Brian Clegg's Blog, page 111

Get it right, BBC

I was watching the BBC school soap Waterloo Road the other day, and ended up rolling all over the floor moaning. Because we saw a 'science teacher' making one of the most basic possible errors. Would they have allowed an English teacher to write on a board that Hamlet was written by T. S. Eliot? Or a geography teacher to note down the capital of France as Belgium? I would hope not. Yet this is a comparable error. Take a look at this little snap.



What is she doing? It seems she has invented a new kind of hydrogen peroxide that is made up of H-squared and O-squared. I have no idea what a squared atom is, and I wait with interest to see the BBC's drama department explaining all about these new particles. At the very least, I would expect a squared atom would enable us to perform cold fusion.

In the meanwhile I just don't understand what kind of editing process at the BBC can allow H2O2 to be written as H2O2. I can only assume every single person involved didn't even manage to get a science GCSE. And that says something very sad about the whole TV drama world.

How very different from the home life of our own dear animals

In my long project to digitize old photos I've just done some from my first visit to London in 1963. My mum was taking her teaching finals, so my dad took me away for three days in the capital. I have to say, as a father-son bonding exercise it was brilliant. We had a great time, staying in a (rather scruffy) hotel in Russell Square, eating in a brilliant Italian restaurant (the first time I'd ever come across raffia-covered bottles and candles that dripped wax down over their bottle supports - actually, the first time I'd eaten Italian food) and seeing all the usual sights.

But what really caught my eye looking at the photos was not the guards at the Tower of London or the other famous buildings, it was a couple of pictures from a visit to London Zoo. At the time there were two animals that were by far the most famous in the land, Chi Chi the panda and Guy the gorilla, both were based in Regent's Park. I have photos of each of them and what stands out to me is how appalling the conditions were that these animals were kept in.

Remember these were the best known, star animal attractions in the whole country. Even up in the wilds of Rochdale I knew both of them by name. Yet we see Guy in a featureless concrete cell and Chi Chi, while at least given some space and a tyre, still in a stark, concrete environment with no attempt to make it feel like nature.

I think it is worth taking a look at these just to see how much the whole zoo business has come on since my youth. There are those who doubt the benefits of zoos, but I think on the whole they do serve a useful purpose, both in terms of education/increasing interest in zoology and in breeding programmes. But when you see those photos there can be little doubt at all that we have got a whole lot better at it since the swinging 60s.

I can't help wonder what zoologists of the time were thinking. It's hardly rocket science to realize that a gorilla, say, is not going to be happy in an environment like that. It's not a matter of animal rights, it would be enough to have a concern for the wellbeing of your specimens. Looking back, it boggles the mind.

Is there a law of the excluded middle?

I have just finished reading the excellent Inventing Reality for review, a great book that both outlines the essentials of physics and looks into what physics is really doing. It has a fascinating argument about the law of the excluded middle, which I just have to pass on.

The law of the excluded middle essentially says that a statement must be either true or false. Apart from tricksy statements like 'This statement is false', most mathematicians and all physicists seem to assume that this is true, that a statement has to be either true or false. But is really the case?

Bruce Gregory uses a simple, and apparently non-tricksy statement as an example. Here's a conjecture: 'A woman will never be elected president of the United States of America.' Is that true or false? As Gregory says, 'if we insist it must be one or the other, we seem to be committing ourselves to a future that somehow already exists, for the truth or falsity of the statement depends on events that have not yet occurred.'

Just think about that for a moment. We can certainly say it is very likely that there will be a woman president elected at some point in the future, but I can also posit a range of scenarios where it never comes to pass. We can't say that this statement is definitely true or false. And if that's the case, argues Gregory, might it not also be true of a mathematical conjecture, like the Goldbach conjecture (saying that every even number larger than 2 can be written as the sum of two primes)? Obviously this could be proved false, all we need to do is come up with a single even number that isn't the sum of two primes, but it is entirely possible that the conjecture will never have a definitive outcome.

The same, Gregory suggests, could be true of some aspects of physics. We can't assume that, say, String theory will ever be proved true or false. (Where 'true' or 'false' does not mean matches reality, as we have no idea what reality truly is. Rather it means 'successfully predicts measurable outcomes'.) Which makes for some interesting thinking about physics, the universe and everything.

Better bikes

If I am honest, as a driver I hate bikes on the road. Even when they don't misbehave, they can be difficult to pass on narrow roads (of course, I always leave plenty of space), and few things are more irritating than when the same bike keeps undertaking you in traffic, then you have to pass it again, then it undertakes you again...

And, of course, like many others I have witnessed far too many bad practices from bikes. (If you are a biking enthusiast, don't get on your high horse - er, saddle - I see plenty of bad practices from drivers too, but I am talking about bikes here.) The majority in these parts seem to think it's okay to ride at night without lights. I've seen bikes riding three-abreast, totally blocking the carriageway. And I've pulled out at a T-junction traffic light only to have a bike ram into the side of me because he thought traffic lights didn't apply to him.
There's no doubt that bikes do irritate motorists - and a lot of it is down to fear. Drivers genuinely don't like going near bikes because they are aware of the damage they could cause.
Our bike-friendly footpathRound our way, we have a much better solution. Almost all our pavements are bike/pedestrian. And it works. There is no danger of knocking a bike over when you are driving, because they aren't on the road. Of course there is always a risk from mixing bikes and pedestrians, but in my experience round here, the bikes are fairly careful (in part because these clearly aren't pure bike lanes) and though I have seen a few near misses I'd rather see a bike/pedestrian collision than a car/bike one.
I ought to stress that our pavements are not mega-wide, two lane, bike ways. They are just ordinary pavements - perhaps slightly wider than some, but not hugely so. There is no doubt this approach could be taken in many more places. And maybe it would even save some lives.

Why today's time machines don't disappear

I love giving talks about the science of time travel as a result of Build Your Own Time Machine - and I can't help but feel there will be a few more as we lead up to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who in November. I usually start by pointing out that there is nothing in the laws of physics that prevents time travel. In fact it's happening all the time. The best manmade examples? Voyager 1 has travelled 1.1 seconds into the future, while the GPS satellites constantly slip into the past. Often people don't believe me - and they have a good, if invalid, reason for this disbelief.

The thing is, when a time machine moves into the future or the past it disappears, doesn't it? The Tardis does, and so did H. G. Wells' time machine. But Voyager and the GPS satellites stubbornly insist on still being there. This is because it's something fiction gets wrong. Most time machines don't disappear as they travel through time. Let's take a look at those two examples, but exaggerate the effect to see what's going on.

We'll start with the simpler one, travelling into the future. Anything that moves has a time stream that slows down compared with the place it is moving with respect to. So when, for instance Voyager 1 flies away from the Earth, its time runs slower. This is a well tested and inevitable effect of special relativity. So let's imagine that Voyager 1 travels much closer to the speed of light than it actually does. And now we use a magic telescope that allows us to see from the Earth into Voyager 1, so we can watch its clock. We would see the clock running incredibly slowly. When a year has passed by on the Earth, perhaps just a second has ticked past on the clock. So after 10 years, just 10 seconds has passed by on the probe. If Voyager 1 arrived back at the Earth at this point, it would have moved 10 years into Earth's future.

Now here's the thing. For that whole 10 years we still see Voyager 1 - we just see its clock ticking past very slowly indeed. It doesn't disappear, we continue to see it. But hang on, you might say, this is cheating. Voyager isn't really moving into the future, it just looks like that because its clock seems to be running slowly. But this isn't a 'seems to be' (as it is sometimes described even in popular science books). From the Earth's viewpoint that clock really is running slowly. As is everything else on board. If Voyager was much bigger and had a crew then the people on the ship will only have aged 10 seconds and experienced 10 seconds passing by. They really have travelled into the future.

(If you are wondering why time only slows on the ship, you are a clever person. Special relativity works both ways. From the ship's viewpoint, the Earth is moving away at high speed, and to anyone on Voyager, time on the Earth seems to run slowly. But the situation isn't symmetrical. The ship undergoes acceleration at both ends of its trip that the Earth doesn't, and it is this acceleration that means the ship experiences something different to the Earth.)

So to the more unlikely aspect of time travel. Because heading off to the future doesn't risk any strange paradoxes, but should you travel into the past, surely all those funny things like killing your parents before you are born can happen? Let's take a look at the GPS satellite.

The satellite is moving, so seen from the Earth, just like Voyager 1, the satellite's time runs a bit slower because of special relativity. But there is a second effect here which operates in the opposite direction and is more significant. General relativity shows us that gravity slows time down. The stronger the gravitational field, the slower time runs. So time runs faster on the GPS satellite than it does on the Earth. The opposite effect to Voyager 1, so the satellite moves into the future. Again, let's imagine the (tiny) effect is hugely exaggerated and every second that passes on Earth, a year passes on the satellite. So after 10 seconds passes on the Earth, the satellite is pretty well 10 years ahead. Once more, if we watch the satellite travel through time, we don't see it disappear. We just see its clocks run really quickly.

So let's finish the time voyage. On the satellite, say, it is 2023, while it is 2013 on the Earth. So the satellite pops down to Earth and moves ten years into the past. Whizzo magico. Only here's the thing - it can't move back before it was first set up, because time doesn't go backwards on the Earth, it just runs very slowly from the satellite's viewpoint. So it can't go back into the past (or peer down at Earth and discover next week's lottery results) or do something that will effect the future, because the Earth's future hasn't happened yet. The future it has moved from is its own. Like Voyager, it might seem that this cheating, but it really isn't. For instance, if people lived on that GPS satellite, in the 10 seconds that elapsed on Earth, they could do 10 years of work and bring back with them newly written novels etc., bringing them from the future to the past. They just couldn't get up to any tricksy paradoxes.

If you find this all rather disappointing, there is a third class of time machine where you would disappear, and where paradoxes are possible. These are the ones depending on wormholes, neutron star cylinders and the like which won't be around for millions of years and may never be possible to construct. But you shouldn't be disappointed by what is possible now, because we still have the amazing fact that both backward and forward travelling time machines exist today.

Seriously strange? Strangely serious

Conference registration in action - and not a vampire in sightI had the pleasure of spending the day at Bath University on Saturday, taking part in the Serious Strange conference. This was the annual get-together of ASSAP (the Assocation for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena). Not surprisingly I got the invitation to appear on a panel there as a result of writing  Extra Sensory .

Now, if I'm honest, one or two scientists of my acquaintance have been a bit snarky about my attending this event, suggesting it would be a load of woo, and that it would be frequented by weirdos who probably dress up as ghouls or vampires or something. I'm pleased to reveal they were wrong on both counts.

I really would say there was no big difference between the attendees and those I'd come across at a science festival with two slight variants that there were probably more women and definitely fewer children - in fact no children - but this was a conference rather than a festival. Yes there were one or two strange people, but that's just a fact of life when you gather together 250 people with a strong interest in any subject - but that vast majority were rational, intelligence, interesting folk that just happen to take an interest in the paranormal.

As for the 'load of woo', certainly there were some topics covered that were on the edge science-wise (ghosts, UFOs and such, and particularly EVP), but some took a decidedly sceptical approach. It was interesting that in the panel I took part in (looking at whether or not parapsychology has achieved anything), there was much more interest in studying why humans believe in such strange phenomena, rather than investigating the phenomena themselves. So this was only worrying stuff if you count psychology, sociology and anthropology as woo. They may not be the hardest of sciences, but they are without doubt 'ologies' as Maureen Lipmann used to say on the BT ad. In fact the discussion proved to be both interesting and academic in tone.

So I'm glad I went, and send a loud raspberry to those who were prepared to dismiss the whole thing without even finding out what it really was about. It's a bit like the infamous quote from Richard Dawkins, when asked to consider the evidence for parapsychology. 'I'm not interested in evidence,' Dawkins is alleged to have said. Not being interested in evidence? Now that IS woo.

Amazon plays guess the IRS

... but only if you get US tax info rightAmerican citizens may be delighted to hear that they aren't the only ones who suffer at the hands of the IRS. If you are a foreigner who earns money in the US (for example, an author with a US publisher), you need to be registered with the IRS, which in my case involved having to take a form to the US Embassy in London with my passport and generally mess about to get a magic number called an ITIN.

So far, so good. Generally speaking, when I deal with a publisher I just give them my ITIN and it all works, but I have just spent a very silly time playing games with Amazon, because they don't make it so easy. To be able to publish Kindle ebooks, you have to fill in an online tax form. But here's the thing. Unless the details you fill in (about ten different items) exactly match the details they have from the IRS, it is rejected. But they don't tell you what you got wrong.

Now I have various bits of documentation from the IRS, all with subtly different variants of the information. So the guessing game starts. It took me three tries to guess the information that the online system wanted me to give.

Arrggh. Sound of hair being torn out.

You'd think Amazon wasn't a global company, like they keep claiming to be when they are avoiding tax. I'm sure a true global company would manage to handle tax in your own country.

Assumptions, assumptions

Creativity Unleashed Limited - spot the cognitive dissonanceWhen I'm training businesses in creativity techniques, one of the first things I try to hammer into them is that assumptions kill creativity. We all make assumptions all the time. How we do things. What's allowed (and what's not). What's possible (and what's not). The rules. And so on. And every one of these assumptions gets in the way of being creative. Throw them out and you can solve many more problems. Of course, you might break the law in the process. But this isn't a problem.

Why? Because it is much easier to take a wonderful, attractive, but impractical idea and make it practical than it is to take a dull but practical idea and make it wonderful and attractive. So banish assumptions to begin with when trying to be creative, then re-impose them later as you refine your ideas and make them usable.

Sometimes assumptions can be downright dangerous, as I discovered in my teens. On my way to school I used to walk through the centre of Manchester, a busy city in the North of England. I went the same route every day and I knew which of the streets I crossed were one way streets. So like many apparently streetwise city dwellers I tended to show off my knowledge by only bothering to look down the street in the direction I knew cars would come from. Until the day a car went the wrong way down a one-way street and only just managed to stop with its bumper nestling against my legs.

So if you are with me in a city and feel the urge to snigger when I always look to make sure traffic isn't coming from the wrong direction in a one way street, suppress that urge. I am just making sure that I don't make a deadly assumption.

Psi vision goggles

In the first chapter of my recent book Extra Sensory I wrote this:

Some scientists are scornful, claiming that it’s all over for paranormal abilities. They point out that traditionally many things that were once considered supernatural we now know to be either imaginary or the product of perfectly normal, natural phenomena. The supernatural aspects were first dismissed by science, and that dismissal has been gradually accepted by the general public. So, for instance, lightning was once seen as an unearthly force, quite possibly propelled by the wrath of the gods. Although there are technical aspects of the way that lightning is produced that we still don’t understand, there are few people indeed who don’t accept that lightning is a purely physical phenomenon, an electrical effect on a tremendous scale. It may be quite unlike the kind of thing that comes out of the socket at home, but it’s electricity nonetheless.

If you look back at the remarkable summaries of thirteenth century  proto-science produced by natural philosopher and friar Roger Bacon in books like the Opus Majus, there are plenty of travelers’ tales that we would now dismiss out of hand and that we wouldn’t consider to be serious descriptions of the real world. You will find descriptions of tribes of wild Amazon female warriors and mysterious devices for seeing at a distance that go beyond even the capabilities of a telescope. There are many marvelous, if unlikely examples that were thought to be part of nature. For example, in his Letter Concerning the Marvelous Power of Art and of Nature and Concerning the Nullity of Magic, Bacon tells us:

as for instance that the Basilisk kills by sight alone, that the wolf makes a man hoarse if he sees him first, and that the hyena does not permit a dog to bark if he comes within its shadow ... Aristotle tells in the book De vegetabilibus that female palm trees mature ripe fruit through the odour of the males; and mares in certain countries are fertilized by the smell of horses ...

These were all serious beliefs back then, as close to science as anything came. But these beliefs have joined leprechauns and fairies in the ranks of ideas that were not just an incorrect observation of nature but totally fictitious. Just as these misinterpretations and fictions have disappeared from everyday life it is argued by some skeptics who can’t even be bothered to examine the evidence that telepathy, remote viewing, telekinesis and the like have also reached a stage where they should no longer be considered anything more than a fantasy or a historical misunderstanding.

I would suggest that we have not reached that stage while there are so many people who still think that there is something to be investigated, and while a host of experiments have thrown up evidence that at least needs careful examination. We ought to take a look at that evidence with fresh eyes, biased neither by enthusiasm for the topic nor by scientific blindness that refuses to even look at the evidence because we “know” there is nothing to see.

 It has been interesting that the reviews I've had so far fall into three camps, which sadly reflect the fact that quite a lot of people aren't prepared to look with fresh eyes, but merely fall back on their old prejudices.

The first camp is the purely sceptical science camp. They have shown their position by simply ignoring the book. Of course any book can fail to garner reviews, but on past evidence of my books, this is unlikely to be the case entirely. So along with Richard Dawkins, this group is probably saying 'I am not interested in the evidence.' Then there's a second camp that gets it. Thank you to them. Finally, and most vocally in terms of reviews, are those who, as I put it above, are 'biassed by enthusiasm for the topic'. They accuse me of being a secret sceptic or say I unfairly make parapsychology sound in a bad way. This suggests, of course, there is something wrong with being sceptic. But scepticism, if applied properly is neutral. What they mean by 'sceptic' is someone who starts with the assumption there are no psi phenomena, which anyone actually reading the book would see is not the approach I took.

As for parapsychology being in a bad way, I think it is. We aren't seeing the big pieces of work like Rhine's and PEAR any more. And ever since Rhine, the field has been dogged by a combination of being unwilling to apply proper controls and by an obsession with looking for small statistical variations, rather than actual direct evidence. I'd suggest it does need an overhaul.

I can't say those who accuse me of being a secret sceptic upset me - but I do think it's funny that they can't see how thick the distorting goggles they themselves wear are.

More Ancient than Modern

The real dealI love church music. I have been singing it for 40 years and it includes some of the most beautiful music ever written. Which is why I want to ask the churches of Britain why the have such a love affair with Ancient and Modern hymn books.

I need to give a little historical perspective. Back in Victorian times there was only one hymn book worth using - Hymns Ancient and Modern. But it had significant problems. It was chock full of nauseously maudlin Victorian hymns that no one in their right mind would sing these days. And many of its tunes and harmonies were awful. For example, Welsh tunes were excluded, omitting some of the greatest melodies ever. The only possible reason I can see for this was racism. Seriously. As for harmonies, Bach was bowdlerised and many of the other hymns had dull harmonies not worth singing.

One man was primarily responsible for countering this - the great Ralph Vaughan Williams. He masterminded the musical content of the 20th century rival that took the nation's cathedrals by storm - The English Hymnal (updated to New English Hymnal). There is hardly a cathedral in the land that doesn't use this. Yet most parish churches stick with A and M. The good news is that if they buy the latest version of that book, they are in for a serious awakening. A and M has now imported many of RVW's gorgeous harmonies, and does allow Welsh tunes (though sometimes as a 'second' tune to a totally limp one). It has also done away with some of the crazy omissions - superb numbers from English Hymnal, like the Russian Kontakion for the Dead, and the mildly bonkers (the tune changes part way through) but glorious St Patrick's Breastplate.

So that's it, really. Next time you replace your hymn books, churches, put the New English Hymnal at the top of your list for a real hymn book, but if you must go for A and M, choose the latest one.

I'll leave you not with a hymn, but with an example of the sort of Tudorbethan church music that makes life worth living, in a wonderful, contemplative fashion, William Byrd's Ave Verum Corpus.