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11 April 2012
From Stanley S. Schaetzel
The introduction to your God issue is wrong in saying that "religious belief is ingrained in human nature" (17 March, p 37) . Rather, curiosity is ingrained in human nature. The problem is that we reply to a child's early "why?" questions with easy, but wrong, answers. We answer children's quest for the so-called causal …
11 April 2012
From Margaret Brown
David Bainbridge, offering a new perspective on middle age, seems to assume that women's fertility will continue to shut down in the fifth decade, and that this will in future liberate women for the rest of their lives (10 March, p 48) . There are some grounds for this. In Thailand, the menopause turns a …
11 April 2012
From Luce Gilmore
It is probably just as well that creating inflaton particles is so resoundingly out of our reach (17 March, p 32) . Those things, linked to the early expansion of the universe, are capable of making something inflate by a factor of about 1050 in only 10-33 of a second, to the likely detriment of …
11 April 2012
From Ian Napier
In his letter, Brian Bonney raises the question of just how big black holes can get (25 February, p 36) . If there is an infinite number of universes, then it might be expected that there will be an infinite number that are home to big bangs, star formation, star death and black holes. Hawking …
11 April 2012
From Steve Wilson
Marcus Chown states that "all the wormholes envisioned... assume that Einstein's theory of gravity is correct. In fact, this is unlikely to be the case" (10 March, p 40) . The article goes on to state that "many researchers believe that Einstein's theory of gravity must be an approximation of a deeper theory". Can we …
11 April 2012
From Hardin Tibbs
Michael Brooks poses the puzzle of identifying the three dimensions of the modern-looking "colour space" in Bishop Grosseteste's 13th-century colour theory (10 March, p 52) . Two, named in Latin, seem fairly straightforward. The scale running from clara to obscura seems likely to correspond to saturation, while the scale from purum to impurum could well …
11 April 2012
• We should not have implied that Quentin Atkinson believes that "overcrowding in the Horn of Africa" may have pushed the L3 mitochondrial lineage group of humans to migrate out of Africa, nor that his study supports the idea that environmental stability was a factor (24 March, p 40) . What he does argue is …
Issue no. 2860 published 14 April 2012
