Letters archive

From Michael Duff, Abdus Salam Professor of Theoretical Physics, Imperial College London I enjoyed Milena Wazeck's analysis of the thought processes of those who denied Einstein's relativity (13 November, p 48) . Yet it all sounded eerily familiar. Phrases such as "when people don't like what science tells them, they resort to conspiracy theories, mud-slinging …

Simon Williams waxes sniffily about the arbitrarily set "fiddle factor" in Petr Horava's theory on how to unify quantum theory and relativity (18 September, p 27) . Copernicus came up with a passable theory of the movements of the solar system. Would Williams scoff at the fact that this, too, is full of fiddle factors, …

John Bickle and Sean Keating ponder the implications of digital technology on our internal narrative, and thus our sense of self (13 November, p 52) . However, their arguments rest on two interlinked fallacies: that written narrative has always been the primary mode of storytelling; and that these narratives have always been linear and goal-oriented. …

Ben Haller dismisses as "silly and vacuous" the assertion that up to 80 per cent of our mental experiences are verbal (30 October, p 31) . It is not. Haller bases his criticism on his own assertion that "every second, I probably process more raw visual percepts than the number of words that go through …

From the headline to the final quote, Helen Thomson's article on auras was just sensationalism (20 November, p 14) . As reported, the experiment lacked controls, which are especially important when the evidence comes through a subject's report. If there were controls, they should have been reported. If you choose to include the greatly overreaching …

Supposing that the concept of guilt is made obsolete by hard-wired brain functions, Bill Foster proposes that the purpose of judicial punishment is either deterrence or retribution (6 November, p 28) . I think there is a third possibility. If we humans are just very complex robots without genuine free will, we can punish and …

Valerio Cugia wonders whether preferences for different types of art may vary with geography (16 October, p 27) . Jerome Kagan suggests in his book The Temperamental Thread: How genes, culture, time and luck make us who we are , which you reviewed this year (24 April, p 47) , that the different preferences for …

Whatever the actual or perceived health benefits of pet ownership (6 November, p 30) , a more comprehensive evaluation would consider the many costs borne by the rest of society, particularly as a result of dog and cat ownership. Taxes are diverted from other worthwhile causes to pay for the infrastructure of pet ownership: dog-walking …

• The beetles pictured in our article on genetic inheritance were stag beetles, not broad-horned flour beetles as the article implied (13 November, p 17) .