16 November 2019 | New Scientist | 27shoulder and the mosquito net
had kinks on it where his friend
had bitten through to him. He
was unable to explain what
happened, as he couldn’t talk yet.
Some months later, he pointed
to the still-kinked netting and said,
trying out a new word for the first
time, “bite”. It is clear to me that
his thoughts and memory of the
experience existed independently
of and prior to his language skills.
The information rates
of speech and of reading
14 September, p 17
From James Stone, Great Hucklow,
Derbyshire, UK
Apparently, speech conveys 39 bits
of information per second. This is
supported by a quick calculation
for reading. At a reading rate of
250 words per minute, where each
word has an average of five letters
and each letter conveys an average
of 1.8 bits of information, a reader
can absorb up to 37.5 bits per
second, close to the rate for speech.
What right do we have
to burn away the future?
Letters, 12 October
From Pauline Fothergill,
Pocklington, East Yorkshire, UK
Andrew Scott suggests we may
need fossil fuels to keep warm
in the far future. We have to stop
thinking of them as fuels. In a
future of clean energy, we will still
need them to make medicines and
plastics. Future generations will
never forgive us for burning them.
You can’t be a customer if
you can’t choose a service
19 October, p 12
From Sam Edge,
Ringwood, Hampshire, UK
You report that the Home Office
is using flawed and biased face-
recognition technology. It shows
its attitude by calling the public
“customers”. In a healthy market,
a customer can choose between
providers. Even if I don’t use any
of its public services, I can’t choose
not to pay for the Home Office.Why worry about online
fraud and not the weather?
Online, 23 June 2016
From Anthony Judge,
Brussels, Belgium
On the day of the UK’s referendum
on EU membership in 2016, you
asked whether bad weather would
have an impact on the vote. Little
has yet been said about the impact
that weather could have on the
UK election in mid-December.
Instead of influencing the
electorate with electronic
seeding via the “cloud”, as is now
widespread, attention could be
given to traditional modes of
“cloud seeding”. The challenge
for political groups would be
to determine which voter
segments, in which locations,
would be influenced by the
weather and to organise cloud
seeding appropriately. Achieving
freezing temperatures would be
more difficult, of course.
With electronic voting, people
could vote from armchairs, pubs
and cafes at their convenience.
It is curious that vulnerability to
fraud is held to be the determining
argument in favour of traditional
polling booths when people are
now encouraged, if not obliged,
to use the internet for banking. ❚For the record
❚ Carbon dioxide emissions from
human activities are estimated at
about 35 billion tonnes of carbon
per year (5 October, p 34).
❚ One song of the white bellbird
(Procnias albus) measures
116 dB(a) at a distance of
1 metre (26 October, p 9).30 years ago, New Scientist
looked forward to glimpsing
the universe’s first lightNASA launched its Cosmic
Background Explorer (COBE)
satellite on 18 November
1989 to “test ideas about the
big bang theory of the creation
of the Universe”, we reported
on 25 November that year.
“According to the theory,” we
wrote, “the Universe began
with a cataclysmic explosion
15 billion years ago.” The idea was that COBE’s three
instruments, each detecting radiation in a different
part of the spectrum, would reveal the early universe
in unprecedented detail.
The satellite sought that detail in the cosmic
microwave background (CMB), the first light emitted
in the universe, just 380,000 years after the big bang.
The mission was the brainchild of John Mather, who
dreamed it up as a 28-year-old graduate student.
Mather’s team, which included collaborators such
as George Smoot, wanted to launch its satellite on
an expendable rocket. NASA insisted on a shuttle
launch. Then, on 28 January 1986, the Challenger
space shuttle disaster resulted in the deaths of seven
crew members. COBE seemed as good as finished.
Still, NASA desperately needed something to restore
its image, and picked COBE – on the condition it was
launched within two years.
Nobody thought that was possible. But COBE
met its launch window, and it worked like a dream.
By early 1990, it had precisely measured the CMB’s
spectrum, confirming that it fit perfectly with the big
bang theory. It also revealed that the CMB is almost
completely uniform, with a constant temperature
across nearly the whole sky – but not quite. Two years
later, NASA announced that its satellite had discovered
tiny fluctuations, or “ripples”, in the CMB. Thought to
be the primordial “seeds” of the galaxy clusters strung
across the universe today, the identification of these
fluctuations was deemed by Stephen Hawking to be
“the discovery of the century, if not of all time”.
The CMB has since been measured with greater
precision, revealing key details about the size, matter
content, age, geometry and fate of our universe. There
was a hiccup in 2014, when claims we had discovered
proof of the breakneck expansion of the early universe
turned to dust. But cosmologists are getting closer to
revealing the last secrets of the “afterglow of creation”.
No wonder, then, that Mather and Smoot jointly won
the 2006 Nobel prize in physics. Simon IngsTo find more from the archives, visit
newscientist.com/old-scientistViews From the archives
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