Letters archive

Your excellent existential issue ( 23 July ) is most revealing in what it ignores. It exposes modern cosmology as a sophisticated shell game using advanced mathematics to generate infinite regresses of explanations that explain nothing. Problems are solved by positing ever more perplexing problems that multiply like angels on the head of a pin. …

In Michael Brooks's excellent article on existence, he suggests that "our reality is in fact a simulation run by entities from a more advanced civilisation" (23 July, p 36) . Robin Hanson then says that if we uncovered a clue to the existence of this simulation, the operators could just rewind everything to a point …

Mary Midgley's letter on the space race (30 July, p 28) could be interpreted as humankind's suicide note. She consigns human space exploration to the realm of fantasy "which has proved imaginatively nutritious but which needs to be kept separate from real life". Real life also includes meteorite impacts, super volcanoes, basalt floods and other …

Michael Le Page discusses scenarios for what artificial intelligences will do when they exceed human intelligence (23 July, p 40) . One possibility described is that computers, being better suited than humans to interstellar travel, will leave Earth to explore the galaxy. In the spirit of the late author Douglas Adams, I suggest that their …

Anil Ananthaswamy seems to suggest that improved understanding of the neurological basis of our sense of self shows that "self" is just an illusion (23 July, p 41) . I think it shows that the sense of self we experience is an emergent phenomenon which we can now understand as arising from fleeting and changeable …

Given my role in a large internet company, it's probably natural to worry about what might happen if the internet becomes Balkanised , as Anil Ananthaswamy suggests (16 July, p 42) . While I might not wish to downplay the threat from fragmentation, I believe there are other risks to the internet that are potentially …

It is not true to say that incandescent light bulbs waste 90 per cent of the power they consume as heat (23 July, p 5) . In climates and seasons that require buildings to be heated, any heat from incandescent bulbs warms those buildings and offsets part of their heating requirements. I would not like …

In his look at the meaning of risk (25 June, p 30) , Nicolas Bouleau writes: "The concept of chance as we understand it today emerged long after the birth of philosophy. The ancient Greeks distinguished between events which were inevitable and those which were seen as the will of a god." Aristotle's Physics has …

As interesting as your "Lab rats" feature was (9 July, p 40) , I was startled by the statement that Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar "settled for life as a second-tier scientist". Chandra, as he was known, was widely regarded as one of the greatest mathematical physicists and astrophysicists of the 20th century. His many deeply penetrating books …

David Robson's fascinating exploration of sound symbolism in language (16 July, p 30) reminded me of a performance in Australia in the early 1990s. Christine Johnston, dressed as a demented opera singer, walked through the audience approaching various individuals, and proceeded to "sing" their hair.There were screeching, short, percussive sounds for a crew cut, flowing …