Letters archive

While reading the many elaborate schemes discussed by Jim Giles for mitigating our effect on the climate (3 April, p 6) , I was struck by two salient points about the human condition. First, how innately ingenious and creative we are, and secondly, how unable we are to notice the obvious. Space-based light reflectors, cloud …

As part of your "Nine big brain questions" special ( 3 April, p 26 ), Celeste Biever made a reference to the familiar problem that we "have no way of proving we are not the only self-aware individuals in a world of unaware 'zombies'". I have often wondered why this doubt persists when there is …

If I read Amanda Gefter's fascinating article right, for observers outside a black hole all information about stuff that has been sucked through the event horizon is smeared across the surface of the horizon (6 March, p 28) . It's a hologram. Thus the holographic principle: that the surface of every volume, including the infinite …

Your editorial "Time to accept that atheism, not god, is odd" makes the case that since atheists are a minority group, they should be considered abnormal (6 March, p 3) . However, almost every belief system has a history of stamping out non-believers, whereas there are, to my knowledge, no recorded instances of the reverse, …

Marcus Chown reports on James Brownridge's theory that the reason hot water freezes faster than cold – the Mpemba effect – is a consequence of supercooling in the water that started off cold (27 March, p 10) . However, after many years of getting my student teachers to investigate the phenomenon, the neatest explanation I …

Scott Turner and Rupert Soar suggest that the circulation of air in termite nests is driven by wind blowing across the mounds rather than by convection currents within them (20 February, p 35) . This may be so in the mounds they studied in Namibia – although it does not explain why the nest does …

Colin Jacobson's letter on homeopathy (20 March, p 25) annoyed me. First, he argues that homeopathy is good because it costs less than conventional medicine. Of course, water and sugar should be cheaper than clinically tested drugs, but that does not make it useful. He then argues that homeopathy satisfies a real demand in healthcare, …

In his article about persistent observations and the sometimes slow pace of science (19 December 2009, p 58) , Stephen Battersby suggests that "a carefully controlled 10,000-year experiment should do the trick" of seeing whether "any form of silica glass is fluid at room temperature". That experiment has already been started. I recently saw the …

• We mistakenly illustrated a story about "pointillist graphics" for computers (3 April, p 18) with a standard polygon image; had it been pointillist it would have been less blocky. • The physicist Eugene Wigner was Hungarian, not German (10 April, p 28) . He studied in Germany until 1930 and became a US citizen …