Letters archive

Integrated information theory (IIT), identified in your article as the best bet for a mathematical model of consciousness, may not point towards panpsychism, the universal consciousness of matter, as suggested ( 2 May, p40 ). This is for the simple reason that it points clearly towards something else entirely. The way that IIT focuses on …

It is clear that our understanding of the coronavirus, and how it spreads through networks of people, is related to the quantity and quality of data we collect. This is rightly a point of focus. But it would be a great shame if, while focusing on covid-19, we missed the opportunity to gather detailed information …

Hillary Shaw suggests a definition of what constitutes life (Letters, 25 April ). It is defined as "a bounded system containing a readable information code that can locally decrease entropy". This seemed to me to succinctly encapsulate all forms of life that we know about, and reduced a complicated concept to a simple idea in …

As the National Parks and Wildlife Service threatened species officer in Broken Hill, Sturt national park is in my patch ( 25 April, p36 ). The idea you reported of fencing the park as an experimental plot for dingo introduction is of interest to me. The claims that dingoes have a positive effect on small …

The long-term lesson of our current predicament is that pandemics do happen, and when they do, many people can be hurt ( 2 May, p 7 ). I don't expect to see another pandemic – I am 80 – but there is a real chance that my grandchildren will. There is a lot of scientific …

The spread and death toll of covid-19 has made us conscious that we are all connected, as well as of how fragile life, human societies and economies are. The latent possibility of a viral pandemic wasn't a total surprise, but it isn't the only such enemy. What about a solar flare killing our telecommunication satellites, …

I wonder whether there is a serious and overlooked aspect of any drive to achieve herd immunity to the coronavirus in order to end the need for lockdowns ( 11 April, p 10 ). Attaining herd immunity, if this is even possible, would require a significant proportion of the population to become infected and develop …

Your piece on how the turtle got its shell was a fascinating insight into the jigsaw that is palaeontology, especially bearing in mind there are so very few pieces to put together to tell the story of the course of evolution ( 2 May, p 36 ). But what particularly grabbed my attention was the …

I would say that missing mass and dark matter were elephants in the room of astronomy and cosmology from rather earlier than the 1980s ( 16 May, p 30 ). It is claimed that as early as 1884, Lord Kelvin suggested that the observed dynamics of the Milky Way didn't seem to match the amount …

Your article on consciousness raises the tantalising prospect that the validity of ideas put forward to explain it could become amenable to practical mathematical analysis ( 2 May, p 40 ). This is encouraging. As usual, though, some philosophers have rolled out the argument that the tools of mathematics and empiricism are insufficient to explain …