a lifecycle, it is not linear and uni-directional after all. n

Spring 2005

3/3/05 9:09:54 am

INTERVIEW

O, my Ghosh! Pallab’s back

Iain Taylor talks to Pallab Ghosh, the BBC’s science correspondent, about journalism, Hutton and editing Felix.

Do you have fond memories of Felix?

It was great fun. When I took it over, Felix had a great tradition of being independent, and we quite enjoyed satirising College and the people. As far as I know, I was the only Felix editor to so enrage the Rector, it was Lord Flowers at the time, that he produced a rival newspaper called Fido containing all sorts of salacious and exaggerated gossip about me. It was wonderful and the thing that made me decide to be a journalist. I initially got involved with Felix since my friend in halls was working in Felix and he encouraged me to come along and meet the editor. It seemed like a nice social group, and I got involved in photography and layout. It was in the days of cut and paste, so there were many technical layout and design issues.

What did you study as an undergraduate?

I studied physics. I didn’t get very good marks in physics – I got a degree, but I was obviously not going to set the world alight. I didn’t think that I’d be a journalist, partly because of my background. Although I grew up in this country, English wasn’t my first language – I could speak it quite well, but my grammar and spelling were atrocious. I think a lot of people from poorer, disadvantaged backgrounds feel that, and that’s partly why when at the Association of British Science Writers (ABSW) I set up this scheme to try to help people from disadvantaged backgrounds get onto MSc science communication courses like the ones at Imperial.

Was the problem with physics that your time was being taken up by Felix?

No, it was because physics was hard! A lot of people who go to Imperial are top of their class in school and then find they’re at best mediocre amongst an exceptionally gifted bunch of people. I knew I wasn’t going to be a good scientist, and so decided to edit the newspaper instead. Unfortunately I couldn’t write to save my life! I could do the layout and design, and I

Spring 2005 Interviews_final.indd 5

thought I could get my staff to write the news stories, people to write features, and my girlfriend at the time to write the editorial. When I took over it was a month before the first issue deadline and while concentrating on the design, I kept asking my girlfriend to write the editorial early because I was feeling anxious about it. She kept saying she needed to wash her hair or do the shopping – the things girlfriends say when they don’t want to do something – and it became quite obvious she wasn’t going to write it. At the very last minute I had to write to save my life, or it wasn’t going to get published. I realised I could write after all.

What is your position within the BBC? I am one of the science correspondents here.

There are four of us because BBC News has expanded so much recently. When I first started at the Beeb, I was doing science stories for all the radio and TV – I was completely exhausted. Now I focus mostly on radio. The Today programme is the most important customer in radio, but I’ll also do TV when I’ve got a story.

I find it a nice balance. Now I’ve got a bit more time, I can actually find my own stories rather than just responding to the diary.

Do the public want to know about science?

I think so. The only thing I have to go on is that there’s a big appetite for science stories.

You must know from your own interaction with people who aren’t scientists that they tend to be interested. People followed Beagle very closely, they follow the stem cell debate.

Perhaps people aren’t interested in studying science, or in becoming science teachers, but I think people are interested in the whole area.

Were you in favour of the decision to dumb down Horizon recently?

Have they tried to dumb down Horizon? I think that perhaps years ago BBC2 lost its way slightly. Channel 4 was going great guns with innovative broadcasting, and it’s my own per-

sonal view that BBC2 had a bit of an identity crisis. It wanted to be innovative but had to keep one eye on its ratings. You mustn’t think of the BBC as one entity, with one evil genius in charge of it all. It’s a large organisation with different people doing different things.

Production teams differ between Horizon programmes, and the apparent ‘dumbing down’ may have just been down to one production team.

The Hutton report had a big effect on reporting in the BBC, but science news is generally assumed to be impartial. Has the report affected science reporting by the BBC at all?

No, but remember that Susan Watts (BBC Newsnight science editor) was a key player in that affair and picked up the same WMD story. In fact, this illustrates my point on there being grey areas: there are lots of government scientists that tend to talk to science correspondents rather than defence correspondents. Gilligan was a defence correspondent so David Kelly spoke to him as well. I think it’s made us think about our own reporting and our own standards of reporting. Generally, we do ok, but the whole David Kelly/Hutton thing reminds us not to be complacent. There are various things the Beeb has done to try and go back to core values I suppose. It sounds like flag-waving, but one thing that still distinguishes the BBC is the freedom its journalists have to tell a story as they see it. Many of my science correspondent colleagues, even those on the broadsheets, get told what to write.

As a public service corporation, does the government instruct the BBC on the amount of science it has to report on?

No, that would be appalling! One of the things I did when I was at the ABSW as chair was to make it quite clear that the job of the science journalist isn’t primarily to educate. It might have that effect, but I’ve been trying to get science journalists to be journalists again.

There’s been a tradition for science journalists to be translators – to be part of the whole education movement. In other countries they call it ‘popularization’. It’s a laudable aim and important for society, but what’s also important is to hold people to account and put them under scrutiny. If we spend all our time saying how fantastic everything is, then we don’t do our jobs properly.

I, science

31 3/3/05 9:31:12 am

An article in New Scientist in early February about How World Ends has put everything in the right perspective. Within 100 million years, the planet would cease to be habitable, and it could be even earlier, much earlier. Changes in entire environment and climate changes often happen in the planet’s life cycle, but adding an “enzyme” such as global pollution, with man-made gases, can make it happen much more rapidly.

Humans have contemplated the reason for their existence since the dawn of time. There has never been a time when humans did not think of a reason for their existence. Over the years, scientific discoveries have enabled us to develop a better understanding of world and how things work, and we have developed the concept of a ‘world view’, with it has evolved the comprehension of the world-view concept. People have, however, become often divided in their views and the paths they wish to take towards the self realisation.

How we see the world, where we find ourselves, and how much more there is to know and discover. They have sought to belong to groups of people with a common belief through religion, which shapes their attitude toward the new discoveries. Belonging to group of people with a common belief: this is religion. The interpretation of scientific facts in the factfed media. People will always try to understand the “creation”. Look around you. The amount of power, be it physical or that of a deity, necessary to create THIS, what exist all around us, would have been quite extraordinary. From the discovery of fire, we always seek to find ways of creating such energies and methods of how to use it. Having discovered nuclear power helps. It could have a positive effect on our evolution in the future, as we can learn, by researching it, by testing it, how it could be safely harnessed. But making mistakes can prove to have very disastrous effect. Take industry driven global warming as an example.

The clue is to have a wide viewpoint towards everything so you can grasp as much knowledge as possible in order to reach the correct conclusion about certain theories. The earthquake that shook Alaska in 1964 has sped up the rotation of the Earth and enlarged its wobble, causing the length of a day to shrink permanently by 3 millionths of a second. It also moved the North Pole one inch. The outcome of this is that in about 1000 years the length of the day would be extended by a second. I understand more when it is explained, hence science makes more logical sense to me.

Thus Science is what I believe more than religion, which to me, is more about human wisdom writings, rules and protocols people should adhere to for a ”happy” living. My point is the world as we know it is changing radically. Changes inflicted upon current environment are not helping.

Testing nuclear technology in a desert may be “safe” but everything has a domino effect, especially in this fragile world. The Tsunamis and earthquakes, and Global Warming I doubt are accidental, I think the main cause of these is human negligence towards the environment. For example the well known changes we experience, if they get noticed, like the earthquake which moved New York up and down 2 inches, that with so few people noticing it does make you ask whether THIS is ‘life as we know contents.indd 4

it’? All is not forever, and how lucky you are to exist now. The more I think about it, the more I come to a conclusion that the recently made Day after Tomorrow movie, does show quite explicitly what we are going to face. The movie showed what the results would be like of the changing environment, radically changing weather, freak/unusual weather in places, sudden subzero temperature drops and so on. Einsteins are not born everyday, and if they would be, I doubt they could draw up the correct sequence from those first events that created our planet, and life with it, as we know it. It’s a complex paradox and at the same time a sequence of events. I guess that is what people refer to as God. One thing you definitely should not think too much about is that 100 million years is way much out of your range of life. So, I guess, make the most of your life, contribute something to the society, to help future generations. What was given to us/what we have here, the planet, life, environment needs to be taken care of. Just using it up sounds like a line from the movie “The Matrix” that “humans are the plague…”.

Our Environment is fragile, just like everything else on our planet it can end. If we do not make changes, or take precautions, this end can come very soon. We should be careful and use the natural resources more wisely. Government should plan ahead, and think of different ways of pro-

cross the river safely, to escape the pharaoh’s army, is still not disproved.

It is interesting thing however, if God, the single invisible entity many people believe in, does exist, and is all all-existent, always and everywhere, then where does that leave our world? 1.6 billion years from now and Earth would have been ruptured by volcanoes, lost much of its atmosphere, and frozen over, with Sun glowing afar. Will God exist even then, without us, possibly creating other worlds? Where would that leave our solar system? With Sun most likely ending as a red dwarf?

The Milky Way colliding with a neighbouring galaxy, or expanding away? Or all together being consumed by our galaxy’s centred black hole which is 1000’s of times greater that our Sun? How will it end?You can only estimate, based on your personal religious, philosophical or scientific beliefs. Also since these are still the early years of the rapid technological advancement, scientists have a great deal yet to explain. One day maybe science would be able to answer the “creation” in greater detail. All that is needed is time. It is hard to say now if science can co-exist with religion, I do hope so, but some things in Bible are really old, do we really have a better understanding of the universe than we did 5 thousand years ago? However, Religion must always be taken into account, for moral and ethical considerations.

ducing energy. Everyone knows that once natural resources are used up, that is it, there is no more. Then again, little is known about what is being done, what are the plans for the future, when it does happen. Being just religious does not help, learning to be paid does not help the environment either. Only when each and everyone of us does their “bit”.

Then, and only then we can see the change and preserve the nature’s balance for longer. However, with current population and industry growth, the fact is that it is inevitable that we are going to run out of natural resources such as crude oil and gas.

Therefore, there should be an ongoing research for a “plan B” energy solution, so we can turn to that, when the threshold of energy usage is met.

I want to draw your attention to the main point which is that religion shapes the way the mind is developed, the philosophy, the basic rules of society one may say, but I consider this is as far as it can go. Science itself can and does try to explain the creation in a more logical manner.

With religion, in this case, the explanation of “how the world was made” is not specific, conclusive, nor complete. There are, however things, that science, today, is not capable of explaining. Such as findings in Egypt of ancient objects at the bottom of the Nile such as cutlery, weapons and other items, discovered where many believe Moses parted the sea and lead the way out of Egypt for the Jewish people. How they happen to be there, is not yet known, thus the idea that water was split and moved out of the way, aside, allowing people to

An article in New Scientist in early February about How World Ends has put everything in the right perspective. Within 100 million years, the planet would cease to be habitable, and it could be even earlier, much earlier. Changes in entire environment and climate changes often happen in the planet’s life cycle, but adding an “enzyme” such as global pollution, with man-made gases, can make it happen much more rapidly.

Humans have contemplated the reason for their existence since the dawn of time. There has never been a time when humans did not think of a reason for their existence. Over the years, scientific discoveries have enabled us to develop a better understanding of world and how things work, and we have developed the concept of a ‘world view’, with it has evolved the comprehension of the world-view concept. People have, however, become often divided in their views and the paths they wish to take towards the self realisation.

How we see the world, where we find ourselves, and how much more there is to know and discover. They have sought to belong to groups of people with a common belief through religion, which shapes their attitude toward the new discoveries. Belonging to group of people with a common belief: this is religion. The interpretation of scientific facts in the factfed media. People will always try to understand the “creation”. Look around you. The amount of power, be it physical or that of a deity, necessary to create THIS, what exist all around us, would have been quite extraordinary. From the discovery of

I, sci

fire, we always seek to find ways of creating such energies and methods of how to use it. Having discovered nuclear power helps. It could have a positive effect on our evolution in the future, as we can learn, by researching it, by testing it, how it could be safely harnessed. But making mistakes can prove to have very disastrous effect. Take industry driven global warming as an example.

The clue is to have a wide viewpoint towards everything so you can grasp as much knowledge as possible in order to reach the correct conclusion about certain theories. The earthquake that shook Alaska in 1964 has sped up the rotation of the Earth and enlarged its wobble, causing the length of a day to shrink permanently by 3 millionths of a second. It also moved the North Pole one inch. The outcome of this is that in about 1000 years the length of the day would be extended by a second. I understand more when it is explained, hence science makes more logical sense to me.

Thus Science is what I believe more than religion, which to me, is more about human wisdom writings, rules and protocols people should adhere to for a ”happy” living. My point is the world as we know it is changing radically. Changes inflicted upon current environment are not helping.

Testing nuclear technology in a desert may be “safe” but everything has a domino effect, especially in this fragile world. The Tsunamis and earthquakes, and Global Warming I doubt are accidental, I think the main cause of these is human negligence towards the environment. For example the well known changes we experience, if they get noticed, like the earthquake which moved New York up and down 2 inches, that with so few people noticing it does make you ask whether THIS is ‘life as we know it’? All is not forever, and how lucky you are to exist now. The more I think about it, the more I come to a conclusion that the recently made Day after Tomorrow movie, does show quite explicitly what we are going to face. The movie showed what the results would be like of the changing environment, radically changing weather, freak/unusual weather in places, sudden subzero temperature drops and so on. Einsteins are not born everyday, and if they would be, I doubt they could draw up the correct sequence from those first events that created our planet, and life with it, as we know it. It’s a complex paradox and at the same time a sequence of events. I guess that is what people refer to as God. One thing you definitely should not think too much about is that 100 million years is way much out of your range of life. So, I guess, make the most of your life, contribute something to the society, to help future generations. What was given to us/what we have here, the planet, life, environment needs to be taken care of. Just using it up sounds like a line from the movie “The Matrix” that “humans are the plague…”.

Our Environment is fragile, just like everything else on our planet it can end. If we do not make changes, or take precautions, this end can come very soon. We should be careful and use the natural resources more wisely. Government should plan ahead, and think of different ways of producing energy. Everyone knows that once natural resources are used up, that is it, there is no more. Then again, little is known about what is being done, what are the plans for 3/3/05 12:55:02 pm