22 June 2019 | New Scientist | 27of US president Donald Trump’s
withdrawal from the 2015 Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action
nuclear agreement.
However, I was surprised at
the line: “the standard inspections
the IAEA does in all countries with
nuclear plants”. I thought that the
IAEA had been refused access to
nuclear facilities in Israel, India,
Pakistan and North Korea?
The editor writes:
❚ Perhaps strictly we should have
said: “in all member countries
with nuclear plants”. The countries
mentioned aren’t members of
the IAEA and haven’t signed the
nuclear non-proliferation treaty,
or have signed and left in the
case of North Korea. The general
inspections obligation applies to all
states that have signed the treaty
apart from the recognised nuclear
weapons states (the P5), although
the P5 have agreements with the
IAEA whereby their civil nuclear
plants are inspected as a courtesy.
Carbon tax must come
with carbon dividends
25 May, p 23
From Gareth Ackland,
London, UK
I commend your article on the
European Parliamentary elections
for flagging up the fear of higher
environmental taxes, which could
only make life disproportionately
harder for poorer people. It may
fuel populism and encourage
the idea that environmentalists
are part of an elite.
The carbon fee and dividend
scheme championed by climate
scientist James Hansen accounts
for this, and, indeed, inverts it:
all levies raised from extraction
or import are divided equally
between citizens. The dividend for
someone on a low income would
easily outweigh the price increases
to their weekly shop. A high earner
who overconsumes would
be penalised and hopefully
given incentive to adapt. Hard
for a populist to argue against a
scheme that makes those who are
profiting less from society richer.A world without rubber
might not be so bad
18 May, p 44
From Euan Connell,
Aberdeen, UK
I just read your feature
about Earth’s rubber supply.
As someone with allergies to
latex and the accelerators used
in rubber production (carba mix
and thiuram mix), the prospect
of a world without rubber seems
fantastic. I think this should serve
as a wake-up call that we have, yet
again, become too dependent on
a finite resource and alternatives
should be considered. My view may
be biased, but I don’t think it is
unjust. The rubber particles end up
in our atmosphere and it could be
contributing to the rise in allergies.
Pollution is never a good thing.We have to change if we
want to make it in space
18 May, p 5
From Julius Wroblewski,
Vancouver, British Columbia,
Canada
Your leader about the new space
age made me think back to all the
starry-eyed dreams of space travel
I had as a child, watching space
missions and sci-fi programmes
on TV. Where is the vacation on
the moon that I was promised?
Where is the HAL 9000 from
2001: A Space Odyssey that I
should be using and fearing?
We have great gadgets, to be
sure, but they are about as
sentient as a toaster.
Crewed space travel has turned
out to be far more expensive and
dangerous than I imagined as achild. Is it necessary? Wouldn’t
it be great if robots could do the
dangerous work instead? I hope
to see the day when humans
won’t need to go down mine
shafts to extract minerals, likewise
for the worst bits of space travel.
Then again, venturing into
space will eventually become
vital. Mother Nature has placed us
in a trap: a presently fertile world
that will eventually be rendered
uninhabitable by a bloated red
giant star. If we are to make the
transition, we will have to alter
our genome to cope, creating
Homo spatialis, able to handle
radiation and microgravity
without collapsing into a heap.AI’s countless failings
foretold in fiction
13 April, p 12
From Nick Goddard,
Manchester, UK
So Deepmind’s artificial
intelligence can’t add up. That
reminds me of the late, great
Stanislaw Lem, who foresaw this
more than 50 years ago in his
short story Trurl’s Machine. The
eponymous inventor creates an
eight-storey thinking machine
that, when asked to calculate
two plus two, thinks for a while
and replies “seven”. At least
Deepmind’s AI didn’t try to kill its
creators – unlike Trurl’s machine.Free will is complicated,
let’s leave it at that
Letters, 25 May
From Neil Higgins,
Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK
I would like to challenge the
view of mathematics presented in
Peter Bennett’s letter on the topic
of free will. He seems to think that
mathematics can only deal with
problems that can be described in
either a simplistic deterministic
way or as the result of entirely
random events. He is therefore
incapable of describing
phenomena where hysteresis
is involved, a feature that would
seem essential if free will implies
that different outcomes can occurfor ostensibly the same inputs.
The final output of a mind
that creates the actions of a “free
agent” may be expected to have a
complex relationship to the prior
states and external stimuli that
produced it. Indeed, it is probable
that elements of the end state act
through feedback mechanisms
on their prior states, before
coalescing into their final form.
The complexity of such a
highly nonlinear process in the
brain may be almost impossible to
model comprehensively, but it can
be represented by mathematics,
even if the state information and
details of the interactions will
always elude us.From Neil Doherty,
Wilthorpe, South Yorkshire, UK
Continuing the debate on free
will that regularly features in New
Scientist these days, I am concerned
that the scientific costs of this
discourse are rising exponentially
as more scientists pick a side.
I realise that doing science
also requires discussion, so that
we might progress by such means
as well as through experiment
and empirical observation. None
of these methods can check free
will via the scientific method.
The costs of discussing an
unprovable conjecture like the
existence of free will are wasted
“science”. If one can’t present
serious evidence beyond the work
of the mind alone, then one can’t
prove the speculation, no matter
how long the discussion lasts.
Scientists need to consider
how much research time they are
wasting on this topic, then get on
with properly testable science and
leave free will to the philosophers.Different verbs for
different celestial bodies
25 May, p 16
From Andrew Glassner,
Seattle, Washington, US
I read your headline “Chinese
rover unearths moon’s deeper
secrets”, and I suspect we are
being trolled. Surely the proper
verb would be “unmoons”. ❚Want to get in touch?
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