Galileo and the Dolphins

by Adrian Berry

  The Hot Air of

  Danger is shining through the sky . . .We have to tell our children that they must redefine their relationship to the sky, and they must think of the sky as a threatening part of the environment.

  When the future Vice-President of the United States gave this terrifying warning in the winter of 1992, he was not thinking of alien invasions or colliding asteroids but of a comparatively minor nuisance, the hole in the Antarctic ozone layer.

  Unless drastic action was taken against it, warned, ultraviolet radiation from the Sun would eat up all life. And as an afterthought, if any life survived, the UV radiation would make conditions even more unpleasant for it by rendering the Aids virus more virulent.

  Just before becoming Vice President, only a heart-beat from the supreme office, published the widely selling Earth in the Balance. Now academics who do not share what one of them calls his ‘grim, exaggerated views’, have responded with a book of their own: Environmental Gore. In this rare book-that-reviews-a-book, they challenge his science and oppose his remedies.*

  *‘Environmental Gore: A Constructive Response to ‘Earth in the Balance’, edited by .

  Taking into account not only the ozone hole, but alleged global warming and overpopulation, Mr Gore feels the situation is so serious that it demands a ‘Global Marshall Plan’ and a world government that would introduce the environmental equivalent of Star Wars.

  This would be no laissez-faire property-owning democracy. Indeed, it is hard to see how it would differ from a dictatorship.

  Childbirth would be restricted. Rigidly centralized bureaucracies would decide what technologies should be permitted, and there would be no appeal against their decisions. Those industrialists who obeyed these orders would have ‘guaranteed profits’, while those who did not would presumably go bankrupt. Nations that refused to co-operate would have their exports banned.

  Nor does he have any time for dissidents, the ‘less than reputable’ sceptics about global warming, the ‘ferocious defenders of waste’, the economists who ‘ignore bad things’, and the ‘appeasers’, whose complacency about the environment reminds him of Neville Chamberlain’s relaxed attitude to Hitler.

  The most frightening aspect of ’s book, says one of these authors, ‘is the utter intolerance towards those who disagree with him. [He sees them as] not simply as wrong but ill. knows what is best for his patients and is ready to administer his medicine.’

  Central to his theme are his strange views of the relationship between man and nature. He vilifies , the great seventeenth-century philosophical advocate of science-based wealth who declared: ‘Man conquers nature by obeying her.’ seems only to have understood the first three words of this sentence; man’s supposed conquest of nature makes him think of ’s ruthless Italian campaign against Abyssinia with poison gas.

  Bacon’s point is too subtle for him, for he summarizes it with exactly the opposite of its true meaning: ‘The new power derived from scientific knowledge could be used to dominate nature with moral impunity.’

  What are the chances that might get into the White House and be in a position to put his programme into action? I received an alarming message on the Internet from the space expert , who said that was negotiating with Nasa for a ride in the space shuttle in Election Year 1996.

  By this he would upstage and perhaps gain the Democratic nomination. But happily, on telephoning , I discovered that his message was an April Fool.

  Bow Down to the Cosmic Lords

  The , who reigns on the planet will soon come down to earth. His strength will be greater than all the armies of the world, and those with a ‘negative’ attitude to him will be ‘removed’.

  This astonishing message was conveyed to a packed and fervent public meeting which I attended. Flying saucers, filled either with the servants, or else the robots of this terrible being, apparently visit the Earth regularly to prepare for his coming, as they have done for the last 50,000 years. But now, we were assured, a New Age has begun, and his arrival is imminent.

  During eight hours of speeches, in a London hotel, about 300 members of the Aetherius Society were repeatedly told two things about these flying saucers. They are real and friendly, but there is an inter-governmental plot to conceal their existence.

  These facts were ‘the single most important issue facing mankind today’. John Holder, who holds a decorate in biochemistry from Hull University and who works as a unit trust manager, set out the scientific ‘proof of the existence of the spacefaring minions of Aetherius.

  His proof consisted largely of numbers. An incident in which a Japan Air Lines Jet had been ‘bugged’ by a mysterious object while flying over Alaska had generated 329 pages of official documents. Norad, the US Air Defence Command, had collected data on ‘no less that ten million incidents’ during the past 20 years. The British Ministry of Defence had records of 2,250 sightings over four years, and 15,000 of them since 1962.

  To , secretary of the Society’s European headquarters, these numbers proved a great deal. These aerial activities were caused, not only by Aetherius, but by the other ‘Cosmic Lords’.

  It appears that every planet in our Solar System is inhabited by these beings. The fact that space probes had found all these planets to be uninhabitable did not matter, since the Cosmic Lords consisted of pure mind. They had no bodies that would suffer from poisonous atmospheres.

  The true facts about their existence had now been ‘revealed’. Revealed to whom? To their prophet on Earth, a resident of America. His Eminence Sir , who has inherited his knighthood from a Byzantine emperor. became advanced in the science of yoga, which in his case meant communing with God. Back in 1954, he ‘heard a voice’.

  ‘Do not smirk,’ said sternly. ‘St Paul also heard a voice. So did the prophet .’ He explained that had received more than 600 messages from the Cosmic Lords, and they had appointed him the representative of their Planetary Parliament. is now the medium through which the Cosmic Lords speak to the people of Earth. His is the voice but theirs are the words. To let us hear them, played three unintelligible tapes. I checked an impulse to laugh as he warned: ‘We regard these transmissions as extremely holy.’

  It was depressing to listen to this farrago of nonsense. The meeting had started in a fairly scientific manner, but as it proceeded the tone grew progressively more evangelical and intolerant. ‘ doesn’t believe in flying saucers, but he’s discredited,’ declared. The audience never laughed. In later meetings of the Society, Lawrence and his colleagues claimed that the dimensions of the Egyptian pyramids reveal the precise distance between the Earth and the Sun, data which their builders could not possibly have known, but which the Cosmic Lords could have fed into their minds.

  again poured scorn on the ‘debunkers’. ‘Some people have such closed minds. They wouldn’t even recognize a flying saucer if it landed.’ In this he is wrong. That is about the only circumstance in which we would recognize it. It is the absence of any artefacts that makes it impossible to take these people seriously.

  Part Six: TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE

  How much science do you know? Here is a selection of my Christmas Science Quizzes to test your knowledge. Answers are given at the end of the section. Needless to say, the £400 and £450 prizes for the answers to specially difficult questions are no longer on offer!

  Quiz No.l

  1. Who said:

  (a) ‘Mighty are numbers, joined with art resistless.’

  (b) ‘A machine may not harm humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.’

  (c) ‘What of , noisy father of all noisy discoveries? He has no ideas of his own, so he appropriates those of others.’

  (d) ‘If your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.’

  (e) ‘Scientists imagine they are the brains of the nation. Actually, they are not the brains but the shit.’

  (f) ‘Look at the
morning star as it sets majestically on the breast of the infinite. Melancholy will overcome you. No one can resist the melancholy in nature.’

  (g) ‘The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the Devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.’ (h) ‘The history of England is emphatically the history of progress.’

  (i) ‘It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.’ (j) ‘I’m as drunk a lord, but then I am one, so what does it matter?’

  2. Are the following true or false?

  (a) The globular star clusters are among the youngest objects in the universe

  (b) The Star of Bethlehem is now believed to have been Halley’s Comet

  (c) Sir was a pioneer in fingerprinting

  (d) Ophiuchus is one of the constellations of the Zodiac

  3. Nine duchesses argue about who should sit next to whom at a single conference table with numbered seats. How many possible seating arrangements could they choose?

  (a) 9

  (b) 18 (c)36 (d)81

  (e) 729

  (f) 362,880

  4. What were the Seven Sciences?

  5. [A special question that originally carried a £400 prize.] The following 75-digit number is a ‘prime product’, consisting of 2 prime numbers multiplied together (prime numbers are divisible only by themselves and 1). Find the 2 prime numbers:

  297,426,271,865, 197, 115,769,312,409, 175, 873, 555, 265, 022, 587, 277, 069, 502, 757, 095, 321, 297, 480, 347, 763

  6. What is the following sentence an example of? ‘I met a man in Oregon who hadn’t any teeth - yet that man could play on the bass drum better than any man I ever met.’

  7. Prove that the Beast of Revelations is a fox.

  8. Who attacked ’s model of the solar system as being ‘anti-Biblical and intolerable’?

  9. What is the nearest star to the Earth?

  10. What information are these sayings meant to remind us of?

  (a) ‘Oh, be a fine girl, kiss me right now!’

  (b) ‘How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after that long lecture involving quantum mechanics.’

  11. Where would one expect to find high concentrations of the elements titanium, vanadium, chromium, manganese, iron, cobalt and nickel?

  12. What is starry-gazy pie?

  13. In warfare, why were tanks so-named?

  14. What are, or were, the following:

  (a) mascons (b) neutrinos (c) porphyrin

  (d) airglow (e) the Kirkwood gaps (f) anti-hydrogen

  (g) tachyons (h) black dwarves (i) velociraptors

  (j) echo-location (k) a steganogram

  15. For what have the following been in the scientific news?

  (a) Ayres (b) (c)

  (d) (e) Collins (f) (g) (h) Severin

  16. Who used to be called ‘’?

  Quiz No.2

  1. Who said:

  (a) ‘ maintained that women have fewer teeth than men. Although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouth.’

  (b) ‘Psychologists are no more scientists than converted savages are Christians.’

  (c) ‘Space travel is utter bilge.’

  (d) ‘My rule was simple - each man should know everything he needed to know for his job, and nothing else.’

  (e) ‘Those hateful persons called Original Researchers.’

  (f) ‘Anyone who can be replaced by a machine deserves to be.’

  (g) ‘ I’d lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.’

  (h) ‘No country without an atomic bomb can properly consider itself

  independent.’

  (i) ‘Scientists are treacherous allies on committees, for they can change

  their minds in response to arguments.’

  (j) ‘Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.’

  (k)’There is no democracy in physics. We can’t say that some second-rate

  guy has as much right to his opinion as Fermi.’

  2. Why is a recent estimate that the universe is less than 12 billion years old almost certainly wrong?

  3. Of what invention did say: ‘It will unmake our work. No greater instrument of counter-revolution and conspiracy can be imagined.’?

  4. In the once fashionable temperature scale invented by , what was the boiling point of water?

  5. For thousands of years there have been man-made sonic booms. How were they caused?

  6. Solve the equation:

  =6

  where A, B, C and D are all positive whole numbers below 100.

  7. From where did Napoleon get the inspiration to build the Arc de Triomphe in ?

  8. What are the latitudes of the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn?

  9. Just as foxhounds make a ‘pack’, what is the collective name for:

  (a) owls (b) ravens (c) larks (d) vipers (e) rats (f) rhinoceroses (g) elks (h) mussels (i) monkeys (j) goldfish (k) caterpillars (1) falcons?

  10. Where was the city of Pelusium?

  11. In industry, what is carbon monoxide commonly used for?

  12. What made the mathematician call 1,729 one of the most interesting numbers he knew?

  13. How do Loughborough University scientists propose to alleviate the ever increasing growth of the air passenger market?

  14. Where, in Europe, would one be most likely to find the fossils of velociraptors?

  15. Where does Dactyl dance with ?

  16. In Royal Naval ships, why are the dog watches so-called?

  17. What problem did solve that inspired him to rush naked into the street shouting ‘Eureka!’?

  18. A giant star about 10,000 light-years from Earth is tearing itself to pieces. What is it called?

  19. What was ’s of Robotics?

  20. How many years does energy generated in the Sun’s core take to reach its surface:

  (a) 1 (b) 5 (c) 100 (d) 10,000 (e) 1 million (f) 100 million?

  21. What, in geology and Earth science, is:

  (a) a coombe (b) a monadnock (c) a neck (d) a tombolo (e) a jehel (f) a nunatak (g) a literal (h) a cordillera (i) fool’s gold?

  22. Why are the noble gases so-called?

  23. Who used electricity to demonstrate the behaviour of muscles in a frog’s legs?

  24. What was the dogma of the Soviet charlatan ?

  25. What have scientists been searching for near the south pole of the Moon?

  26. Why is the American space shuttle Endeavour spelled in the English way?

  Quiz No.3

  1. Who said:

  (a) ‘I don’t want to belong to any club that will have me as a member.’

  (b) ‘There is no evil in the atom, only in men’s souls.’

  (c) ‘We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.’

  (d) ‘That an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd.’

  (e) ‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’

  (f) ‘The fossilized bones of an ape more manlike, or a man more apelike, than any yet known may await some unborn palaeontologist.’

  (g) ‘The more I read about the less I wonder that they poisoned him.’

  (h) ‘Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one cannot stay in the cradle for

  ever.’

  (i) ‘I would rather believe that Yankee professors lie than that stones fall

  from Heaven.’

  (j) ‘Prometheus reaches for the stars with an insane grin on his face and a

  totem-symbol in his hand.’

  (k) ‘The first invention of a super-intelligent machine will be the last

  invention that mankind is allowed to make.’

  2. A minister was sacked by his ruler for ‘introducing infinitesimals into
administration.’ (a) Who was he? (b) Who sacked him?

  3. (a) What is sapa? (b) Give at least one of the two reasons why prostitutes ate it neat?

  4. The world’s potentially most valuable substance costs an estimated $300 billion per milligram. What is it?

  5. The following pieces of vile English are cryptograms in ‘bureaucratese’. Give their better known originals:

  (a) ‘In the case of the ruler, it might be considered appropriate, from a moral or ethical point of view, to yield up to that potentate all of those goods and materials of whatever character or quality which can be shown to have had their original source in any portion of the domain of the latter.’

  (b) ‘I repeat; for the gift or loan of a quadrupedal transportive gramini-vore, I would be willing to donate the substance of my estate in its entirety.’

  (c) ‘I am not what might be called an adept in the art of public speaking, the opposite of which might be fairly stated of my opponent in this debate.’

  (d) ‘Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.’

  6. [This question originally carried an extra prize of £450.] The following four pairs of numbers are ‘consecutive prime pairs’. That is, they are prime numbers separated only by 2, and which do not have any other prime pairs between them:

  3 and 5; 5 and 7; 11 and 13; 17 and 19. What is the first group of five consecutive prime pairs?

  7. What do 2,3,7,8-tetrach lorodibenzo-p-dioxin and ethyl S-2-diisoprovy laminoethylmethyl phosphonothiolate have in common?

  8. What are the familiar names of the following stars:

  (a) Alpha Eridani

  (b) Alpha Centauri

  (c) Alpha Canis Majoris

  (d) Alpha Orionis

  (e) Beta Persei

  (f) Alpha Tauri

  (g) Zeta (h) Alpha Ursae Minoris (i) Beta Geminorum

  (j) Eta Tauri.

  9. What phenomenon was describing when he quoted these lines from Through the Looking Glass:

  But I was thinking of a plan To dye one’s whiskers green, And always use so large a fan That they could not be seen,