Do Sparrows Like Bach?: The Strange and Wonderful Things that Are Discovered When Scientists Break Free

by Unknown

  ‘Things were going well,’ Hayes recalled. ‘But then the Russians got friendly.’ As funding fizzled out, Hayes realised that the same principles that kept military hardware cool could also keep pizza hot. The material he invented was used as a tray which absorbed heat as the pizza cooked on it. It would then slowly release the heat when removed from the oven and could keep pizzas hot for more than an hour.

  The US Star Wars project, which was intended to destroy enemy missiles from space while still in flight, seems to have spawned more than its fair share of offspring.

  Icy asteroids could power reactors in space

  Wacky ideas are commonplace among space scientists, but in 1993 officials at the US Department of Energy came up with a scheme to top them all. Searching for new ways to justify the department’s moribund programme to develop a nuclear reactor for use in space, they proposed capturing nearby asteroids and comets and towing them into Earth orbit.

  According to an internal memo from the energy department, nuclear-powered processing plants in space would extract water from the asteroids. The water could be used to sustain humans in space and as a propellant for nuclear rockets, it said.

  ‘Electric energy beamed to Earth from space would provide nearly pure electricity without global warming, acid rain, strip mining or the hazards of fission products anywhere near Earth, three dozen years in the future,’ the memo argued. There are believed to be thousands of asteroids relatively close to Earth, with water ice making up a large chunk of each. Some asteroids may be dormant comets, which would contain an even greater proportion of water.

  But had the idea gained ground, those running the programme might have had a tough time convincing the public that the project would not endanger humans on Earth. ‘There would be the twin bugaboos of nuclear power and comets,’ said John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists. ‘You would have to be able to convince people that the comet wouldn’t come crashing into Kansas. Since the beginning of history, comets have been portents of disaster.’

  Presumably, by the time we are able to pull asteroids into Earth orbit, we’ll have computers that can do all the difficult calculations for us while reassuring us that nothing can go wrong. However, at the moment, we are still working on numerous incarnations of artificial intelligence…

  Forgive me computer, for I have sinned

  Feeling a stab of after-hours guilt? If so, Greg Garvey’s Automatic Confession Machine designed in 1993 might have been perfect for you. Just imagine stepping up to the sleek, black booth with its neon cross and winking Christ, kneeling on the red velvet stool, pressing the ‘amen’ button, and electronically divesting yourself of your sins.

  Garvey, an artist at Concordia University in Montreal, who was brought up as a Catholic, programmed a computer to guide users through a formal confession, strictly according to church doctrine, he claimed. After the customary ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned’, the programme instructed the user to tap in the number of days since last confession, the number of venial versus mortal sins (selected from a list of the seven deadly sins and the ten commandments) and then further details of each sin.

  The confessor responded to the computer’s questions by pressing buttons such as ‘days’ ‘weeks’, ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘venial’ and ‘mortal’. Once the sinful tally was recorded, the machine calculated penance and delivered a print-out for the penitent on a handy, wallet-sized slip of paper.

  ‘My purpose is not to make fun of a particular sacrament or religion,’ said Garvey. But while he admitted it was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek undertaking, he was quick to point out its possible advantages over the real thing. ‘If we mass-produce these we can guarantee uniform application of the doctrine, we can automatically download the latest papal bull—and add any update necessary,’ he said. ‘We can have paid-for-confession—take MasterCard, Visa, American Express. And, of course, there’s the added confidentiality.’

  Garvey pointed out that his confessional was not the first marriage of high technology to religious rite. American televangelist Robert Tilton claimed to heal watchers who placed their hand on the television screen over his hand. And Jews had been faxing God for some time, in the form of prayers that were received in Jerusalem and then slipped into the cracks of the Wailing Wall.

  But, said Garvey, the automatic confessional could not possibly replace a priest, because the software had not yet been ordained.

  Trial by laptop

  Imagine the scene: there’s been a minor car crunch on a city street in Brazil, and the two drivers are arguing angrily over who’s to blame and who should pay for the damage. Suddenly, a van screeches to a halt and out pop a judge, a court clerk and a very special laptop computer. Instant justice has arrived, cyber-style.

  This is no fantasy. In the year 2000, a laptop was invented which ran an artificial intelligence program called the Electronic Judge, and its job was to help the human judge on the team swiftly and methodically dispense justice according to witness reports and forensic evidence at the scene of an incident. It could issue on-the-spot fines, order damages to be paid and even recommend jail sentences.

  The software was tested by three judges in the state of Espirito Santo. It formed part of a scheme called Justice-on-Wheels, which was designed to speed up Brazil’s overloaded legal system by dealing immediately with straightforward cases. The idea was not to replace judges but to make them more efficient, said Pedro Valls Feu Rosa, a judge in the state’s Supreme Court of Appeals.

  The E-Judge program presented the judge with multiple-choice questions, such as ‘Did the driver stop at the red light?’ or ‘Had the driver been drinking alcohol above the acceptable limit of the law?’ These are the sorts of questions that human judges are normally expected to answer, based on evidence from the scene, explained Feu Rosa, and they only need yes or no answers. ‘If we are concerned with nothing more than pure logic, then why not give the task to a computer?

  Most people were happy to have the matter sorted out on the spot, he said. The program gave more than a mere judgment: it also printed out its reasoning. If the human judge disagreed with the decision it could simply be overruled, said Feu Rosa. He admitted, however, that some people who had been judged by the program didn’t realise that they’d been tried by software.

  But, of course, whatever mind-boggling inventions and whatever great ideas scientists and researchers may come up with, they always have to be aware of the health and safety implications. Sometimes, it seems, scientists—as well as the public—need to be protected from themselves.

  Read this first

  In 1996, reader John Isles wrote to tell us about information supplied with his Kenner Toy Company’s ‘Batman Returns’ costume. ‘Caution,’ it announced. ‘Cape does not enable user to fly.’

  2 Mad research

  There’s nowt so queer as folk, runs the old Yorkshire saying. Well, the author is a Yorkshireman who used to agree with this axiom. And then he discovered scientists. If Yorkshire-men are a breed apart, in the way that Queenslanders, Texans and Bavarians all boast their superiority (to the irritation of their compatriots), they’ll all be sad to learn that they are easily displaced by scientists at the top of the smugness ledger. Indeed, you’ll see from this chapter that scientists are the black sheep among the infrequently spotted Leicester Longwools living on the organic rare breed farm’s top pasture—very haughty, very headstrong (and sometimes wet and bedraggled). However much barbed wire you put around the fence, however deep the cattle grid, however secure the padlock on the only gate, come springtime you’ll find the whole flock has chewed its way through the hedgerow, trotted down to the bottom field and got giddy by drinking undiluted sheep dip.

  Working on the principle that you have to try everything once, the researchers here are all prepared to put their bodies on the line (more than metaphorically in some cases) in order to prove something. Or to fail to prove something, which is much the same thing. This means you’ll encounter Jorge Mira Pérez a
nd Jose Viña, who’ve gone to the trouble of calculating the temperatures of both heaven and hell; Konstantine Raudive, who probably failed to contact the dead, although he might deny it; and Troy Hurtubise, who really did put his body on the line when he donned a bear suit and went off to cavort with grizzlies.

  Sadly, there are a few areas of ‘research’ reported by New Scientist over the years that we were unable to include. In an article on the effects that alcohol can have on human behaviour we recounted the story of the Polish farmer Krystof Azninski, who proved himself to be especially dim. Azninski had been drinking with friends, after which it was suggested they ‘strip naked and play some “men’s games”’. Initially they hit each other over the head with frozen swedes, but then one man seized a chain saw and cut off the end of his foot. Not to be outdone, Azninski grabbed the saw and crying ‘Watch this then,’ swung at his own head and chopped it off. ‘It’s funny,’ said one companion, ‘because when he was young he put on his sister’s underwear. But he died like a man.’

  We’ve since been told the story may be of doubtful authenticity. If it is, it was too good to avoid telling again. If it isn’t, we apologise to Mr Azninski’s family for reawakening their distress, but we are sure they’ll agree that he deserves a mention in any scientific discussion of irrationality and is worth his place in the introduction to this chapter, if—sadly—not the chapter itself. Had Mr Azninski been a scientist conducting research it would have earned him a spot in these annals. But it seems that not even scientists would go to such lengths to prove alcohol gets you really, really drunk. So the Polish farmers merely warrant a footnote in our exploration of the outer reaches of scientific endeavour.

  There’s only one place to start when it comes to quality research. We’re starting at the top, with God and the afterlife…

  Too damned hot

  In 1998, Biblical scholars breathed a sigh of relief when two physicists and a bishop decided that the furnaces of hell are indeed hotter than heaven.

  In 1972, science waded into the domain of theology with an anonymous article in Applied Optics stating that heaven must be hotter than hell. The paper noted that Revelation 21:8 describes a lake in hell ‘which burneth with fire and brimstone’. For there to be such a lake, hell’s temperature must be below the boiling point of sulphur, just under 718 kelvin at atmospheric pressure.

  Meanwhile, Isaiah 30:26 describes the lighting in heaven, where ‘the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun, and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days’. Using Stefan’s law, which states that the temperature of an object in thermal equilibrium is related to the fourth root of the amount of light it receives, the paper’s authors calculated heaven’s temperature to be a sweltering 798 kelvin.

  However, in a letter published in the magazine Physics Today, Jorge Mira Pérez and Jose Viña, physicists at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, said that the Applied Optics authors misinterpreted the Isaiah passage, wrongly multiplying 7 by 7 to make the illumination in heaven 49 times as bright as that experienced by us on Earth.

  After Bishop Eugenio Ramiro Pose of Madrid confirmed that only a single factor of 7 was intended, Pérez and Viña recalculated heaven’s temperature as 504.5 kelvin—blisteringly hot, but probably cooler than hell. ‘A lot of colleagues, joking with me, have said that they prefer to stay on Earth,’ said Pérez.

  In the realm of intangibles

  Poking through scientific archives can be an enlightening process. In the early 20th century, Duncan MacDougall, an American physician, positioned a patient dying from tuberculosis, bed and all, on an enormous beam balance, and waited with scientific curiosity for the end. After several hours, the patient died and ‘the beam dropped with an audible stroke hitting the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound. The loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce.’ Therefore, it seems, a departing soul weighs as much as a slice of bread.

  Of course, there’s great debate as to whether a deity exists or otherwise, but as scientists we are on firm ground when we tackle more tangible issues like little green men. As this piece which appeared in New Scientist in 1991 shows, we even know what they’ll look like. And it won’t be Vulcan.

  How to design an alien

  What are the rules of thumb that life forms anywhere in the galaxy would have to follow? The famous geneticist Conrad Waddington believed that any higher life form would have to look like…Conrad Waddington. But most people see evolution as a contingent process—in other words, if evolution on Earth was run through again, land vertebrates—and that includes us—would be unlikely to reappear. And if they did we’d look very different. Of course, this applies to other planets too.

  So, if we can’t have humans on other planets, what can we have? There are patterns of general problems, and common solutions, that apply to life anywhere in the universe. We know this because different species on Earth invent identical solutions separately. Birds, bats, insects and some fish all fly. And plants and some bacteria photosynthesise. These universal solutions will be found on pretty well all other planets with life—including intelligence. So life will be formed of universal solutions—such as the elephant’s huge legs to support great bulk in gravity—and local or parochial ones—such as its trunk, which developed from a need, on Earth, to pick up food from its feeding spots. Its food on another planet might not have required trunk-to-mouth delivery.

  The difficulty, therefore, is in recognising universal solutions—which aliens will possess—and parochial ones—which they will not. Parochials normally happen only once—the trunk—universals more times—flying. Joints seem universal; the number of digits on a limb is not. Eyes, yes, external ears, probably not. And the list is very diverse…our strange excitement in sexual guilt pleasures is almost certainly parochial, so alien pornography seems unlikely.

  This means the standard clichés of science fiction would not hold up. Star Trek’s Mr Spock, whose anthropomorphic appearance and evolutionary convergence is so close to humans that he can interbreed with us when we cannot even breed with species on our own planet, is, sadly, illogical. And we should disbelieve all the flying saucer stories that have little green men, not because they are little and green, but because they are men. Little green splots are so much more believable.

  To be fair, little green splots are serious science. Communicating with the dead, however, requires taking a step towards the cliff edge of crumbling rationality…

  Night of the living-impaired

  In 1998, the trade magazine Computer Technology ran an illuminating article by Michael Doherty about the technology of communicating with the dead.

  The piece was full of fascinating information about what the author called ‘necrophony’. Did you know, for example, that Thomas Edison attempted to construct a ‘spirit communicator’ in the 1920s? He didn’t get very far but, undaunted, continued the work long after his death, communicating his progress through a medium called Sigrum Seuterman in 1967.

  Since Edison’s pioneering efforts, methods of communication with what we are obliged to call ‘the living-impaired’ have come on apace. Tape recorders, in particular, proved to be immensely useful in recording otherwise inaudible spirit voices. The late Konstantine Raudive, a leader in this field, compiled a collection of 72,000 tapes of spirit recordings while he was still with us. After his death, like Edison, he continued his work from ‘the other side’ and was himself recorded by his followers.

  Modified telephones also played a part in necrophony. Several inventors came up with devices that enabled people to phone deceased relatives and friends. Notable among these was the ‘spiricom’, which Doherty described as ‘a complex 29-megahertz communications system that established “quality” two-way conversations for the first time’. Unfortunately, a slight hitch with the spiricom emerged after the death of one of its inventors, William O’Neil, who related through the device that experiments on his side were infuriatingly being conduc
ted at 68 megahertz.

  The next step was obvious, and back in 1998 people were already working on it. It was hoped that we would be able to download software that would enable us to communicate with the dead through our computers. If Doherty was to be believed, at the time of writing several companies in the US were on the brink of releasing such software.

  We foresaw problems when this article was published, though. How many dead people were computer literate? And would computers on the other side have been IBM-compatible, or would the living impaired prefer Apple Macs?

  Rational or not, one of New Scientist’s correspondents had his interest piqued…

  Rolling out Hades

  We are disappointed that you see fit to make light of our latest research on communication between the living and the living impaired. At this very moment we are rolling out Hades Explorer 4.0, heralding an unparalleled increase in the volume of living-dead communications. You will be communicating with us soon, one way or the other.

  Thomas Edison

  Necrophony Inc.

  Hades

  (17 January 1998)

  Is there really an afterlife? And if you are an egghead in this reality will you continue to be one after you’ve passed into that great lab in the sky? We hope so. But first let’s deal with corporeal eggheads. There are, after all, plenty of them. In 2007 Alex Boese, author of Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments, went in search of them for New Scientist and stumbled on some of the craziest research ever. As he pointed out at the time, these researchers weren’t cranks, all the work was carried out by honest, hard-working scientists who were not prepared to accept common-sense explanations of how the world works. All the same, bet you can’t help thinking ‘eggheads’ as you read about them.