From Tim Sprod
Is any other reader inexorably reminded of the medieval scholastics trying to calculate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, when they read articles in New Scientist about cosmology and particle physics?
Rachel Courtland’s “Countdown to oblivion” – addressing a supposed paradox arising from a mathematical model of the multiverse – strikes me as the latest and most absurd example (2 October, p 6). A fudge factor introduced by mathematicians because they can’t think of any other way to solve their equations has real implications for the universe(s)? Give me a break. Did this fudge factor always affect the universe(s), or only after they thought it up?
Taroona, Tasmania, Australia
