<2Science is a good thing>2 IF <1New Scientist>1 has a wish for 1983 that is in theory achievable it is that the two cultures C. P. Snow described a generation ago should again become one. Perhaps for historical reasons, or because it was necessary to keep the brain tidy when so many powerful thoughts were in their infancy, a separation was necessary; but now the schism is not only sad but philistine, anachronistic and shameful. When did the schism begin? Not at first sight by the 19th century, which has John Keats reading medicine, Samuel Taylor Coleridge playing with chemistry, and Mary Shelley writing science fiction. Yet schism was already there. By the beginning of the 19th century science seemed already to be ineluctably yoked with technology, and technology with industry; and though industry could be equated with men of culture and vision (such as Josiah Wedgwood and sons) it is remembered in practice, by those who later "read" the "humanities", through the contemporary and in alliterative terms more resonant response of William Blake. The new industrial age presented a vision of hell, of "dark Satanic mills", and the science that supported it was cold, objectified. It was anti-life, and in particular anti-human life. The die was cast. We have all heard of John Ruskin, only a minor artist, but a self-appointed and probably most influential overseer of Victorian aesthetics. But who has heard of David Brewster, minor scientist and in his own way at least as powerful a visionary of the new age of science and industry? History is taught as if the industrial revolution, the most significant event since the development of agriculture, just happened, simply by the outworking of blind economic forces; and as if the only people to be consciously aware of it were the aesthetes who reacted against its artifacts, or who, like Karl Marx, sought to analyse those forces and to predict their course. Thus the idea is implicit that science and industry, the development of the material world, just happened, without human contemplation. Perhaps the most significant intellectual advance of the mid-20th century was indeed made by Karl Popper, not because he provided any kind of method for scientists to pursue ( as he decidedly did not) but because he showed for the first time in formal philosophy, that science is inescapably a human activity, and that if its underlying human-ness is ever shelved it is only temporarily, and for convenience, to ameliorate human frailty. Thus he provides a respectable intellectual basis for re-incorporating science into culture. The basis for rejecting science is very like carelessness. [] <2A dead weight on science?>2 IS Britain responding too slowly to shifting priorities in research? The junior minister for the universities, William Waldegrave, thinks that the structure of the bureaucracy that controls our research effort could be in part to blame (This Week, p 784). The research councils, and the Science and Engineering and the Medical Research Councils in particular, deserve much praise for their albeit slightly belated efforts to pintpoint growth areas, such as microelectronics, informa- tion technology, biotechnology and remote-sensing. They have persuaded the government to invest extra money in basic research in these areas. The amounts of money involved, however, pale into insignificance when compared with the vast sums spent each year on older areas such as "big physics". The SERC spent #83 million in 1981-82 on providing facilities and supporting the research of British nuclear physicists and astronomers, repre- senting 39 per cent of its total budget. The pre-eminence of these subjects is also enshrined in the SERC's structure. Of its four main committees astronomy and nuclear physics each command a committee, while the whole of engineering, including microelectronics and biotechnology, is dealt with by another committee of equal status, and the "rest of science" by another. Against this background, it is hardly surprising that the example of bureaucratic inertia uppermost in Waldegrave's mind is that of "big physics". He is right to ask whether SERC as it is at present constituted could decide ruthlessly to cut projects in this area. The strange thing is that the SERC itself has looked at similar issues in a report on the "decline in physics" (ie "little" as opposed to "big" physics, which includes the solid state physics that underpins materials science and microelectronics). The council's findings must be quite damning, because it refuses to tell anyone what they are. Waldgrave should not let the council get away with that. [] <2Moral and mathematical lessons>2 <2from a Rubik cube>2 <2Apart from humiliating a whole generation of adults in front of their more adept offspring, Rubik's>2 <2brilliant invention has sparked off some new thinking about how people solve problems. Here British>2 <2cubemaster David Singmaster draws together some of his reflections on the cube phenomenon>2 <2David Singmaster>2 Problem solving, like other mental activities such as creativity, is hard to define but generally easy to recognise. Psyoholo- gists argue whether problem solving is the same as or just part of thinking or learning, and they also debate over "What is a problem?" Without getting into these deep and murky waters, let me say that problem solving uses thinking, but that solving a genuine problem usually requires some creative act, ranging from the flash of insight that illumimates the entire prob- lem to the glimmer of light that shows a direction to pursue (and which may be a will o' the wisp). Without creativity, problems reduce to exercises, though this is a gradual transition and one cannot draw any firm line between problems and exer- cises. To me, the creative aspect of problem solving is beyond pure thought, though again there is a con- tinuous transition involved. Unlike thinking, which has been discussed by philoso- phers and systematised by logicians ever since the An- cient Greeks, problem solv- ing has only recently become an object of study. The only relevant ancient work is <1The>1 <1Method>1 of Archimedes which describes his mechanical analogy for finding areas and volumes. The earliest general discussions that I know of are in the works of 17th century philosopher, Rene/ Descartes, <1Rules for the>1 <1Direction of the Mind>1 and <1Discours de la Me/thode.>1 In the late 19th century, Henri Poincare/ and Jacques- Solomon Hadamard wrote on mathematical creation, and more recently George Po/lya and Gabo%r Szego used problems as a teaching method and Polya prcduced his famous <1How To Solve It>1 (Princeton UP, 1971). But since the 1950s, there have been several hundred articles and books, generally written by psychologists, but also from mathematicians, engineers, advertising men and so on. Several dozen mathematics texts have appeared that use problems as the principal teaching technique. It is natural for mathematicians to be the first to study problem solving but it surprises me that other disciplines have been so slow. Problem solving is an important part of the work of researchers of all descriptions, as well as medical diagnosticians, archaeologists, translators, historians, detectives, accountants, designers and taxonoms, but few of these fields have contributed to the problem-solving literature ( excepting detective fiction). Perhaps the practitioners have just considered problem-solving techniques as "common sense". The current interest in problem solving arises from the recognition that: * problem solving is a common everyday pheno- menon * problem solving can be taught and learned (and has not been in the past) * problem-solving skills are applicable in most fields * problem solving can be fun. One pet theory of mine is that the decline in the study of Latin has accentuated this interest. People often used to claim that studying Latin developed the power of logical thought and the ability to solve problems, thereby equipping students to run countries. I believe this is a much inflated claim, but there may be some truth to it. Now that the study of Latin has de- clined, interest has focused on how problem solving is taught in mathematics classes. The "new math" movement, which empha- sises understanding and uses more non-routine problems, has provided the main stimulus for this. In many ways, problem solving is just common sense but we know how rare that is! The ideas of problem solving appear to be well known or obvious, but most of us will be able to recall situations where we spent hours or days on a problem whose solution was "obvious" once we found it. The systematisation of common sense is generally a convenience and has sometimes even provided a breakthrough in a subject. I find that when I am stuck on a problem, a simple contemplation of different problem- solving techniques can lead me to a new approach. Teachers of problem solving believe that problem solving can be taught, that it helps people in solving problems and that this is a good thing. We cannot really discuss problem solving without an example, so I am going to discuss a rather large problem, namely Rubik's cube. The discussion presented has the benefit of hindsight: although each idea appears obvious and in an obvious sequence, most were not obvious at the time they were discovered, the steps were not considered in this order and the overall result does not seem obvious even now. We start by picking up and examining the cube. We read the instructions (if any) and ask friends what it does. At this first stage, it is essential not to go too fast, but by now most people have already done so; they have already jumbled the cube and thereby discovered the basic mathematical problem: how do you get back to where you started? Let us assume that we have been more careful and not leapt before we looked. When we look, we see that the cube apparently consists of a 3 X 3 X 3 (which we abbreviate as 33) array of 27 pieces. These are small cubes, called cubies or cubelets, with their outside faces (called facelets) coloured. The original state had the 32 facelets of a single colour on each face, with six different colours for the six cube faces. It takes some people a time to realise that the inside facelets are never seen, to see that all the faces can turn and that there are several distinct types of pieces. There are 8 "corner" pieces, 12 "edge" pieces, 6 "centre" pieces (which are the centres of the cube faces and might be called "face" pieces) and a central piece that is never seen. These pieces move about as the faces turn, but we soon notice that the corner pieces move only to corner places, and so on. The types remain separate and are not intermixed. Further, the centres only turn in place and are never permuted. I have given the above observations explicitly because they are the necessary foundations for later investigation and many people have trouble observing them, even though others find them obvious. <2The right notation simplifies the problem>2 Whether the cube has already been jumbled or has been carefully preserved, we will realise by now that one way to restore the cube is "just" to reverse the moves we made. This requires some means of recording moves. Mathematicians are used to doing this, but notation tends to frighten non-scientists. However, notation is simply a way of naming things and every field has its own specialised words and jargon, so the basic idea is really familiar to most people. I devised the notation now most commonly used about December 1978. John Conway, a mathematician at Cambridge University, had already developed a similar but more poetic notation but I did not see this until the summer of 1979. The basis of my notation is the observa- tion that the centre pieces are not permuted--they only turn in place. Thus we can always tell what colour a face should be by looking at its centre, regardless of how mixed up the cube is. It is natural to identify the faces by their centre colours but this soon runs into complications. So the six faces are labelled "Front", "Back", "Right", "Left", "Up", and "Down" and abbreviated to their initial letters. Now we label all the pieces and positions of the cube. For example, the corner at the intersection of the <1U, R, F>1 faces is labelled <1URF>1 (or <1RFU>1 or <1FUR>1), the edge at the intersection of the <1U>1 and <1F>1 faces is labelled <1UF>1 (or <1FU>1) (Figures 1 and 2). These labels denote the shown positions and the pieces that were originally present but which wander away into other positions as the faces are turned. We also use face names to denote face turns. <1R>1 means a 90s clockwise turn of the <1R>1 face as in Figure 3. (Clock- wise is the most natural way for a right-handed person to turn the <1R>1 face.) <1Rs>1 denotes <1RR>1 which is a 180s turn and <1Rs>1 denotes <1RRR>1, also written <1R--s>1 or <1R'>1, denoting a 270s turn clockwise or a 90s turn anticlcckwise. <1Rs=RRRR>1 is the same as the identity operation, <1I>1, of doing nothing. Clockwise can be confusing on faces that are away from you--I always treat it as clockwise when looking straight at the face. <1RU>1 now denotes the process of first turning the <1R>1 face, then the <1U>1 face (Figure 4). The final aspect of notation is the question of repre- senting the effect of a sequence of moves. For example, consider the cube after <1RU>1 has been executed (figure 4). This diagram does record the effect of <1RU>1 on the pieces, but it is hard to see what is happening. Let us consider a single piece such as the cdge <1FR.>1 This piece is carried to the <1UF>1 position, which we denote by <1FR-->UF.>1 (Here the relative orders are important. The notation <1FR-->Uf>1 means that the F facelet of the piece in the <1FR>1 position is carried to U facelet of the <1UF>1 position. This is the same as <1RF-->FU>1, but is not the same as <1FR--FU>1.) By following along, we see that: <1FR>1--><1UF>1--><1UL>1--><1UB>1--><1UR>1--> <1BR>1--><1DR>1--><1FR>1--><1UF>1-->. . ., as shown in Figure 5. As there are only a finite number of edge pieces and the process <1RU>1 can take only one edge piece into a new "edge piece" position, this sequence must cycle back to the beginning and we denote this "7-cycle" as (<1FR, Uf, UL, UB, UR, BR>1, <1DR).>1 The corners go through the sequence: <1BRU-->DRB-->>1 <1FRD-->UFL-->ULB-->UBR-->BDR-->>1. . ., as shown in Figure 6, where the positions repeat after five steps, but with an anticlockwise twist, so we write this "twisted" 5-cycle as (<1BRU, DRB, FRD, UfL, ULB)--. There is another corner>1 affected that remains in place but twists clockwise, giving <1URF-->RFU-->FUR-->URF>1 . . . , which we write as (<1URF>1)+. (The choice of clcckwise for + is arbitrary and probably due to thinking of the turn <1R>1 as clockwise.) We call this representation (a modification of the standard cycle representation of a permutation) the cycle representation of the effect of <1RU>1 on the cube. If we apply <1RU>1 to a jumbled cube, the notation <1FR-->UF>1 means that the piece at the position <1FR>1 is carried to the position <1UF.>1 We have spent some time on the preliminaries, particu- larly the notation, because notation is essential for communication and because it is often neglected as a stage in attacking a problem. Of course a suitable notation rarely appears instantly and clearly at the start of a problem. It is only once the problem is well under way or even completed that one fully knows what the notation is required to do. Notations are generally taught long before their significance is apparent. We are now (at last!) ready to start the actual solving of the problem, and will use several problem-solving techniques in no particular order. We have already noted that there are three types of piece: corner, edge and centre. Because the centres have no visible changes on a standard cube, we ignore them. (Here we are eliminating irrelevant aspects of the problem.) We are now left with two types of piece and we can split our problem into two parts: restore the edges and restore the corners. There may be some interaction between the edges and corners that prevents this split but it is a resonable split to start with. We also observe that a piece can return to its posi- tion but in a different orientation; for example, <1RU>1 twists the FUR piece. So we can try to split the restoration into another two parts: get the pieces in their right positions and get the pieces correctly oriented. There are now four such problems which can be assembled into a solution in any order, provided we can solve a subproblem in such a way as not to disturb the solution of the previous sub- problems. As a general strategy, this is fine, but it is not yet broken down far enough to be useful. If we begin thinking about the details of the cube, we can try to restore one piece at a time. However, there are 20 pieces (eight corners and 12 edges) to restore and a piece may be in many different positions with respect to its home position, so such a method will involve solving many subproblems (239 to be exact) and this is not a very human strategy, though it is perhaps the easiest for a computer. The order in which the 20 pieces can be restored is almost completely arbi- trary, so that each solver of the cube can devise his own strategy. (This is one of the features that ele- vates the cube beyond the ordinary puzzle.) Most people follow the recom- mendation in the instruc- tions and try to restore one face first, then follow with the adjacent layer and the remaining face. In this way one can simplify the number of subproblems considerably and one can group them into about eight stages, each of which has about six sub-problems, and this becomes humanly comprehensible. ( Psychologists believe that the human mind remembers information in batches or chunks of at most about eight items. ) These general considerations of strategy should interact with our exploration of the cube, though many would-be solvers will not start thinking about strategy for some time. The strategic considerations tell us that we should try to find processes that have simple effects. In particular, can we move one piece into a desired position while disturbing only a few others? Some such processes can be found by trial and error or by simply paying attention to only a few pieces. I found it easier to systematise my trial-and-error searching by restricting the possible moves, thus reducing a wider problem to a subproblem. The wider problem is to determine just what positions of the cube can be achieved by turning the faces. The associated subproblem is to determine what positions are achievable by turning, say, just two faces <1F>1 and <1R.>1 The set of such positions is denoted <1.>1 The set of all positions of the cube is an example of the mathematical structure called a group; <1>1 is the subgroup generated by <1F>1 and <1R.>1 <2Explorations among the subgroups>2 There are several such subgroups that one can easily explore: for example, <1>1 has only four elements and <1>1 has only two. John Conway suggested the following subgroup which has many elegant patterns. A <1slice>1 is a move like <1F,=FB,>1 which can be viewed as the movement of the middle "slice" layer between the <1F>1 and <1B>1 faces (but then the relation of our coordinate system to the face centres is lost and one must use a "spatial" coordinate system which requires a bit more care to use). The sub- group of positions generatcd by the three slice moves, <1FB, UD>1 and <1RL,>1 has only 768 patterns and one can soon find a simple way to return to the pristine cube from any one of these positions in at most seven slice moves. The group generated by the "slice-squared" moves like <1Fs=FsB>1<22>2 has only eight elements. Playing with these groups does not lead toward our solution except that it develops familiarity with the cube and with the notation. It also yields a diversionary problem of continuing inter- est: what aesthetically pleasing patterns can be achieved? If we now return to <1>1 and find it too complex (which it is), our experience with the slice moves suggests we consider s, Rs>. We find this subgroup has precisely 12 patterns and one of them <1FsRsFsRsFsRs=(FsRs)s has the>1 particularly simple effect of exchanging the positions of two pairs of edge pieces (<1UF, DF)>1 <1(UR, DR),>1 as shown in Figure 7. In fact, as I shall discuss later, we cannot get a simpler effect. Exploration of different types of subgroups with one slice move will yield <1UsR,sDsR,s=(UF, UB) (DF>1, <1DB)>1 and <1FsRsUsR=(UF, DF, UB)>1 where <1R,>1 is the inverse of <1Ri=RL'>1, namely <1R'L.>1 Note that the last 3-cycle is equal to (UF, DF) followed by (UF, UB). Any one of these moves suffices to give lots of simple changes by means of a process that in group theory is called <1conjugation,>1 though it is really a general problem- solving technique that has no general name. For example, if I know how to wash a dish at the kitchen sink, how do I wash a dish at the table? Simple--I take the dish over to the sink and wash it, then bring it back to the table. On the cube, I know how to exchange two pairs of pieces in particular positions by (<1F>1s<1R>1s)s, so how do I exchange two other pairs of pieces? Simple--I take the other two pairs to suitable positions, then exchange them, and then put them back whore I found them. If <1P>1 is the process that brings the pieces into the working positions, then we must use <1P>1-s to put them back again, so that our total operation is <1P>1(<1F>1s<1R>1s)s<1P>1-s. At first, finding <1P>1 seems to be just as difficult as finding the two exchanges as <1P>1 also moves four pieces. However, we can let <1P>1 affect these other pieces, because (<1F>1s<1R>1s)s does not affect any other pieces and so <1P>1-s will also put them back correctly. Hence a conjugate of (<1F>1s2)z, such as P(FRi)jP-I is also a pair of exchanges and it acts only on the pieces that are brought to the four working locations by <1P>1. My friend and colleague Sandy Frey has correctly recognised this as a fundamental process for the cube, and for other mathe- matical groups, and he calls it the <1Principle of Partial>1 <1Inverses;>1 a piece moved by <1P>1 is restored by <1P>1-s, provided nothing else has moved it in between. <2Change to a problem you can solve>2 Conjugation is generally taught in algebra or group theory as a fairly abstract process. I certainly never pictured it as being the same operation acting on differ- ent pieces until I actually saw it happening on the cube. While writing this article, I have realised that it is actually a very general problem-solving technique, of which there are many other instances in mathematics and science: If you cannot do a problem, transform it to a problem that you can do and then transform the answer back to reach the solution to the original problem. Conjugation is a powerful technique on the cube and in general but how shall we apply it? We contemplate the cube for a bit and see that we can move any four edges into the four working locations of F, and we can put the edges in either way round. In this way we can put one edge at a time in place while we exchange another pair of edges. This procedure may break down if we get to a single pair of edges, but we will see that this can happen only if a pair of corners has also to be exchanged. The fact that we can put the edges in the working locations either way around allows us to exchange a pair twice, but with one edge flipped between exchanges, and this leads to all edges being in place but one pair being flipped. With this, we can easily flip any even number of edges, which we will see is all that is possible. In principle, then, we can restore the edges of the cube without affecting the corners! This is quite a lot to achieve with a single process. It certainly demonstrates the power of conjugation and provides a definite guide for further puzzles of this type. When I first acquired a cube, Conway and Roger Penrose, from Oxford University, had already solved theirs and remarked that it took them some time to realise the power of conjugation. It certainly was the last point that I understood; I remember lying awake think- ing about it, seeing that I could move any four edges into the working locations and realising that this completed the general method for restoring the cube to its original state. What remains is to solve the problem of restoring the corners of the cube to their rightful positions. We return to our subgroup <1>1 and look at another common con- struction of group theory. The <1commutator>1 of <1F>1 and <1R>1 is <1FRF'R'>1 which I denote [<1F, R].>1 First, let us see why this is called a commutator. The inverse of <1FR>1 is (FR)'=R'F' so that <1FRR'F'=I.>1 Thus <1FRF'R'>1 is not normally the identity; it is the identity, if and only if <1FR=RF,>1 that is, <1F>1 and <1R>1 commute. The basic arithmetic operations of addition and multiplication are commutative : <1a>1+<1b>1=<1b>1+<1a>1, and <1ab>1= <1ba>1. Though subtraction (<1a>1-<1b>1=/<1b>1-<1a>1) and division (<1a>1/<1b>1=/ <1b>1/<1a>1) are examples of non-commutative operations, the following may be more appropriate. When we get up in the morning, we put on our socks, then our shces. To go to bed, we take off our shoes, then our socks to get back to the original state of bare feet. That is, we must reverse each step and the order of the steps. Trying to take off our socks first will cause a terrible mess. On the other hand (or foot), consider putting on the right shoe (<1R>1) and then the left one (<1L>1). The shoes can now be taken off in either order, or we can see that the order of putting them on makes no difference, that is, <1RL>1=<1LR,>1 or <1R>1 and <1L>1 commute. <1R>1 and <1L>1 also commute on the cube because they act on different pieces, but <1F>1 and <1R>1 do not commute, so the commutator [<1F>1, <1R>1] creates a terrible mess (Figure 8). Or is it such a mess? <1F>1 and <1R>1 produce cycles of corners and edges which overlap in the three positions along the <1FR>1 edge of the cube. The Principle of Partial Inverses shows that <1FRF>1'<1R>1' does not affect a piece like <1FL>1 because <1F>1 does not carry it into the overlap region, hence it is unaffected by <1R,>1 then restored by <1F>1' and again left un- affected by <1R'.>1 From this we can see that the only pieces that can be affected by the commutator [<1F>1,<1R>1] are those which are in the overlap or are moved into the overlap by <1F>1 or <1R>1. As there is just one edge in the overlap region, the action on edges must be a 3-cycle. The overlap has two corners, one of which moves to the other under <1F>1 and under <1R>1, so we find that the comu- tator is a pair of twisted 2-cycles, affecting only four out of the six corners involved in the moves <1F>1 and <1R>1. The same sort of reasoning about conjugation that we used for edges shows that we can use this process to restore all the corners, though we do disturb the edges. However, we can restore the corners without disturbing the edges, and once the corners are correct, we cannot find ourselves left with a single pair of edges to exchange (as we shall see later). In theory, this completes the constructive part of our problem; every possible pattern of the cube can be restored by these processes. <2How to find new tricks>2 However, we have not yet demonstrated the theoretical assertions that certain patterns are impossible and we shall do this shortly. In practice, our solution is a long way from effective. But the notion of the commutator is very powerful for finding useful simple processes. If we can find a process that affects only one piece in a face, then the commutator of that process with that face gives a 3-cycle of a piece, or a pair of flips or a pair of corner twists, depending on whether the process moves, flips, or twists the piece. Noting that [<1F>1, <1R>1] moves only one corner in the <1L>1 face, and [<1F>1, <1R>1]s twists only one corner in the <1L>1 face, we can obtain a 3-cycle of corners and a pair of corner twists. We also note that [<1F>1, <1R>1]s causes the 3-cycle of edges to vanish and leaves just a pair of 2-cycles of corners. These results greatly improve our ability to restore corners and we can now restore corners and twist corners without affecting edges. With these processes, our edge processes and the technique of conjugation, one can actually solve all four of our basic subproblems indepen- dently of the others and it is possible to do them in any order, although it is difficult to orient pieces that are not yet in their correct position. We can now describe the possible patterns of the cube precisely, but it is easiest to first contemplate a more general problem. Consider a cube which is disassembled into its pieces and imagine reassembling the pieces so that the outside facelets remain outside and the centres remain in the same relative positions. (This can actually be done because the corner and edge pieces can be re- moved, leaving the centres attached together, and one can put only corner pieces into corner locations, etc.) There are eight corner pieces and these can be rearranged or permuted in 8! =8X7X6X5X4X3X2X1=40320 ways. Each corner piece can be oriented in three ways, giving 3s=6561 orientations of corners. Similarly, we get 12! =479001 600 and 22=4096 for the edges and a total of 8! 3s 12! 2s=519 024 039 293 878 272 000 patterns which one could construct in this way. However, our conserva- tion laws tell us that we can achieve just half of the total permutations of corners and edges, just half of the total flips of edges and just one-third of the total twists of corners, so we can achieve just one-twelfth of the above numbers, yielding 43 252 003 274 489 856 000 possible pat- terns for the cube. A modern computer can count some- where between 10s and 10s numbers per second and there are about 3-16 X 10s seconds in a year. Even at the faster rate, it would take over 1300 years simply to count to the smallest of the above numbers. This is a nice example of the "combinatorial explosion": the fact that the number of ways of arranging <1n>1 things grows very rapidly with <1n>1 and becomes essentially infinite even for quite moderate values of <1n.>1 To demonstrate the size of such numbers, one is driven to make strange comparisons; for instance, if we had a cube for each of the 4.325 X 10s patterns, they would form a stack about 260 light years long; and a volume consisting of one cube for each of the 8.858 X 10s pattems with marked centres would be about three- quarters the volume of the Moon. The first part of our solution has been constructive. We showed how to achieve certain basic patterns by using the processes that we discovered and then we saw how they could be combined to achieve a large class of patterns. The theoretical part of the solution shows that no other patterns can occur. The theory can be described as a characterisation of the possible patterns or as the destruc- tive part of the problem--it destroys or eliminates certain possibilities. I also like to view these parts of the theory as bottom up and top down. We start off with a set of <1a priori>1 possibilities, namely the set of constructible patterns, and one known achievable state, namely the initial position. The constructive theory builds up the set of achievable patterns while the destructive theory reduces the set of possible patterns. The problem solver pushes into the un- known intermediate region, alternatively employing con- structive and destructive processes. When these two processes converge, the problem is completed. Almost everyone who solves the cube does only the constructive theory. Though many may wonder about the destructive theory, it requires a moderate amount of mathematical training to develop the conservation laws. Know- ing the results of the destructive theory will keep you from searching for impossible patterns. However, if one does not know the theory, then an- other problem-solving tech- nique comes into play: if you cannot prove it true, then try to prove it false. In substantial problems, this tech- nique may be used many times before one finally resolves the question. In a sense, we have now reached the end of our problem. But an important aspect of problem solving is retro- spection. Can we improve our results? Can we systematise our results? Can we find simpler proofs? Are there diver- sionary problems which could now be attacked? Can we extend our work to similar problems? Can we now quantify our qualitative results? There is a method of solving the cube, due to Morwen Thistlethwaite, my colleague at the Polytechnic of the South Bank in London, that always restores the cube in at most 50 moves (recently reduced from 52) and simple counting shows that some positions require at least 18 moves (counting 180s turns as single moves) or 21 right-angle turns. Several subgroups of the cube have been completely analysed. The 2s can always be restored in 11 moves or 14 quarter turns. The subgroup generated by the 180s turns on the 3s cam always be solved in 15 moves. Both these results are the best possible and the latter reduced Thistlethwaite's method by two moves. For the complete cube, the results so far lead us to believe that one can always restore the cube in at most about 22 moves. The method that restores any position in the mcst efficient way is called God's algorithm and seems likely to remain known only to God. Can we relate the cube to other work? The cube has many generalisations, such as the 2s, the 4s, the 3s, the 2 X 3X3 Magic Domino, and the basic idea extends to other polyhedral shapes. The ideas also cover most sliding piece puzzles. They require some basic work but are generally easier than the cube, though some have many more positions. A much more interesting type of rela- tion is an elegant analogy, due to Solomon W. Golomb of the University of Southern California at Los Angeles, between the unachievable twists of a third turn of a cube corner and the unobservable quarks of charge one-third. Perhaps the most interesting uses of the cube are as an intricate and interesting concrete example in group theory and, to a lesser degree, in combinatorics. Almost all the basic ideas of group theory cccur naturally as one studies the cube and a fair amount of advanced group thcory emerges. Already several scientific papers inspired by the cube have been published: so has a textbook using the cube to develop theory for students. From the point of view of problem solving, I find the cube has led me to formulate many problem-solving techniques in more generality than previously and to develop a general scheme for all problems of this sort. The scheme is as follows: 1. Familiarise yourself with the problem 2. Find appropriate notation(s) for pieces, positions and moves. (In general, this may require assuming all pieces are distinct even when they are in- distinguishable. ) 3. Look for simple processes: especially pairs of 2-cycles or single 3-cycles, by using commutators and other subgroups 4. Once simple processes are found, investigate whether conjugation will allow the processes to be moved to other pieces 5. Look for parity or other conservation laws. So far, this scheme has worked with every puzzle of this type. The hardest problems are those where simple processes are hard to find, usually because of some com- plexity of the puzzle which makes it hard to see the effects of moves, or those where the basic coordinate system and hence a notation is hard to find. The scheme yields only a theoretical solution, from which the number of patterns can be obtained. Practical solutions require finding more processes and developing a strategy, but some puzzles become much easier because they have many pieces the same. So where does this essay leave us? I have tried to con- vince you that problem solving is important and that it can be taught and learned by means of guided problem solving. In the example of Rubik's cube, we have looked at a substantial problem that leads naturally to a great deal of mathematics and uses many techniques of problem solving. The cube leads to more mathematics and uses more problem-solving techniques than any other recrea- tional problem, and so is an excellent problem for teaching and learning. [] ---------------------------------------------------------------- <2Our resident goddess reflects>2 ---------------------------------------------------------------- SEVERAL old and tried tunes opened up the year. Thather said that the UK was "financially sound", there was a ban on overtime (voluntary) on British Rail; the US was organising sanctions against Poland for daring to be taken over by the military and the Social Science Research Council, to muffled cheers and sobs, got a #1 million cut. <1New Scientist>1 began by printing an article that stated that the country had better start acting youth- fully or it was doomed to become a developing nation, thus posing the problem of how to become developing from being developed. In the same week, at least somebody behaved youth- fully, if not something else. A young woman with large breasts paraded them across a football field and imme- diately got a job of modelling double-breasted clothes. Youthful Roy Jenkins was recommended to fight the Hillhead election for the SDP and a judge proved that youth was not necessarily an advantage by deciding that a 17-year-old girl, a victim of rape, was guilty of contri- butory negligence by thumbing a lift at night. 1982 kept going at a lightning pace. Peace was alleged to have broken out in the civil war or scrum called the Labour Party, creationism was adjudged not acceptable in Little Rock, Arkansas, schools, the Advanced Passenger Train ran with no passengers aboard to prove how advanced it was in every way except actually working, and the Soviet mission to the UN sued New York for better protection. The only comic note was struck by two escaping prisoners, handcuffed to each other, legging it either side of a lamp post, a way to make little progress. <2Les cris de coeur et le own goal>2 <1New Scientist>1, still apparently concerned about youth, reported that uric acid might be the elixir of it because of its power as an antioxidant. Gloom for some readers followed. A survey revealed that scientists were poorly paid, on the whole. If you wanted more money, you should have gone in for doctoring, academicking, police inspector- ing or company secretarying. The newspapers embarked on a steady reporting of rape and sexual assault cases, alleged to be on the increase, although official figures stated that sex offences were at a 10-year low. A woman in a provincial restaurant ate a steak and complained that it tasted of cardboard. She had eaten the cardboard pack- ing, undoubtedly well-cooked. Possibly in the nick of time, Israel began to export an appetite killer, consisting of pulverised algae. <1New Scientist>1 enlightened us all by say- ing "animals infected with rabies virus show dramatic changes in their behaviour". Ariadne announced that the pictures on the back page with what some call funny captions were to be axed and was promptly beaten up by post and battered into continuing. The US, clearly at its wits end, decided to show its con- cern for repression in Poland by beaming a special TV show all over the world, including Frank Sinatra singing in Polish. The show proved that the US was at its wits end. In a burst of what the English call chauvinism, the French government urged its scientists to stop using English in scientific papers. It objected to "le hardware" and "le software" among other terms, a real <1cri de coeur>1 as we say over here. <1New Scientist>1 mourned the decay of that Victorian exuberance, the seaside pier, described Eire as a hive of electronic industry and indicated foreboding about the government's attitude to forking out money for wave power schemes, at the same time laying out all the argu- ments for and against test-tube babies. Laker's air line, all its troubles over, collapsed to extraordinary scenes of public support and lots of money by mail to save it. One famous baby in the making encoun- tered danger as Lady Di, or the Princess of Wales, fell downstairs but no harm came to, all being well, the future King of England. <1New Scientist>1 printed a meticulous survey about where and from what the cuts in money for universities administered in 1981 by the University Grants Committee would produce bleeding. Salford and Stirling were faced with the worst haemorrhages. The 20p coin was announced. John Nott said that the nuclear submarine Dreadnought was going to be scrapped as soon as anyone could think of a way of doing it and the <1US>1 and USSR declined to consider each other's plans for nuclear disarmament. During this week's rail strike, some civil servants walked miles to work while, in Rome (on the Continent, of course ), persistent shirkers in the civil service were arrested and thrown into jail. French farmers hijacked a wine tanker and poured its contents all over the road. They thought it was Italian. It was French. "Le own goal" entered the language. <1New Scientist,>1 in an article by Stephen Salter, explained that simplicity was not synonymous with efficiency or even soundness and that failure of a project is often wrongly said to be because of its complexity. Lack of tenacity could be a more accurate diagnosis. Tenaciously ASLEF called off its latest strike and BR claimed victory through ASLEF's shouts of "We won!" The union, triumphant, demanded more money. BR, exultant, refused. Thatcher said that there would be no relaxation of anything in the budget. Resisting the sirens' song from the Tory wets, she said that like Ulysses, another resister, she would come safely home to harbour. (Note for students: Ulysses lost his ship and his entire crew.) Once a country joined the EEC, it could not leave, said the politicians. Greenland left the EEC. <1New Scientist>1 said that the government was planning to double its money for space in the next few years. In the meantime, the government did little to raise cash by selling Amersham, the old radiochemical centre, at about #20 million less than its market value. The European Court outlawed beating by schoolteachers in the UK. Rhodes Boyson, all of a dither, prophesied instant chaos. A cloud far smaller than a man's hand peeped over the horizon as March began. The Argentinians demanded monthly talks about the future of the Falkland Islands. Bombers could be made invisible to radar, maintained an American author in <1New Scientist,>1 the issue also carrying a discussion of what scientists could do to halt develop- ment of more appalling weapons even than those in exis- tence. Rumours of Brezhnev's death sent buyers, mysteriously, "scurrying" for gold. The Chancellor, in a burst of origin- ality, raised taxes on alcohol, tobacco, petrol and motor cars. Possibly in answer a man got drunk and was pinched for being in charge of a horse and cart the while. He said he had drunk only 24 pints. <1New Scientist>1 spent a lot of space on <1US>1 chemical weapons in Europe and on the ethics and value of seal- slaughtering. Mary Whitehouse sued the National Theatre about simulated homosexual assault on the stage. Both sides won, according to statements when the case was called off. Europe, said <1New Scientist,>1 "lies poised" to take over the pre-eminent position in X-ray astronomy and despaired of London's public transport. Better news about transport was that the new design for London taxis made sure that the back seat was suitable for lovers. A party of Argentinian scrap mer- chants landed on South Georgia and as this report came in, the government announced that 4000 people were to be fired from the Royal Navy. On the same day it was the opinion of every poll that Roy Jenkins had no chance at Hillhead and a slight fall in unem- ployment was said to be the herald of economic re- covery. Roy Jenkins won the election. Economic re- covery remained unachieved. At the end of the month <1New Scientist>1 was taking a sober view of the clinical value of interferon, once thought a possible panacea against viruses. As Argentina deployed gunboats, the Foreign Office entered a long silence over South Georgia. Meanwhile, unofficial reports said that a British atomic submarine was on its silent way to the Falklands. Normally, <1New Scientist>1 heralds the beginning of April with a few <1jeux d'esprit>1, but this year it was subdued, predicting only that the world would come to an end on 5 April, a prophecy based on meat consumption figures, though it was hard to make up the mind about an item called "What the woodlouse can teach us about marriage". 0n the larger scene, the Hydraulics Research Station was turned into a private company. Beans in space, said the Americans, did not know which way to grow and truancy in children was ascribed, by researchers in the US and Britain, to long-sightedness. The question of long and short sight was to become a hot subject for debate as the Argentinians invaded the Falkland Islands, Lord Carrington (no details of the state of his vision) resigned, carriers were hurriedly prepared to sail and a blockade of the islands was declared. Morale was shown by a woman who dialled a number in Buenos Aires at random and sang two choruses of <1Rule Britannia>1 to whoever it was on the end of the line. Overnight all corned beef became Brazilian and Argentinian wine was sold at cut price. <2Balls, Buenos Aires and broken precedents>2 <1New Scientist>1 sailed on with a discussion of the Roman Catholic Church's acceptance of science as long as science accepted miracles and where did that leave both sides. A special issue on the centenary of the death of Darwin contained articles saying he was right, he was half right and in many respects wrong. <1New Scientist>1 also revealed that Britain had an answer to Rubik's cube. It was, appar- ently, Rubik's balls. Meanwhile Alexander Haig flew to Buenos Aires. to London and to Buenos Aires, but there were displays of resolve, resolution and firmness in all areas. Hard line General Menendez was commanding the troops on the Falklands, while Thatcher said that any attempt to breach the blockade would mean hostilities. The US was firmly even-handed, or frozen on the fence, firmness in another direction came from Begin who, in answer to reports that Israel was poised to attack in Lebanon, said there would be no war. Interpretations, impressions, plans, develop- ments, attitudes and postures filled the newspapers. while the Ministry of Defence deployed a speech-synthe- siser called Ian McDonald to give the British public all the news fit to print, all of which appeared to be found fit several days after it happened. The task force for the recovery of the Falklands sailed steadily on, it boldly revealed. By this time, <1New Scientist>1 had organised its own survey of what was likely to happen when the task force reached its objective. The generally accepted idea was a long blockade, said an article by an author specialising in defence (including attack, of course) and that the winter season ensured that conventional military tactics would "fly out of the window". It also printed the term as "war" rather than war, but it gave close observers a full and accurate description of the weapons on both sides. A headline, asked, "Are animals getting better at avoiding extinction?" Readers must have had doubts. Thatcher threatened a "heavy punch" and tightened the blockade to a radius of 200 miles. It was hard to keep an even keel. "What's holding up the cashless society?" asked <1New>1 <1Scientist>1 on its front cover, signalling a feature on the electronic possibilities in paying for goods and services. The answer seemed to be a lack of cash, except for the banks. Breaking with all precedent <1New Scientist>1 started to advertise itself with posters in the London Under- ground. Advertising elsewhere showed an astonishing rash of small computers for sale, all unique, guaranteed to produce prosperity, efficiency, amusement, and intellec- tual progress at negligible cost. [] <2Cable radio -- Victorian style>2 The British government's approval of cable networks to distribute information and entertainment on a national or regional scale has created a good deal of commercial excitement. But it has been done before, in 1895, by the Electrophone COmpany of Gerrard Street, London <2Denys Parsons>2 The banker is let into his house by the maid. After handing her his gloves, hat and coat, he walks into the drawing room, calls for a sherry and says, "Evening dearest, what's on tonight?" His spouse replies, "Well, there's Shakespeare from the Aldwych, but the children would prefer the musical comedy from the Gaiety. On Sunday we can all listen to the service from St Martin's-in-the Fields in the morning and the concert in the afternoon from the Albert Hall." The year is 1895, proving once again that there is nothing new. There was such a thing as "piped" entertainment into the home, 27 years before regular radio, 41 years before regular television broadcasts, and some 87 years before the advent of cable television. It was called the Electrophone. The "pipe" was, of course, the telephone line. For a modest sum, a family sit- ting in the comfort of their home could listen for a whole year to one perform- ance nightly from a selec- tion of theatres, music halls and concert halls with a choice of a dozen church services on Sundays. The service was operated in London by the Electrophone Company of Gerrard Street under licence from the National Telephone Company Ltd. It, in turn, was licensed under an indenture from Queen Victoria's Postmaster-General, then Henry Duke of Norfolk. In 1906 the company took a full-page advertisement in the London telephone directory, from which you can see that home listeners could choose their evening's enter- tainment from 14 London theatres: Aldwych, Alhambra, Apollo, Daly's, Drury Lane, Empire, Gaiety, Lyric, Palace, Pavilion, Prince of Wales's, Savoy, Shaftesbury and the Tivoli, plus concerts from the Queen's Hall and Royal Albert Hall. On Sundays no fewer than 15 church ser- vices were available. The Electrophone Company was formed by Mr H. S. J. Booth in 1894, and by 1896 had some 50 subscribers in London. It passed the 1000 mark in 1919 and the number climbed steadily to just over 2000 in 1923, after which a rapid decline set in. By November 1924, the number of subscribers had fallen to 1000 and in 1925 the Electro- phone Company went into voluntary liquidation -- killed stone-dead by the advance of the new-fangled "wireless". The Post Office Records section at St Martin's-IeGrand has ample files on the Electrophone, and Roy Jones, the official in charge there, gave me the gratifying impres- sion that his one pleasure in life was to make them avail- able to me--in comfort, in a reading room next to his office. The files show that Booth, Electrophone's founder, was a most persistent individual. On record there is the prolonged correspondence he had with the Postmaster- General (PMG) from 1908 onwards. Why, he asked, should not telephone en- gineers when canvassing for telephone business also canvas for Electrophone subscribers, when they would be remunerated by a commission from the Elec- trophone Company? A minion replied stiffly for the PMG that this was "not considered desirable". In 1912 the operations of the National Telephone Com- pany were transferred to the Post Office and throughout 1912 and 1913, when recruitment of Electrophone sub- scribers was in temporary decline, Booth returned to the attack. He bombarded the PMG with letters and eventually that official agreed to receive a deputation of directors of the company. The outcome was a letter in which the PMG explained that the Treasury had put an absolute veto on-any suggestion that Post Office canvassers should be remunerated by outside interests. But Booth did not give up. The Post Office reluctantly gave way and allowed its canvassers "informal permission" to canvass for Elec- trophone installations "outside their official hours". But how did it actually work? At the point of recording in the theatre, for example, granular carbon microphones --up to 48 of them--were ranged along the footlights. The subscribers merely asked their local operator (no dials in those days) to connect them to Electrophone. The com- pany ran its own miniature exchange with five or six operators, and one of these girls would put the subscriber through to the theatre, concert hall or church of his choice. In the home, the user had special pairs of earphones, mounted on what looked like a pitch Fork. A man whose late father was a subscriber sent me the Electrophone programme for the month of May 1924. It shows that the lighter side of entertainment, then as now, was most in demand: <1Madame Pompodour, The Three>1 <1Graces, Nell Gwynne, Tonight's the Night,>1 and two un- named shows; or there was variety from the Alhambra, seasons of opera from the Old Vic and (at a small extra charge) from Covent Garden, and the usual Sunday church services. What of the quality? There must be dozens of people still alive who remember the transmissions from their youth or childhood in the early 1920s. But I had consider- able difficulty in tracking any down. Two brothers called Dommersen, sons of the secretary of the Electrophone Company, reported the quality as excellent. One of them clearly remembered listening to George Robey. Mr W. Ross Pope, who wrote to me from Chichester, recalled the period from 1916 to 1920 when the family lived at Putney Hill. "There were certain shows on at that time such as <1 Bric-a-Brac>1 (Palace) <1Vanity Fair>1 (Palace), <1The Bing Boys>1 (Alhambra). We knew these and other shows so word- perfect that we knew when a mistake was made, and noticed all the "ad libs" put in by actors like George Robey, W. H. Berry, Alfred Lester, and Nelson Keys." Mr Pope drew from memory a remarkably accurate sketch of the hexagonal table with headsets, an example of which I was able to inspect at Telecom Technology Showcase, as British Telecom calls its new museum. Here also, the staff fell over themselves to show me their treasures. Patients at the many London hospitals appreciated ser- vices brought to them by Electrophone. Like today's TV politicians, the preachers worked at their microphone technique. "Though speaking from the longest distance," wrote the editor of the Highbury Quadrant Church maga- zine, "Mr Dawson, as on previous occasions, was best heard of all. The Electrophone always does him full jus- tice. His sonorous voice and deliberate utterance may to a great extent account for this but it should also be re- marked that as Highbury Quadrant was the first church to introduce the Electrophone, perfection has been prob- ably acquired by long practice in the details requisite to success." It was not then thought proper to display a microphone in the pulpit so it was disguised as a <1Bible->1- a <1Bible>1 of curious proportions, delicately mounted on two stubby white pillars. Not the least surprising aspect of the Electrophone ser- vice was its value for money. Installation was free, and for #5 a year subscription for two (#10 for four), you could listen any or every night of the year, with no extra charge for the telephone calls. In 1925 the Post Office, which operated independently or through other licensees outside London, went to the length of installing, for a private subscriber in Eastbourne, a free line to St An- drew's Church 933 yards away, and charged him an annual rental of #1-17-6d (#1-8712) under a three-year contract. The Electrophone Company paid the Postmaster-General an annual sum of #25 plus a royalty of half a crown (1212p) a year for each subscriber. A note on the file at St Martin's-le-Grand shows that for the year ending 31 December, 1920, the Electrophone Company's income from subscribers was #11 868, its operating expenses were #5866, and its royalty payment to the Post Office was just #496. Theatres received an annual royalty from the com- pany of the order of 10 shillings (50p) a year per sub- scriber connected. Clearly nobody made a packet out of this remarkable venture. Although radio broadcasting killed the Electrophone Company and piped entertainment in London, telephone transmissions continued in Bournemouth until 1937. As Postmaster-General, Austen Chamberlain had in 1903 licensed Bayley and Sons of Poole Hill, Bournemouth, described as "ironmongers and electrical engineers", to establish Electrophone exchanges in Bournemouth. Sub- scribers were recruited slowly and reached a peak of 62 in 1924 after which a decline set in. The choice of enter- tainment was shrinking: in 1927 the Royal Theatre with- drew from the service, in 1929 the Winter Gardens closed and the Pavilion committee refused an installation. There remained only the four church services. Yet in 1937 there were still two faithful subscribers, Mrs Cooper and Mrs Hatchcock. But it was almost the end. <118 October 1938. Memo to Engineering Dept from Tele->1 <1communications Tp. B. Dept:>1 It is understood that no subscribers are now connected to the Electrophone service anywhere in the country. No new subscriers will be accepted. In its 30-year span of life the Electrophone had its moments of glory. At 10.20 pm on Saturday, 3 November, 1906, at Sandringham, King Edward VII heard, via the Electrophone exchange, excerpts from the final scenes at Covent Garden, the Apollo, and the Prince of Wales. His Majesty described the reception as "wonderful". The following morning Queen Alexandra, on her return from Sandringham church, listened in to parts of services from several London churches. This was probably not their first experience of the Electrophone, as it had been in- stalled at Marlborough House in 1896. In 1903, an august assembly was photographed at the Hotel Metropole on the occasion of a dinner given by Sir George Chubb to meet the Rt Hon austen Chamber- lain, by then Chancellor of the Exchequer. They were listening to a speech by the Prime Minister relayed from the United Services Club. Britain appears to have been the pioneer in "electrc- phonic" transmission to homes, but there had been earlier experimental transmissions in the US and France. And today's young hi-fi enthusiasts may be astonished to learn that the Paris Theatrophone transmitted performances from the Opera, the Opera Comique and Theatre Francais to the Paris Exhibition of 1881 <1in>1 stereo! This is made crystal clear in a somewhat laboured exposition in a book by Preece and Maier published in 1889: Let us suppose the two microphonic transmitters are placed on the stage at <1T>1 and <1T>1s, and these transmitters separately connected by two distinct wires to two tele- phone receivers, <1R>1 and <1R>1s, which are applied to both ears to hear the actor, whom we will suppose to be placed at A. It is easy to understand that, the distance of this actor from transmitter <1T>1 being less than that from transmitter <1 T>1s, his song will be more distinctly reproduced by trans- mitter <1T>1 than by <1T>1s, and the stronger impression will be produced on the left ear. If, on the contrary, the singer changes his position to <1A>1s, the opposite result will be ob- tained and the right ear will receive the stronger im- pression. The sensation produced will, therefore, be a change of sonorous intensity from one ear to the other, consequent upon the displacement of the sound or of the singer from right to left, and the sane will he the case for several actors crossing one another on the stage. The Electrophone did not diminish box office receipts --on the contrary it tempted subscribers to flock to the West End to see the "real thing". But, what with today's theatre seat prices, the difficulty of parking the car, and the limitations of radio and television, who would not pay the #5 subscription 10 or 20 times over to bring back the stay-at-home multiple choice facilities that our grand- parents enjoyed. What about a revival of Electrophone now? It would certainly distract the attention of the powerful commercial groups that are about to join battle over cable television networks. [] <2He who eats the nut>2 <2must first crack the shell>2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Walnuts come in hard and convoluted shells. They also come in little cellophane bags. How do they get from one to the other? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jeremy Cherfas Sitting somnolently around the fire, all blood long since having departed the brain for regions gastric, the average Christmas reveller often feels a lingering need to continue eating. That need is most freqently satisfied by recourse to a nut or three. The cracking of nuts is an ideal task for such a time, particularly for the more technically minded. Person- ally, I used to devote what little thought I could muster to the question of nut- crackers. Almost all seemed very ill suited for the job at hand, because it was impossible to prevent the force that cracked the shell from also crushing the nut. That solved, by the purchase of a device based on a screw which is perfect for all nuts except Brazils, I began to think about commerce. Here was I, struggling to free a walnut from its con- voluted enclosure, exalting when at last I managed to obtain a whole half rather than a handful of shards, while in the next room was a packet replete with whole halves. It wasn't that I was tempted to eat those convenient nuts, just the very fact of their existence. Somehow those walnuts had been extracted from their shells, with little apparent damage. True, there were packets of walnut bits too, but they failed to impress themselves on me. Gullible child of the age that I am, I assumed that someone, some where, had invented a machine that accepted complete walnuts at one end and dispensed perfect halves (and shells) at the other. It not only cracked nuts, but somehow picked the edible meats from the inedible shell. I resolved to find that machine, and reveal its secrets to all. My quest took me swiftly to the premises of john F. Renshaw & Company, giants among British nut people, and purveyors of nuts to royalty. There, in a quiet street in Mitcham, I was to learn how they get nuts. My first intelligence was a grave disappointment. Stan Wickenden, purchasing director of Renshaws, quickly disabused me of my fanciful notions that Mitcham harboured fabulous nut-cracking machinery: "Of course, you realise that most nuts are imported ready shelled. After all, there's little point paying freight on useless shells." I nodded agree- ment, trying desperately to prevent my fallen crest from showing. But still, somewhere the nuts are shelled. Where better to start than in California. (Parenthetically, let me admit that it isn't easy to resist cracking all those nut jokes. But resist I will. You'll get no cheap laughs from this article.) Anyway, California is the world leader in almonds. ln 1981 the world produced 323000 tonnes, and 180000 of those tonnes grew in California. The remainder comes mostly from the countries around the Mediterranean, but what the original almond growers lack in quantity they apparently make up for in quality. Stan Wickenden con- cedes that the Californians "have a marvellous sys- tem, with every- thing mechanised and pure, but at the end of the day there's no taste" So what is the system? The almond trees grow in the fertile valleys of Califor- nia, neatly planted in straight lines. There are hun- dreds of varieties, some ripening early and some late, but all rely on a mild spring to prevent damage to the lovely blossoms and on bees to pollinate them. The fruit is rather like a small peach, but the hull dies off towards the end of the season. During the harvest, which starts in September and continues for about six weeks, an enormous machine is driven up to the tree trunk, which it locks in a mechanical embrace. The machine then literally shakes the nuts out of the tree, the amplitude and frequency of the vibrations carefully calculated to bring down all the nuts without inflicting permanent damage on the tree. Along comes another machine which sweeps all the nuts into nice straight lines between the avenues of almond trees. And then comes another machine (or the previous one with a new attachment) which sucks up all the nuts and any other loose debris lying around on the ground. The machinery is, I suppose, neither more nor less wonderful than other sort of modern farm equipment. It knocks nuts down, and it picks them up. The first clean- ing happens right out there in the orchard, because many of the harvesters have fans that blow sticks and other debris away while leaving the nuts to fall into their trailer. They are hauled off to a depot, to await their turn to be processed. The first step is de-hulling, removing the flesh of the almond fruit. This died while the almond was still on the tree, but it often remains loosely attached to the shell. Another air-blast separates the nut from the hull, which goes to feed cattle while the nuts pass to the sheller. An almond may be but a simple nut compared with a walnut but at last I was getting close. The sheller, it turned out, was no more than a series of rollers, covered with hard rubber. The rubber takes a grip on the shell and forces it between the rollers, which are set at just the right distance apart so that they crack the shell without damaging the kernel. A steady stream of debris--shell, kernel, sticks and stones--emerges from the rollers, and passes through another series of separators. First there is a vibrating belt, which bounces the light- weight shells away from the heavier nuts. Another air separator, and almost pure nuts emerge. There is a slight problem with stones, which can respond as if they were nuts to the vibrators and air blasts. To deal with these, and any imperfect nuts, there is no substitute for the keen eyes and picky fingers of rows of women, who scan moving belts which cunningly tip the nuts over to expose all their weaknesses, and remove offending objects. Clean, pure and, arguably, tasteless, the Californian almonds are ready to be graded and shipped. The shell, in the meanwhile, is not discarded. The figure of 180 000 tonnes refer to almond kernels, which make up about 60 per cent of the total weight in California. (ln the Mediterranean the kernel is only 35 per cent and the shell 65 per cent; the Californian reversal is just one result of the intensive breeding and selection pro- gramme.) So there are about 120000 tonnes of shell, and the frugal Cali- fornia Almond Growers Exchange uses it to generate electricity. The shells power all the Exchange's plant, and also provides a small surplus that is fed into the local grid. In London, Renshaws put the almonds to work. The nuts have been shelled, but they have not been skinned. The blanching process is an automatic version of the usual home method; the almonds are dipped in boil- ing water and then forced between two rubber rollers, once again set so as to squeeze off the skin without damaging the nut. Then it is into marzipan, or ribbed, or flaked, or on top of Dundee cake, or wherever else almonds may be needed. How they get almonds, then, is not all that mar- vellous a story. Tried and tested methods, which someone less technologic- ally illiterate than myself could have guessed at, are put to very effective use. But almonds, while they may be California's forte and Renshaw's prime product, are hardly the most difficult of nuts. At least among the more common nuts, that accolade belongs either to the walnut or the Brazil. Walnuts are intricate, Brazils tough. So how do they deal with these two? This is perhaps the place to take a little botanical diver- sion. The word "nut" is one of those that means one thing to the person cracking them and quite another to the botanist. Technically, a nut is a single-seeded fruit, with the embryo free in a cavity and the pericarp hardened and woody. In that, it is rather like an achene, except that a nut is derived from two or more carpels while the achene comes from a single carpel. (The pericarp is the seed's enclosure, derived from the ovary wall. A carpel is the constituent unit of a compound ovary. And an achene is a small, single-seeded fruit that does not open, which you might mistake for a nut unless you know that it came from a single carpel.) By that definition, the hazelnut and chestnut are botanically, as well as commonly, nuts. But the Brazil nut is a seed with a thick wall, the walnut a drupe, a stony-seeded fruit. And the peanut, which will not be mentioned again, is an atypical legume. Back, now, to the hard nuts. The first point to note is that we in the UK import more walnuts (and Brazils) in the shell than out. Most of these probably end up cracked at home for domestic con- sumption. But kernels are available, so someone must be producing them. What machine could deal with a walnut? One clue is that California, the biggest supplier of walnuts, will not contract to supply whole halves. If you want Californian walnuts, you take what you get, so-called combination, which includes some halves but is mostly smaller pieces. The clear implication is that no machine is capable of doing the job. Yes, machines can process walnuts, along much the same lines as almonds, but they do so very poorly if what you arc after is whole halves. If you must have whole halves, as many con- fectionsers must, then your best source is probably France. The French can supply perfect walnuts, but charge dear; at #5000 a tonne the price is more than twice the price of California bits, and the reason is that the process is totally unmechanised. Cracking walnuts is, apparently a French cottage industry. Hordes of little old men and women sit around all day doing little else, and that is how they get walnuts. In fact, so vital are the French nutcrackers to the French walnut industry that in 1981, when the crop in the south-west was only 5 per cent of the normal crop, nuts in their shells were imported from California and India to keep the crackers going. How they are cracked is almost the least interesting part of the walnut story. The nuts we eat come from one of two species, the black walnut (Juglans nigra) and the English or Persian, walnut (J. regia, which comes originally from Iran). Walnut timber is exceedingly valuable, so much so that lumbermen in the United States used to wander round offering people cash money for the trees growing in their yard. The husk that surrounds the drupe contains useful dyes. And the leaves and roots apparently contain a poison, juglone, which can prevent other plants from growing. Some native people throw walnut leaves into rivers to poison the fish; dead fish are easy to catch. (Another aside. If, as I used to, one cracks walnuts by banging two of the things together, and keeps the uncracked winner to go forward the next round, will one inevitably finish Christmas with the hardest nut to crack in one's hand? Ignore the fact that a nut may be weakened by repeated use as hammer. Or anvil.) Brazils are a quite dif- ferent story. For one thing they are not really culti- vated, mostly because the trees take a long time to bear fruit and even then are not very prolific. The trees grow wild along the riverbanks and are har- vested between January and june as the fruits ripen. The nuts themselves are not nuts at all but seeds, arranged rather like the segments of an orange in a whole fruit (properly a capsule) that is itself about the size of an orange. Small boys climb the Brazil nut trees and throw the nuts to the ground. Most of them are then shipped as is, for us to struggle with. But some are processed, and the problems here is physically to seprate the meat from the shell. Brazils are tenacious, and all the vibrators and air blasts in the world will not loosen their grip on the shell. Two methods exist, one of which, after suitable domestic experimentation, I am prepared to offer a qualified recommendation. The most popular is briefly to pressure-cook the nuts. The combination of steam and pressure releases the nut from the shell, which can then be cracked and removed. I cannot vouch for this. The other method was developed by one of the other British nut dealers, and this one I can vouch for. If you freeze your Brazils (24 hours is ample) they not only crack more easily but separate delightfully. Of course, you have to wait until the nut has warmed up to savour it, but experiments are currently in progress to deternime whether a frozen and thawed Brazil remains easy to deal with. Other nuts of course, pose other problems. Cashew are related to the American perils poison ivy and poison sumac. Portuguese missionaires brought them to East Africa from South America in the 15th century. The nut itself is a curious thing that grows from the so-called cashew apple, and both are filled with a nasty acid fluid that causes dermatitis. For most of the people in India and East Africa who crack cashews, that is just one of the hazards of the job. But it seems odd that the nut is not the prime product of the tree: apparently the fluid of the cashew apple, quite apart from its inflamatory properties, makes jam, a passable alcoholic beverage, is a lubricant, and insecticide, and finds a use in paints, plastics and car tyres. The nuts are picked and dried in the sun, and then placed in a fire to roast. The oily fluid ignites and irritant vapours afflict those nearby. A more modern technique involves placing the nuts in a metal cylinder, and the cylinder on the fire. This appparently disposes of the toxic fumes much more safely. Pistachios are not very popular in the UK, but it is possible, if you have the right contacts, to buy shelled pistachios. Renshaws have supplied Buckingham Palace with shelled pistachios at the astounding price of #7 per pound (#15-40 per kilo). The company won't say how it does it, but I suspect a walnut-like approach. Hazels are up and coming in Oregon; the nuts are big but Stan Wickenden told me that "you can't get the damn skins off. Still." he added, "they're working on that." But the major portion of the world crop comes from the Turkish coast of the Black Sea. Growing them is apparently no prob- lem, nor is the harvest or processing, which rely on cheap plentiful peasant labour rather than fancy devices. But the Turkish government keeps slap- ping extra taxes on the crop that make it less than competitive. Wickenden, as purchasing director, is naturally reticent about details, but he led me to believe that smuggling nuts out of Turkey was an important activity, and that everyone except presumably the government, was satisfied with this arrangement. Macadamia nuts, I must confess, are one of my favourites, but I have never had to wrestle with cracking them. Details are hard to come by, as indeed are macadamia nuts. To get back to that post-prandial scene, there is, I believe, just one thing that can jolt one out of one's seat; a bitter almond. If you get one, you know the nuts you're eating are not from California, for the Californians grow exclusively sweet almonds. But up to one per cent of European "sweet" almonds can be bitter, and bitter almonds are grown specifically. The bitter variety is a distinct one, all the almonds of a bitter tree being bitter, rather than an occasional sport from a sweet almond. The bitterness is caused by a substance called amygdalin, which itself has no flavour, just bitterness. But amygdalin reacts with an enzyme in the almond to produce glucose and two very characteristic compounds, benzaldehyde and prussic acid. Detectives, when they murmur "bitter almonds" at the scene of the crime, are detecting not cyanide but benzaldehyde, which is the essential flavour of bitter almonds. De-bittering bitter almonds is a simple matter of washing the nuts with several changes of cold water, a leaching process really, and without the bitter amygdalin and poisonous prussic acid, bitter almonds are extremely useful. They're added to marzipan to improve its flavour and keeping qualities, and a little oil of bitter almonds goes a long way in much confectionery. Something else that is added to marzipan, or even used as an almond substitute, is apricot kernels. (Marzipan made from apricot kernels cannot be called marzipan, but it is good.) The kernels have to be de-bittered, for like bitter almonds they contain amygdalin. In fact, the quack cancer therapy laetrile is nothing more than apricot kernels, and although high-sounding claims were made for the effects of nature's cyanide on rampant cells, laetrile has proved useless. Renshaw's, in making non-marzipan, has washed hundreds of tonnes of laetrile down the drain. It's a crazy world. Still no nutty jokes. [] <2ARIADNE>2 IN May, Reagan fell off the fence, ordered sanctions against Argentina and supplies to Britain. Argentina said it would withdraw from the Falklands if actual withdrawal were not required. Tea dances, where gentle- men could meet ladies, were reintroduced at the Waldorf Hotel in London, where a quartet was led, according to one account, by Mrs Strevens on sexophone. Port Stanley airfield was bombed and made inoperable, said the Ministry of Defence through what the press called "The 'I speak your weight' " spokesperson. ( The air- field was in use all the time thereafter.) The Argentinian cruiser, General Belgrano, was sunk by torpedo and the British destroyer, Sheffield, was destroyed by an Exocet missile. <1New Scientist>1 noted the dangers from Colorado beetle and said that British Rail scientists had won the railbus war over another story that said "Go-ahead for space platform", causing unfounded optimism in commuters. A war-zone was defined beginning 12 miles from the Argentinian coast. The Argentinian Foreign Minister said that his country did not require guarantees of sovereignty over the Falklands as long as they remained in Argentinian possession, and strikes broke out in hospitals. Inefficient arrangements and obdurate holding up of reports by British correspondents from the task force goaded Thatcher and a group of MPs to attack the BBC for sub- version. Gagging was not exclusive to the Ministry of Defence. The Agricultural Research Council forbade any of its senior staff to protest about cuts, said <1New Scientist.>1 It also printed some remarks by interested parties that the government was not providing enough money for dis- senters from the government policy on the projected PWR to dissent. It rechristened the APT as the Abandoned Passenger Train and said that British technology had helped to develop the Exocet missile that sank Sheffield because the MoD, also ordering the missile from its French makers, insisted that British firms should have a share in the contract. The British forces invaded the Falklands with the loss of two frigates and uneasy doubts were surfacing about the fireproofing-of-naval ships. Bonn urged negotiations and the Pope arrived in England after uncertainty about the visit. The magazine included an article surmising that British ships could have been lost because, among other things, their superstructures were made of aluminium. Goose Green, Port Darwin and Mount Kent were taken by the British. ITV exhibited patriotism approved by the rabid tabloids in cancelling its showing of Argentina versus Belgium in the World Cup. (It might have been better to show the match. Argentina lost.) The lsraeli Ambassador to the UK was shot in the street. Beirut was bombed and the Israelis invaded Lebanon, thus leading to the revised version, "When one war shuts another one opens." That day, tco, another landing on the coast near Port Stanley was a near disaster, with high casualties. The Pope arrived in Buenos Aires. The Israelis were nearing Beirut. Haig, calling Begin inflexible, refused to go to jerusalem for talks and later resigned. Japan said that it intended to build up its mili- tary forces to a high level so that it could cut them down in the interests of peace. Surrender of the Argentinians was announced, though whether the war was over was far from clear. Thatcher's popularity soared to a record level, said the polls, though an inquiry into the Falklands mess was to be started. <1New Scientist>1 kept its head in the euphoria and asked whether the sight of technological weapons being used to kill people might not give the public pause for thought about the amounts of money spent on military R&D, the largest consumer of research money and still growing. But in the outside world, most realised that Beirut was doomed as Begin said he had no intention of capturing it. Unreality supervened again as Argentina fired its Presi- dent Galtieri and called for the immediate withdrawal of British forces. Princess Diana gave birth to a son and things looked like fast returning to normal in Britain as nurses came out on strike, the London tube drivers came out on strike and the NUR threatened a strike. British Telecom profits doubled in one year and the public waited for increases in telephone charges, the the usual consequence. Sensation rang up the curtain on july when Sir Derek Rayner revealed that government-reared rats for research cost #28 each when the going price for a rat in civvy street was #2. Animals were much in the news. Badger gassing, the infal- lible and humane method of killing them recommended by Lord Zuckerman was stopped on the grounds that it was fallible and in- humane. BR and ASLEF were still at the old game and each other's throats, with rebel train drivers complicating the whole thing. The announcement everyone had been waiting for came on time as British Telecom proposed to put up telephone bills by five per cent. It was, not surprisingly, the wettest June this century Against this background, <1New Scientist>1 was fairly tran- quil, printing articles on conserving the New Forest and the wilds of Snowdonia and finding out that, though meet- ing with difficulties, few women in science would have changed circumstances particularly. A feature on the noises made by muscles in action had several member of staff listening to their own thunder by covering their ears with their thumbs and tightening their hand into fists The magazine also revived all the explanation that could account for the Loch Ness monster, an overture to the silly season, though there was little evidence that there would be one this year. Nobody applied the term "silly season" to the news that a man had got into Bucking- ham Palace and had a chat with the Queen, sitting on the edge of her bed. Everyone behaved hysterically about this, except the Queen. Hysteria in the Middle East was on the cards as Begin claimed that the war in Lebanon was "divinely ordained". <1New Scientist>1 was fond of strategies. Its third july issue, with a cover of a heron's-eye view of 26 of the animals, carried the enticing title "The sex strategies of toads". Yet again. it warned of the dangers to people of the weed- killer 2,4,5-T, with scant hope of doing much good in official circles, especially in the MAFF. Most readers treated an article on mathematics and the infinite with caution. It contained questions that most citizens, unaware that numbers <1did>1 behave, would rather not be asked. such as "How do we know that the behaviour of numbers does not somehow change as they become larger?" Rebels, the TUC and the stolidity of the public forced ASLEF to call off its strike, but balance was at once restored by the NHS unions starting a three-day- one. The remand of an employer at the govern- mental communi- cations centre on spying charges brought rumours of American rage and a scandal of treachery of much greater propor- tions than that of the commander of the Queen's guards resignation because of homosexual activities. Returning ships from the Falklands brought much detail about the campaign that should have been the stuff of correspondent's reports in a democratic society. A "V" sign made by a serviceman through a shell hole in a ship became a cliche/ for photographers. Dr Runcie, the well known Archbishop, found himself in terrible trouble when he obviously betrayed his feel- ing that the Argentinians were human brings in the Falklands memorial service. <1New Scientist,>1 basing its report on information from well - placed anonymous sources, argued that British sailors had died needlessly in the Falklands because their ships were floating fire traps. Generators out of action," incomplete fire-fighting pumps, inflammable plastic in the ships and in the sailors' clothing were some of the reasons, given. (Press complaints over the handling of news from islands said that despatches were stupidly censored and when journalists headed their stories "censored", the word "censored" was censored.) Ominously for users of the postal services, the Post Office was reported to have quadrupled its profits in one year. A smiling Arafat agreed that there was some case for the existence of Israel and ASLEF accepted flexible rostering with far from flexible facial expression. The National Coal Board's losses were stated as #428 million. Almost as hard to credit, the figure for the number of nuclear explosions set off by the French in the Pacific since 1975 was said to be 52. The US agreed to sell more grain to the relatively grainless USSR. <1New Scientist,>1 in the teeth of silence from Whitehall, said that <1HMS>1 Sheffield was destroyed because its radar could tell no difference between its own Sea Harriers and Argentinian Super Etendards. As it was August, New <1Scientist>1 returned to the Loch Ness monster. A piece of pinewood, said Robert Craig, a Scottish electronics en- gineer, the log going up and down like the "bees" in a bottle of beeswine and for much the same reason. A likely story, retorted many letter writers, some of them whisky fanciers. Once again, a feature maintained, the Japanese are "poised" to exploit the technology developed by others, this time the US work on generating electricity from the difference in temperature of the surface and the depths. CBI gloom and a call from Peter Shore to reflate or resign was met by the advice from Geoffrey Howe to "keep our nerve". A German visitor lost his in the silence of a British Rail first-class compartment and uncoupled the coach as a gesture of solidarity with the plebs in the second class. Israel was harangued by Reagan and the UN with calls for withdrawal. Begin eventually agreed to a plan for evacuating the PLO but the bombs continued to fall. James Prior said unemployment levels were intoler- able and Norman Tebbit said that he was going to prove that the problem was soluble. The Friends of the Earth said in <1New Scientist.>1 in the middle of August, that the UK did not need a PWR, part of a debate not yet settled. The magazine had taken to tagging its goodies in a red ear on the cover. "Roman Navy in Mainz Hotel" cried one, giving the impression of some rollicking Italian occasion, but the ships were 2500 years old, found in building work. An article on consciousness was cheekily headed, "I am conscious and you probably are, too . . ." Opren, the anti-arthritis drug, was banned after its large-scale use and Mexico found itself unable to meet its international debts because it had discovered enormous oil resources. International forces landed in Beirut as the PLO started to leave and it was revealed that Prince Andrew, hailed as going to Cambridge University, had obtained one C and two Ds in his A-level results. British Telecom announced that it had, officially, made #458 million and was therefore constrained to raise prices, while Reagan began to blacklist firms sticking to their oil pipeline contracts. The TUC ordered a 24-hour NHS strike, in an effort to keep things normal. [] <2The principle of inverse irreversilbility>2 <2An inquest into scientific methodology, from the Popperian hypotheticodeductive perspective, with>2 <2Kuhnian paradigmatic nonreconstructionism, and just a smidgin of Feyerabendian heaven-knows->2 <2anything-goes counterinductivism>2 Ralph Estling There is a beautiful and, to my mind, very moving story which scientists, grown old and grey in the quest for useful tools with which to chip away first this corner of ignorance and then that one, hand down to their students and which the students, when they have been transmogrified into old and grey scientists themselves, pass on to <1their>1 students, and so on and on down through the generations. It is that Science is for ever a Search, never really a finding, it is a journey, never really an arrival. Proper scientists, proper scientists say, and believe, are not as other men. Sir Karl Popper, a kind and gentle thinker and whose 80th birthday we recently celebrated, has ex- pressed this notion time and time again, and other scientists heartily endorse it. Scientists study facts, observe experiments, draw from experience, think em- pirically, cogitate induc- tively, analyse, finally con- struct hypotheses, theories, general concepts. But all is tentative, never final. Scien- tists then take these unfin- ished, inexact hypotheses and present them to other scientists for the express purpose of seeing if the hypothesis will not in fact be shot full of holes, hoping almost that it <1will>1 be so shot, because Knowledge and Truth are thereby served, if only negatively, in having one more tenu- ous, groping hypothesis about the nature of the world shown to be false. Indeed, so Sir Karl assures us, Science really <1is>1 nothing more than a con- tinuous abandonment of ideas shown by objective, scien- tific inquiry, to be untenable. This is of course the famous "Principle of falsifiability" (or as Imre Lakatos terms it in his immortal words "sophisticated methodological falsifi- cationism"). Thus, concludes Popper, although we can never attain to Ultimate Truth, we can and do continually get nearer to it... It is a beautiful and very moving story, marred only by the fact that it does not bear the remotest resemblance to what actually happens. The reason why is summarised in my own "Principle of inverse irreversibility", a sub-paradigm of my "Law of innate tendencies", itself one of the laws that go to make up the all-encompassing "Law of irrelevant correlates", as explained in my work-in-progress, "Irrelevant correlates (and others)", which promises to be hailed on publication as the definitive analysis of systematised muddleheaded- ness. Put in its simplest way, the principle of inverse irreversi- bility means that a scientist, or anyone else in the business of forming some general "law" by which the Universe, or a very large portion of it, is governed, will view his law in direct inverse proportion to the amount and weight of evidence against it. That is to say a little evidence against it will cause him agonies of doubt and self- mistrust, moderate amounts will cause some real con- cern and a pursing of his lips--but total and irrefut- able proof of his law's in- accuracy, its illogic, its basic and undeniable un- tenability, will cause him to cling to it in all its un- modified entirety with the tenacity and singleminded- ness of a barnacle. The principle of inverse irreversibility is often known by its more collo- quial sobriquet as the "Idiot child principle", in deference to the long- observed tendency of mothers to love best their least-promising offspring. Cognoscenti of aberrant reasoning among experts will recognise its relation- ship to Leon Festinger's "theory of cognitive dis- sonance", <1q>1.<1v>1. On the reverse, less posi- tive side, the principle of inverse irreversibility ex- plains the phenomenon we observe when scientists and other professional ex- perts refuse to accept or even consider other scien- tists', other experts' ob- jectively-arrived-at truths when these tend to under- mine or place in disrepute their own objectively- arrived-at truths. Thus, to give one case example in ten thousand that spring to mind, no psychiatrist in his right mind would pay credence or even attention to the findings, as uncovered by Hans Eysenck some years ago, that patients undergoing psycho- analysis have an improvement rate of 44 per cent, those subject to the effects of other psychotherapy recover at the rate of 64 per cent, and those to whom nothing what- ever is done, who receive no treatment at all, are cured at a rate of 72 per cent. Aghast when the news first struck with its initial shattering impact, psychiatrists quickly rallied, closed ranks, adapted very well, and conducted their own surveys, which unfortunately only confirmed Eysenck's mordant findings. At this point and with a sigh of profound relief, there being nothing else a true scientist could do under the circumstances, psychiatrists the world over dismissed Eysenck, and his findings, on the grounds that Eysenck is a racist sonuvabitch. It is clear from this example that inverse irreversibility can and often does, cut both ways, that is, Eysenck's bias in favour of race being a principal factor in inherent intelligence and the psy- chiatrists' abuse of his statistics because of that, red herring in mad pursuit of red herring. When in 1952 Michael Ventris announced he had succeeded in deciphering Linear B and that it was an archaic form of Greek, howls of indignant refutation were raised by the fraternity of linguistic experts as a matter of course, and when, with that beautiful sense of timing which nemesis has, a whole library of Linear B tablets was unearthed in Pylos on the Greek mainland one year later, translations of which confirmed Ventris's conclusion, the experts did the only thing they could under the circum- stances: they accused the discoverer and Ventris of having forged them. When late in 1972 Richard Leakey announced he had dug up the skull, thighbone, and parts of the lower leg of a human that were more than 2 1/2 million years old, thus, if correct, disproving man's direct descent from Australopithecus, many anthropologists seated in leather armchairs in universities not immediately adjacent to East Africa swiftly challenged Leakey's conclusions, this despite the fact that they had not examined the bones in question, the strata in and near which they had been found, the animal bones found in the same strata, or indeed anything. They challenged Leakey's conclusions because these con- clusions were totally at variance with their own firm beliefs, to wit modern man <1is>1 directly descended from Australopithecus. Further investigation may yet prove Leakey wrong and the academic experts right, but that is not the point. The point is that the experts were convinced Leakey was wrong when they could not possibly have known this to be the case In his rollicking "Steady-state cosmology revisited", Sir Fred Hoyle recounts what occurred when a paper sub- mitted by his fellow astrophysicist Sir Hermann Bondi was set before that august body, the Royal Astronomical Society. Bondi had the affront to list past observational mistakes by some of the society's members and, what is more, had the incredibly bad taste to prove his case beyond question, an unforgivable lapse, and one not to be lightly taken. "The Council of the Society was divided on whether the paper should be published, with a majority favouring rejec- tion. I happened at that time to be a Council member, and I was therefore able to point out that Bondi's listing of obser- vational errors were all taken from well-attested literature. "was a paper to be rejected because its statements were correct?' I asked. This argument was having a little success around the table, when the President of the Society, W. M. Smart, squirmed in the Chair, and exclaimed in an aguished voice: 'Then will somebody propose that this paper be rejected ir- respective of its contents?" The reception given by the best scientific circles to his quantum theory, now the basis of modern physics, caused Max Planck to brood darkly. "A scientific truth," he wrote, and one can almost see the tightly pressed lips, hear the snapping of the pencil, "does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (An ironic postscript is that a new generation of physi- cists is growing up right now that entertains certain reservations about orthodox quantum mechanics, them- selves brooding darkly about their elders and muttering blasphemies about "hidden variables", a term held in unmitigated horror by this older generation of quantum theorists. ) Thus the world turns. As Thomas Kuhn would put it, rival paradigms are incommensurable. Or as Arnold Brecht chides: "New thoughts mean new treacheries . . . " The support or detestation exhibited by biologists in the matter of sociobiology and by educational psychologists in the matter of "nature <1v>1 nurture" is, it seems rather too obvious to point out, of this kind. Scientists take their side in the battle for reasons having nothing to do with the merits or lack of them of the issues but rather because of their politics. Scientists, on both sides of no-man's land, become bitterly indignant when someone points such external influences out to them. "Among those interested in (and the much larger number pontificating on) the history and philosophy of science, I notice an increasing tendency to attribute changes and advances to a mysterious but almost omnipotent entity called 'social-and-economic-factors-." Thus begins Professor M. Hammerton's essay "A <1fashionable fallacy">1 in <1New Scientist>1 (vol 76, p 274). Scientific explanations, scientists like M. Hammerton inform us, huffing and puffing away like the good little, non-pontificating rational beings they are, are completely objective phenomena, and value-free, which is even more to the point. By this they mean these explanations and facts, research and analysis, thought and hypothesis, abstractions and theories, are uncontaminated by subjec- tive inclinations, personal prejudices, biases, all that sort of thing, so noticeable among non-scientists. It is self- evident then that scientists should in no way be hampered by non-scientists in their pursuits, even when these seem to possess vague political or "social-and-economic-factors" like the construction of nuclear bombs, the risk accept- ability associated with the use of atomic reactors, nuclear waste disposal plants, new species of bacteria by means of genetic engineering, cloning, the use of fetal tissue as transplants, or brave new thoroughly modern theories on intelligence based on race. Many scientists are deeply shocked, profoundly indignant, when non-scientists, non- professionals, non-experts interfere with these pursuits of pure reason by asking questions or committing other crudities and barbarisms, when it is plain that scientists are free from all ideologic and idiosyncratic tendencies, that, like some child born without natural germicidal pro- tection, they inhabit a world totally apart, isolated, germ- proof, and--that word again--uncontaminated by any human bias or, apparently, any human contact whatever. Shock and indignation jostle for position in the follow- ing quote from a speech of the president of the Royal Society, delivered in 1978: " 'Ominously, voices have been raised claiming that limits should be set to scientific inquiry--that there are questions which should not be asked and research which should not be undertaken.' . . . Lord Todd selected recombinant-DNA research as one area where the 'freedom of choice of the research scientists' is threatened." In his talk the president all but predicted the re-emer- gence of the Inquisition, this because questions were being raised "by members of the lay public". For a man who places himself resolutely against the suppression o questions Lord Todd's jug- gling act with logic seem odd. One almost wonders about which side of the In- quisition he is on. Row odd of Todd to choose such views, we may well ponder. Scientists then are, in some way, culture-proof? In the 19th century, bi- ologists, growing up in the halcyon days of the Indus- trial Revolution, saw all life as a struggle to sur- vive. Nature was red im tooth and claw, no less than capitalists, the weak ex- isted for no purpose except to be eliminated by the strong, thus toughening the race in its total, unend- ing war with itself and everything else around. This was nature's way. Darwin tells us that he was spurred on to commit his theory about the mutability of species to paper by having read Thomas Malthus's <1An Essay on the Principle of Population.>1 where the words "struggle for existence" sent Charles Darwin scrambling back to his own notes. Alter-egos alter cases. In the 20th century, following two world wars, the great depression, a few instances of genocide, and the prospect of the total destruction of world civilisation, that is the logical conclusion of the 19th century views, existence and evolution are seen as coopera- tive ventures, a matter of peaceful progress, balance, reciprocity. We know now of symbiosis, of ecology, of the species--all species--prospering through mutual aid, com- fort, sweet reason, restraint, and good works. At least such is the picture presented us by biologists whose political sympathies and social attitudes tend towards liberalism and socialism. Biologists who vote Tory, Republican or, in the Soviet bloc, Communist, are more inclined to stick to 19th century shibboleths. Or if one prefers psychology, the more individual, per- sonal approach, one may muse on the notions of B. F. Skinner, Hans Eysenck, Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, and J. B. Watson. It is interesting to make the obvious observation that, while the first and last named are fan- atical behaviourists, believing that everything is subject to unlimited moulding and rearrangement through a pro- cess of reward and punishment, the three in the middle are fanatical instinctivists, insisting that virtually every- thing and anything is inherited, a gift (or a grief) of the genes and not subject to the environment. The parallels of the extreme behaviourist and the extreme hereditarian meet at a finite point and join hands in mystic union, like the snake with its tail in its mouth, welded together by the acetylene torch of commit- ment to <1one>1 approach and <1one>1 answer to a multitude of questions. The fury, the zealotry is all. The fact that all these viewpoints stem from individual and personal bias, social, economic, and political, and therefore have, it is to be assumed, little if any relevance to the actual, real-life situation they are ostensibly dealing with, may one day occur to us, or even to them. It is not anti-science to remind scientists that they too are mortal. Or, at the very least, their arguments to the contrary are subject to the rules of logic. [] <2The Man in the Moon, and all that>2 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- <2The Moon was one fo the first objects to come under the scrutiny of the newly-invented telescope.>2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- <2But that did not put a stop to the myths that have always surrounded Earth's nearest neighbour>2 Enid lake The first astronomer to raise his "glass" to the Moon, in 1609, was an Englishman named Thomas Harriot. Second, by a hairs- breadth, was Galileo Galilei. He constructed his own re- fined version of the newly-invented telescope and peered through it from the top of St Mark's tower in Venice. Although Harriot drew the first map of the Moon as seen through the telescope, or glass, Galileo's series of obser- vations were the first serious scientific imvestigation of the Moon's surface. Scientists of the time were bound by Aristotle's philosophy, which taught that the Moon was an immaculate heavenly body travelling in its own crystal- line sphere around the Earth. The spots and patches vis- ible on the Moon were merely reflections of the Earth's imperfect relief in the Moon's smooth and crystalline surface. Galileo's telescope, however, revealed a host of imper- fections, mountains, plains and, apparently, seas, in sur- prisingly Earth-like formations. By careful observation of the appearance of these fea- tures as the Moon went through its monthly changes of phase, Galileo was able to estimate the lengths of the shadow cast by the uplands under various degrees of illumination by the Sun, and so calculate the heights of the mountains. Even with such an unsophisticated method Galileo's estimates turned out to be correct to within an order of magnitude. We now know the Moon's surface as well as we know the Earth's. The French inventor Louis Daguerre took the first photograph of the Moon in 1839 or slightly earlier, and since then literally thousands of detailed pictures have been acquired, including those transmitted back-to Earth by the Moon-probes of the late 1950s and the 1960s. In October 1959, the Soviet probe Luna 3 first photo- graphed the far side of the Moon, which can never be seen from the Earth. The first man on the Moon, as opposed to <1in>1 the Moon, was American astronaut Neil Armstrong who took his "giant leap for mankind" in july 1969. It is now 10 years since the last of the Apollo astronauts set foot on the lunar surface and there are no immediate plans for another visit. The Apollo missions have confirmed that the Moon is lifeless; all the hopes that Galileo's observa- tions promised of another inhabited world have proved to be false. But 20-20 hindsight is an unfair advantage. In Galileo's time an Earth-like surface suggested Earth-like creatures, as expounded by John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, in <1The Discovery of a New World in the Moon>1 (1638). When astronomers could build a large enough telescope they would see the lunar inhabitants going about their daily lives. As the century progressed, the quality of telescopes improved and skilful, dedicated observers produced more detailed maps of the lunar surface. Johannes Hevelius, a prosperous brewer of Danzig (now Gdansk), made the first attempts to name the lunar features on his map of 1647. His geographically-based nomenclature was however super- seded by that devised only a few years later by Giovanni Riccioli, a Jesuit priest. Sadly, after Hevelius's death, the beautiful copper engrav- ing from which the now "obsolete" map had been printed was melted down to make a tea-kettle. Riccioli's map, published in 1651, named the mountains of the Moon after ranges on Earth such as the Alps and the Appennines. He named the craters after famous people, a system still followed today because of the difficulty of changing it! In his choice of names he occasionally showed a touch of irony such as placing the crater named Nicholas Copernicus (and his disputed plane- tary system with the Sun at the centre) in the Ocean of Storms. Lunar cartography improved steadily during the next 200 years, culminating in a masterpiece of observation and delineation pro- duced by the German astronomers Wilhelm Beer and Johann Ma%dler in 1837. Their map has since been superseded by photographic atlases. Before I leave the period of the great map makers and engravers, there is one more map worthy of mention. This is the lunar map prepared by Giovanni Cassini in 1679 for the Sun King Louis XIV of France. It was the first accurate map and is still considered as one of the finest examples of the engravers' art. Only three or four copies of the original printing have survived and it has always been extremely rare. The Cassini map has a charming idiosyncrasy in the shape of the "Moon Maiden", one of a number of fanciful lunar inhabitants that have been introduced at various times. The next Moon-dwellers cropped up in a newspaper report of observations by the noted astronomer Sir John Herschel, using his superb 610-cm (20-ft) telescope at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. John's father, Sir William Herschel, was the discoverer of the planet Uranus in 1781, and he had been firmly convinced of the possibility of life on other worlds. Thus the family name was already to some extent associated with extraterrestrials. The younger Herschel had travelled to the Cape with his telescope to undertake the first survey of the southern skies with a first-class instrument, and his discoveries of nebulae were already causing a stir in the astronomical community. More sensational "discoveries-' were to follow, through the imaginative pen of a young American journalist called Richard Alton Locke. His series of articles in the New York <1Sun>1 started in a modest way on Friday, 21 August, 1835, with a detailed description of John Herschel's marvellous telescope. Later instalments disclosed the wondrous sights the astronomer had been privileged to see. Locke presented to the gullible public lunar vegeta- tion, birds and fantastic animals, such as two-legged beavers that used fire and lived in huts. And he followed these with winged humans, a great temple of polished sapphire and, just before the "accident'- to the telescope which curtailed the story, man-bats made their entrance. Thanks to these discoveries (for which Sir John was generously given all the credit) the <1Sun>1 became temporarily the newspaper with the highest circulation in the world. Locke's "Moon hoax" was but the culmination of Moon-myths that stretch back to prehistory. All the pantheistic religions of the world have a deity represented by the Moon or governing its actions. In Western cultures, we are familiar with a female deity. Under her various names of Diana, Artemis, Selene, Cynthia, Luna, she is the goddess with the silver crescent on her brow who keeps the shepherd boy Endymion in eternal slumber so she may gaze forever on his lovely face. However, the vast majority of cults have represented the Moon as a male being. The Egyptians called him Khons, the Phoenicians, Bel- Samen; and the Chaldeans, Sin and Hur. This ambiguity of sex may have its origin in whether the Moon is regarded as the wife of the always-male Sun or the husband of the always-female Earth. The ruler of the nights has always held considerable influence in astrology. It is a cold, moist, watery, phlegmatic planet that governs the brain, stomach, bowels, left eye of the male and right eye of the female. Individuals with Luna well aspected at birth are tall and fair with a pale complexion, round face, grey eyes, short arms and thick hands and feet. The Moon also brings good fortune. The Moon has many effects on the Earth and its creatures. Scientists can readily account for physical phenomona such as the tides, but the Moon's sway over human and animal behaviour has long been recognised without any satisfactory explanation. Our language testi- fies to this with words such as "lunatic", "moonling" and "moonstruck". Other phrases connected with the Moon have enriched our vccabulary. "Crying for the Moon" (wanting the unobtainable) for example, is the basis of a fairy tale in many countries. "Once in a blue moon" (signifying a rare event) is however a description of an uncommon, but real, meteorological phenomonen. It occurs when dust particles high in the atmosphere filter out most of the longer wavelengths of red light. The most recent observation of a blue moon was in Edinburgh in 1950. Casual observers tend to see what they expect to see, and naked-eye observations of the full Moon are a case in point. The young child familiar with the nursery rhyme: <1The Man in the>1 Moon Came down too soon And <1asked the way to Norwich>1 sees a jovial face. Medieval divines pictured Cain carrying the meagre offering of a bunch of thorn sticks. The devout Buddhist sees the hare who was willing to be roasted alive so the starving brahmin could eat his flesh. As the animal jumped into the flames, Buddha manifested himself, snatched the hare from the fire and set him in the Moon. The association of the hare with the Moon was one of the most wide- spread ideas, long before Kit Williams' <1Masquerade>1 be- came a bestseller. The Chinese represent the Moon as a hare or rabbit pounding rice in a mortar. In other fables the hare does not have such a noble character as in the Buddhist tale. According to the Hottentots of South Africa, the hare was sent from the Moon to Earth with a message to give Man a symbol of hope: just as the Moon died and rose again, so Mankind should die and rise again. The hare, either out of forgetfulness or malice, distorted the message to say that as the Moon rose and died away so Man should die and rise no more. On the hare's return, the Moon questioned him about the message he had delivered. The Moon was so angry with the hare's evasions that she picked up a hatchet to chop off his head, but missed her aim and cut the hare on the mouth. Incensed by such treatment, the hare scratched the Moon's face with his claws and the two of them are disfigured to this day. The festive period this year is a good time for seeking out the various shapes or figures in the Moon, for its phase grows (waxes) from first quarter on 23 December to full on 30 December. In the new year it shrinks (wanes) to last quarter on 6 january or disappears es a "new" Moon a week later. You can see the "hare", for example, most easily over Christmas itself, between first quarter and full Moon. But the lovers kissing, the lady with a bcok, the donkey, the antelope, the lion, the scorpion and the rest of the menagerie may need a better imagination or a more discerning eye. Try finding the tail on this donkey as a refinement to the familiar party game. The suggested version has similarities to Postman's Knock, too, with a couple having to spend at least one minute observing before they are allowed back into the room. It is possible to play simultaneously "Finding the Lovers Kissing" . . . but this should be discouraged. A quieter party game, with pen and paper, consists of listing all the snippets of folk lore and supersti- tion connected with the Moon. Points are awarded for each item and bonus points for any lines of doggerel quoted. Many of the prognostications con- nected with the Moon are meteor- ological. Bad weather is presaged when the Moon lies "on her back" (with the horns of the crescent pointing upwards) or when the new Moon appears with the old Moon in her arm. This occurs when the part of the Moon turned from the Sun is dimly illuminated by light reflected from the Earth. Other superstitions relating to the weather concern the day of the week upon which the new Moon chances to fall. Rubbish, of course, but Dr Forster, the meteorologist of Bruges, declared that according to the journal kept by his grandfather, father and self, from 1767 to the 1880s, whenever the new Moon had fallen on Saturday the follow- ing 20 days were wet and windy, in 19 cases out of 20. The full Moon on a Sunday is similar: Saturday's <1new>1 and <1Sunday's full>1 <1Never was good and never wull.>1 The most recent "Sunday's full" occurred on 3 October and October was one of the wettest on record. If, on the other hand, the new Moon falls on Monday (the Moon's day) then fair weather is on its way. Whatever the day. new Moon is the time to have silver in your pocket, to turn your money and to seek for your true love. Pull Moon is the time to pick mushrooms, kill the bacon pig or get married, bearing in mind that "When the Moon's in the full, then wit's in the wane". And the Christmas Moon, of course, has its own folklore. A dark (moonless) Christmas sends a fine harvest. A waxing Moon means a prcsperous New Year. So as the Moon beams down on you this Christmas take it as an extraterrestrial greeting for a happy 1983! [] <2Who were the bump-readers?>2 <2The study of bumps on the skull as a guide to a person's character had its heyday as a "science" in>2 <2the 19th century, falling to the level of a fairground act by the early part of this century. But its>2 <2practitioners had some valuable comments on life in general>2 Tom Crabtree In the l9th century many of the - social and intellectual elite were adherents of phrenology: the study of the bumps on the human skull as a guide to character and development. George Eliot twice had her head shaved so that her bumps could be read more accurately. Honore/ de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire and Karl Marx all had their heads examined. Queen Victoria's children, Alice and Albert jnr, had their bumps felt because their mother strongly suspected that little Albert might be "rather stupid". In the space of a century, phrenology went from marble halls and respectability to fairground tents and a quick sixpenny character analysis for granddad. The bump readers, who once moved among the great and the good, are almost gone; though a handful of practitioners are still living, phrenology is officially dead. But where did it all begin? In 1815, the year of the Battle of Waterloo, john Caspar Spurzheim, a physician from the medical school at Vienna, visited London and Edinburgh to lecture on craniology, the study of the shape and size of the human skull. One of his converts was George Combe, a young Scottish lawyer. Combe was to become the most famous of British phrenologists. When Franz Gall, phrenology's founding father and Spurzheim's teacher in Vienna, visited England in 1823 he brought with him a selection of some 3000 skulls, plus drawings of the great men of the past. The idea was to show that it was the bumps on the skull that lead on to glory. There is nothing new in the notion that physical attributes are a key to character. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar preferred "fat, sleek-headed men". Neither Plato nor Aristotle would admit a student to the Academy at Athens if he did not like his face. We all do similar sorts of character analysis, be it at work or cocktail party, in the street or in the pub. Where the phrenologists went wrong was to be too arrogant about their pronouncements; they were also wrong to suppose that the human skull gives us much information about the brain it was designed to protect. Modern psychology, where it is accurate, is trivial. When psychologists have told us things that were based on intuition rather than science many of those things have been important. Phrenology had the same problem as psychology: that of generalisation. The essayist and physician Havelock Ellis once suggested that thieves might be recognised by their low-lying ears and small heads. The problem is to know how to pick out those thieves with high-lying ears. Phrenologists became equally puzzled by villains with prominent bumps of honesty and integrity. Despite the vast edifice that they built up on extremely shaky premises the phrenologists were socially-committed men, with an interest in holistic medicine and a shrewd- ness that served them well when they ran their fingers over somebody's skull in pursuit of character. Perhaps the shrewdest of them all was George Combe. In 1835 he published a book entitled <1Constitution of Man.>1 It sold 2000 copies in 10 days and became fourth in the list of Victorian best-sellers, beaten only by <1The Bible, Robinson>1 Crusoe and <1The Pilgrim's>1 Progress. Nowadays, many of Combe's ideas may appear positively weird. The long explanations of "faculties" and "propen- sities", with each area of the skull carefully marked for a particular skill, strike one as total pseudoscience. More impressive are the strikingly advanced ideas, the common- sense and the sound "keep-yourself-fit" advice which was given alongside the crazy craniology. For example, Combe's suggestions for a new penal system included locating new prisons in the countryside near small towns to give inmates "regulated communi- cation" with country folk, plus a taste of hard work. The idea was to better the prisoners, not break them. There was to be a term of solitary confinement for each prisoner to bring his brain into "the highest state of susceptibility for receiving moral and religious impressions". Hard work was to be accompanied by moral instruction and each convict was to be treated to a series of discussions with a qualified counsellor. The aim was to emphasise that everybody, including the prisoner, could, if they chose, play a useful role in society. Chaplains would administer "the reproofs and consolations of religion". All this may strike us as very patronising but it reveals at least as much concern about the welfare, and rehabilitation, of prisoners as the incarceration policies of the present day. The phrenologists of Manchester originated a com- prehensive plan of secular education : to be established first in their own area and then throughout the nation. They demanded new schools, supported by local taxes and managed by locally elected bodies. In 1850 each MP received a pamphlet of ideas on the subject from Andrew Combe, brother of George. The reform was not carried through in the House but the phrenologists urged or reformers elsewhere and, indirectly, their enthusiasm led on to William Forster's Education Bill of 1870 which established in Britain the system of elementary schools for all. Women heard about the different educational method used in the five phrenological schools that had beer founded by William Ellis in the 1850s. These schools taught the individual, both boy and girl. Emphasis was placed in the case of girls, on "moral training and female accomplishments"; the training was well-advertised in the Ellis's pamphlet <1Progressive Education>1 for Young <1Ladies.>1 Phrenology was, for many women, the road to social involvement and an escape from domestic boredom. Charles Caldwell, the leading phrenologist in the US in the 1850s, called on women to stop wearing corsets, as they stopped the circulation of the blood and gave rise to "many forms of painful and annoying diseases". There was plenty of practical advice about health and hygiene for women. Phrenology also acted as a stepping-stone to various social crusades and encouraged women to take a pride in themselves. Women, later, developed the con- fidence to support such causes as the abolition of slavery and the temperance movement. Medicine turned to the bump-readers for ideas, in an attempt to make doctors "thinking animals". Many doctors were only marginally better informed than the patients they were supposed to be treating. The holistic approach of phrenology taught them to look at the body-mind dichotomy and to think in terms of prevention rather than quick cures that were often spuricus. What price modern medicine with its reliance on the prescription pad, and the slavish devotion to pills? The ideas of the phrenologists contained much sound common sense even though they were built on the false premise that bumps on the skull are a key to personality. It was only when phrenologists became too confident of their powers (and too detailed in their analyses) that the chinks in their "scientific" armour began to show. "Women", announced one phrenologist, according to the <1Phrenological Journal>1 of 1835, "do not extend their reason- ing beyond the range of the visible world, nor do they make any great or daring excursions into the realm of fancy." A greatly-respected professional musician was diagnosed as having a poor bump of tune; a man accorded a large bump of benevolence turned out to be a well- known ( and violent) criminal. Mistakes of this sort made the movement many enemies and hastened its demise to the fairground, and having one's bumps read for sixpence. Many influential people began to despise the phren- ologists for their pretensions. The historian Lord Macaulay notes in his diary for 16 january, 1851: "We talked much together until another party got into the carriage: a canting fellow and a canting woman. Their cant was not religious but phrenological. It was all we could do to avoid laughimg out loud. The lady pronounced that the Exhibition cf 1851 would enlarge her ideality, and exer- cise her locality." By the end of the 19th century the house of phren- ology, built as it was on scientific quicksands, had crumbled. It had sunk to the level of palm-reading. There was an enormous output of charts, porcelain heads and cheap books (price: one shilling) with titles like <1Heads>1 <1and How to Read Them>1, (containing chapters on "How to choose servants" and "The self-opinionated woman" as well as "Men to avoid"). Phrenology was slcw to die. I can remember my grand- father, in the 1940s, telling me that I had a good bump of location. He also showed me the passage in Captain Marry- at's <1Mr Midshipman Easy>1 where Easy Sir, having invented a machine to alter the bumps on his head, tries to im- prove his personality; with fatal results. Phrenology, and the phrenologists, were heading to- wards extinction. The death sentence came in 1967 when a majority of members voted the British Phrenological Sc- ciety into liquidation and most of its valuable library was given to University College, London, and to the University of Cambridge. Not quite dead, though. Six years ago I had my own head examined by the most distinguished of this country's living phrenologists and was provided with a six-page report of quite startling accuracy. What the phrenologists did have, judging from that sample of one, was tremen- dous insight into human nature. Interesting, yes. Scientific, no. That would be the modern verdict on phrenology. When I lock along my collection of phrenolcgy books, including titles such as <1The Brain and>1 <1How to Read It,>1 and run my fingers with affection over- the porcelain phrenological head that stands on my filing cabinet, I often wonder what future generations will make of today's psychologists. [] <2Straight lines on an ancient landscape>2 <2Archaeologists have long ridiculed ley lines--the idea that prehistoric sites were deliberately aligned.>2 <2But a little exploration along the alignments could soon show whether leys really exist, and if so, why>2 <2Paul Devereux>2 In 1921 Alfred Watkins made an <2Robert Forrest>2 apparent discovery that was startingly simple and yet revolu- tionary. While studying a map of his local Herefordshire countryside, he noticed that certain ancient sites marked on the sheet fell into straight lines representing align- ments of prehistoric monuments and other features running for kilometres across the landscape. Watkins called his alignments "leys". He agreed this name might be in error, but by convoluted etymo- logical detective work he felt he had established a link between the Saxon word for a cleared strip of land and his lines. These leys were the rem- nants of Neolithic traders' routes, Watkins surmised, which had ranged across the countryside and were marked with standing stones and mounds of earth or cairns. These marked lines ran from hilltop to hilltop like "a fairy chain". The hill- tops were marked with earthworks or were traditional beacon sites-- summits well placed for line-of-sight communication. Because we associate beacon fires with the rapid communi- cation system of the Elizabethans, Watkins maintained, we had over- looked their equal usefulness as sur- veying instruments. These surveyors' beacons were later enshrined in traditions such as the Beltane Fires, according to Watkins. He called such hilltops "initial points" and found that holy wells sometimes fulfilled this function too. These old straight tracks were further marked during the Bronze Age, Watkins suggested, but the knowledge and usage of them gradually decayed. In his researches Watkins found that later features-- such as pre-Reformation churches and crosses--also, rather curiously, fell on these supposed prehistoric alignments in addition to subsidiary "confirmation points" like ancient crossroads, old fords and certain types of pond. Watkins died in 1935 and it was not until the 1960s that interest in leys again fared. During this period, wild and woolly concepts of "national grids" of leys were published and thick black pencil lines defaced countless maps--naive enthusiasm that is still held up for ridicule by ley sceptics. But this euphoric rediscovery of the ley theory gave way to quieter and more sober research. The renaissance of ley research coincided with the disintegration of establish- ment archaeology's "woad and skins" attitude to British prehistory in the face of new findings within archaeology itself and unexpected material from other sources, such as Profesor Alexander Thom's studies of stone circles which gave new cause for inquiry into astronomical and metrological knowledge in prehistoric Britain. But what are the criticisms of the ley concept? When Watkins put forward his observations regarding remnants of prehistoric alignments in Britain he ran head-on into official archaeological thinking which still believed in the Piltdown Man. The orthodox view was that the megalith builders were just savages quite incapable of surveying or having any finer thoughts than grubbing for food and feuding with other tribes. The whole idea of leys was an unprecedented absurdity--"damned nonsense" as one archaeologist put it. Modern archaeology shows that prehistoric societies were complex, though even without this it should have been obvious that only an essentially stable and intelligent society would have constructed a structure such as the Neolithic henge at Avebury and its complex could not have been constructed over such a span of time; involving as it did the excavation of a quarter of a million tonnes of chalk and the transportation and erection of hundreds of stones weighing up to about 50 tonnes each. And the prominent prehistorian Professor R. J. C. Atkinson has clearly demonstrated that the laying out of an accurate, straight landscape line would have been well within the means of the megalithic builders. Moreover, since Watkins's death we have found that inexplicable straight lines have been left by ancient peoples in other parts of the world. In 1939, Dr Paul Kosok of Long Island University discovered the enigmatic straight tracks on the pampa ncar Nazca, Peru, and in 1978 the zoologist Tony Morrison reported on the old straight tracks to be found in the remote <1altiplano>1 region of western Bolivia. Both the Peruvian and Bolivian features are dead straight, going over topographical obstacles without deviation. But it is the Bolivian lines which most accurately answer Watkins's idea of leys. They are up to 30 km in length and are marked by Indian cairn shrines and sometimes by Spanish churches ( presumably placed on former Indian sites). Some range from hilltop to hilltop in the manner of Watkins's "fairy chain" image. The lines are understood locally as tracks linking holy sites. No one knows who constructed them. The presence of these South American lines naturally does not prove the existence of British leys, but it did mean that Watkins's theory was no longer an isolated, irrational concept. An actual criticism of the ley theory, as opposed to mental attitude, has been that lines on the plane surface of a map cannot accurately represent alignments on the curved surface of the Earth. This argument is meaningful only for lines longer than, say, 40 km as the inherent discrepancy is so slight on shorter distances that the error on the ground is far less than the sizes of marker sites involved. Any sceptic can prove this by drawing the famous ley running south from Stonehenge through Old Sarum, Salisbury Cathedral, Clearbury Ring and Franken- bury Camp (Figure 1). He can then stand on Old Sarum, look south and see Salisbury Cathedral and Clearbury Ring aligning with it exactly as on the map. A more significant objection has been the charge that leys involve marker sites that vary tremendously in age. A line containing a stone circle and a pre-Reformation church, for example, has sites separated by perhaps three millenium--so how could the ley ever have been set out deliberately? Ley hunters today answer as Watkins him- self did, by suggesting the <1evolution>1 of sacred sites. Exca- vations of churches often reveal earlier, pagan artefacts and structures on the same site, for example at St Swithins in Lincoln or Wells Cathedral. Wells, in particular, experienced successive occupation probably from as far back as the Neolithic period. Furthermore, the Papal instruction to missionaries visiting Britain was that pagan shrines should be converted to Christian use rather than destroyed. This process of Christianisation is well- established, and in France there are extant examples of dolmens and menhirs being Christianised by a cross or being incorporated into church foundations. Ley hunters also argue that plenty of leys are marked by archaeologi- cally-homogenous sites. An example is the 17 1/2 km ley that runs to the Nunwick and Thornborough henges from the Devil's Arrows group of standing stones near Boroughbridge in Yorkshire (Figure 2). This latter line is also statistically significant; the points on the line are most unlikely to be there purely by chance. And it is with the statistical evaluation of leys that there is most controversy and where much work still needs doing. Watkins thought he had statistically proven the existence of leys but his practical methods were inadequate. On the other hand, some archaeologists dismiss all leys as merely chance alignments without- proper statistical investigation. The problem is not simple. A Cambridge mathematician, Michael Behrend, derived an ingenious formula which shows that sites will align by change much more than one would expect. It is clear that a great deal of ley hunting done over the past 50 years has been hunting chance alignments. The old claim many enthusiasts made that Britain is criss-crossed with leys is almost certainly false. There are, however, alignments which do come out statistically significant, of which two examples are the Craigearn and Saintbury lines. The Craigearn line was discovered by John Michell among the standing stones and stone circles marked on the one-inch Ordnance Survey map (sheet 40) of the Aberdeen area (Figure 3). Michell, one of the best known authors on this topic, found on this OS sheet, 34 triads, 5 tetrads and 2 triad/tetrad queries. On the Sheet, 38 standing stones and 25 stone circles are marked, a total of 63 sites in a map area 47.3 X 71.0 cm (part of the map sheet represents the sea). The map symbol for a stone circle is about 0.75 mm in diameter, the symbol for a standing stone is a dot pcssibly only 0.1 mm in diameter. This last symbol, however, is much narrower than the pencil lines inserted by Michell to pick out the alignments, and about 0.25 mm is probably nearer the mark for the lower limit of alignment tolerance. Behrend's formula ( see Box) yields the following expectations: Standing stones Stone circles <12c=0.025cm 2c=0.075cm>1 N(63,3) 55 166 N(63,4) 0.8 7.2 where <1N>1 is the expected number of alignments and <1c>1 is the radius of the sites on the map. At first sight there is little to suggest that Michell has found anything other than chance connections. But one line stands out from the rest--a tetrad only 512 cm long (about 312 km on the ground). Statistically only 0-05 per cent of chance tetrads should come out at this length or less, so that the expected number of alignments like Craigeam lies between 0.00041 for standing stones and 0.0037 for stone circles. This is certainly significant at the 1 per cent level, though we must bear in mind that these expectations are calculated on the basis of a purely random distribution of sites, which may not be quite true in practice. There is another reason for thinking that the Craigearn line is special. This is because when the tetrads that Michell found on the one-inch map are investigated on a 6-inch sheet, they become distressingly "crooked". The Craigearm line, however, does not. It stays a very tight alignment at the 6-inch scale (sheet NJ71SW). In addi- tion, as a ley, the markers could all be of the same age. A second example of a statistically significant ley is the Saintbury line, in the Cotswolds ( Figure 4). This was discovered on 1:25 000 OS sheets SP13 and 5P04/14 and published in <1The Ley Hunter's>1 Companion (Thames & Hudson, 1979). This ley consists of five sites and is a "mixed marker" alignment--in other words the structures are of different dates. It can be considered in the context of a 10 km square, eastings 10 to 20, northings 34 to 44. Let us consider this line at its worst and discount the farm, which can be counted only as "corroborative" evidence of alignment, and even then only if prehistoric remains are to be found there. The line is thus only arguably a pentad Over the 10-km square, a site count reveals 18 churches, 1 cross and 7 tumuli, mounds and earthworks. At worst all 18 churches will be pre-Reformation, so the total site count is <1n>1=26. The largest site on the alignment has a diameter about 1.5 mm and the square edge has a = b = W cm. Using Behrend's formula again (see Box), the expected number of pentads in this context is 0-042. However, the alignment, as a pentad, is noticeably short-- only 9-5 cm from cross to mound. Only 0-40 per cent of pentads should turn out to be of this length or less in this context, so that the expected number of pentads like Saintbury is only about 0-0040 X 0-042 = 0-00017-which is certainly significant at the 1 per cent level. So, even at its <1worst>1 this alignment is significant. If half the churches are rejected as post-Reformation, the signi- ficance of the line becomes greater. If prehistoric remains were to be found at the farm Seven Wells, that would effectively clinch it. "Spade archaeologists" are presented with an interesting challenge here. Once again the only statistical provison is that Behrend's formula assumes a perfectly random distribution of sites, and this is never quite the case in practice. Despite the statistical success of some known align- ments, there is still one statistical objection to be dealt with. It is that by studying the OS maps of Britain for long enough, one will inevitably discover some surprising, but nevertheless still chance, alignments--just as if one plays patience for long enough one will inevitably <2win.>2 Looking at significant lines discovered on the 1:50 000 map sheets, there are 204 of these sheets in all, and thus two chance alignments, apparently significant at the 1 per cent level, can be expected. However, half-dozen such lines would be more than the "patience" argument could comfortably dismiss, and this is about the number of good alignments that are known at present. But not all of these have been discovered at the 1:50000 scale, and there has not been a systematic ley hunt over all 204 sheets. So the statistical wheel is still in spin. If modest funding were made available the whole matter could probably be settled in a year or two. (Perhaps for the cost of a few "rescue" digs, in fact, which by their random nature all too often tend to be repetitive or fragmentary in their findings and which further our understanding of the past less than would the establishment of evidence confirming prehistoric alignment practices.) Ley hunters today tend to think of leys purely as align- ments and are to some extent dubious about Watkins's idea of old straight tracks-though the South American paths do present a question mark here. There are no nationwide ley systems, though possible local arrange- ments are beginning to be discerned-particularly align- ments onto "holy hills", as in Bolivia and as noted by the German researcher Dr Josef Heinsch during his researches before the Second World War. The ancient chalk-figured hills of Wilmington, Cerne Abbas and Uffington have alignments through their summit earthworks from possibly Christianised shrine sites near their bases. This is a pattern that recurs at Winchester and Hereford too, and perhaps at other locations not yet studied. The archaelogical re- searcher John Barnatt has recently re-examined align- ments, first noted last century, of stone circles onto key peaks on Bodmin Moor in or a wall, and has come up with favourable results. How to fit specific hilltops into a statis- tical model is a problem, but the predictability of the pattern would make it a useful tool in evaluating leys. The most convincing leys are short--usually only a few kilometres in length and probably never more than 30 km long. Leys are not found in all parts of Britain any more than are the remains of other prehistoric features. On the popular front, how- ever, notions of beams of magnetic energy travelling along leys and othotenies-- supposed alignment of UFO sightings--persist. Most of the "energy" ideas are based on dowsing results, but until these can be cross- referenced with physical monitoring they must re- main on the wilder shores of the subject. The work of the Dragon Project though, is beginning to show that there may be some basis for thinking that unusual behaviour of certain known energies could be taking place at certain <1sites (New Scientist,>1 21 October, p 166), and it is possible that our ancient ances- tors could detect this "Earth energy". There is virtually no evidence to associate UFOs (whatever they are) with leys, though there is now a basis of evidence to suggest that stone circles at least, may be associated with geo- logical locations that have a high incidence of geo- physically-produced luminous atmospheric phenomena. Modern ley hunting therefore ranges from colourful popularity at one end of its spectrum to unglamorous, somewhat plodding amateur research at the other. The final determination of the ley theory's status is obviously desirable; if it is a mare's nest in Britain, unlike in South America, then it ought to be despatched as quickly as possible. But if it continues to gain in stature, as is the case at the moment, then the necessary resources ought to be put into it by those who hold the purse-strings of archaeology. Apart from the further statistical investiga- tion that is required, there are alignments, like the Saint- bury ley, which predict the presence of obscured pre- historic sites and which need testing by excavation. The whole question of ancient alignment practices remains an important enigma: we do not understand the British cursus-type features (earthern avenues) or stone -rows, much less the Andean lines. There are no other data concerning the ancient societies in any of these cases that predict the occurrence of the linear features. Linear pre- occupation in the past remains a closed book to modern understanding. The Andean lines, like the British leys, are only rarely associated with astronomical orientations, so archaeoastronomy can be only a part of the linear mystery, not <1vice versa>1. The only hint about the use of the lines comes from Bolivian India folklore which states that they are "spirit paths". This echoes ideas associated with Irish faery paths and the old Chinese geomantic system of <1Fengu Shui.>1 It may be modern unwillingness to accept that there were activities in ancient societies which we do not under- stand that accounts for the embarrassing silence of archaeology on the Andean lines and its stubborn resis- tance to a proper treatment of the ley theory in Britain. [] <2Computer chess bad-human Chess worse>2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- <2The best chess computers can beat all but the finest human players. Yet they play remarkably crudely>2 Fred Hapgood The first 30 years of the computer age have spawned libraries of speculation as to the ultimate impact of computers on human dignity and morale. Can they outthink us, or will they be able to? And if so, what are the implications? Will rationality lose its prestige, its power to persuade, when "even a machine" can exercise it? Will we endow smart machines with personalities, free will and, ultimately, rights? Is it possible that humans might feel overshadowed and sur- passed, perhaps attacking the machines in a paroxysm of wounded pride, or, at the other extreme, coming to worship them, as an embodiment of a higher power? Above all, perhaps, what can we learn from the workings of machines that throw light on the mechanisms and strategies of human thought? Until recently there has been little experi- ence relevant to such speculations. However, over the past five years, a new industry has developed that makes and markets machines whose purpose and promise is that they can outthink humans in an arena traditionally thought to demand reasoning of the highest sort. These machines are chess-playing calculators; even the weakest is better than the average chess player (someone who plays at the median strength of all those who know the rules). The best can defeat half the rated players, those who compete in official tournaments, and do so not occasionally, or even regularly, but virtually every single time the pieces are set up. There are now six machines that play at the standard of the best 30 per cent of rated players, and three in the class of the top 20 per cent. In November 1981, Fidelity Electronics pro- duced, and rapidly sold out, a limited run of a machine that was as good as the best 10 per cent. One industry observer, Bill Welter. a con- sultant to Applied Concepts, believes that by 1983 there will be three chess calcula- tors available that will be good enough to play against the top 5 per cent of rated players. This puts them in the international master category, with the equiva- lent of a fide rating of 2000. That these machines should have a market suggests a form of technological masochism. What could be the grounds for this and their success? Finding little help on these points from the people in the industry I purchased one of the machine myself. The experience of playing with one, or on one, was astonishing; nothing I had read had prepared me for it at all. The machines do not play good chess: in fact they play <1terrible>1 chess. In any single game, a computer will make enough mis- takes to illustrate a whole textbook of what not to do. Their play is clumsy, inefficient diffuse and just plain ugly. But this does not mean they do not win; as I can testify, they do. But they win not because they can play chess, which they cannot, but because they can beat humans. Their designers have discovered a blind spot in the way humans play chess, and they have built machines with one ability: to sit in that blind spot and stab out of it, over and over, during the course of the game. Specifically, what the machines do is take advantage of a certain category of mistake of which most good chess players believe, apparently erroneously, that they have made very few. Such mistakes have various technical names. They are called: horrible blunders, astonishing lapses, incomprehen- sible oversights, gross miscalculations, and the like. In other words we are not talking about subtle errors of judgement, but major fumbles, demonstrations of serious incom- petence. The machines have demonstrated that even good players make far more errors of this sort than anyone ever ima- gined, which means that such errors have usually gone undetected and unpunished. The machines find them, or anyway, enough of them, so that the computers can often win despite an intrinsic quality of play that is so inane as to be comic, as is readily apparent when two com- puters play each other. This is what is so fascinat- ing about playing with them. They see things that I miss and miss things that I see. It is like playing chess with a Martian: eerie and weird and very interesting. The machines are the product of 30 years of research into computer chess. Right from the very dawn of the computer age, computer scientists have been interested in teaching a computer to play good chess. The reasons for doing so were various, but prominent among them was that quality chess seemed to demand the ability to devise a plan and stick to it when circumstances changed in un- predictable ways. If machines could be taught to plan over a chessboard, maybe they could do it in a factory as well. The problem of playing chess, whether for computers, humans or Martians, is picking a good, let alone the best, move out of the 30-odd legal possibilities present in the average chess position. Humans do this by screening out most of the alternatives with "ends-and-means" heuristics. Good players have a large vocabulary of patterns that they know will give them an advantage; these are the "ends". They look at the position at hand and figure out which end-pattern is appropriate to try for, which is "nearest', or easiest to get to. Then they look for moves that will push the position in that direction; these are the "means". Taken together, the ends-and-means concepts, most of the time, reduce the alternatives to a manageable number: one. It should be noted that this is not looking ahead in the move-by-move sense. It might take five moves, or 10, or 15, to get to the goal, but when that happens, it is not because the player looked ahead that number of moves. He just formed a plan and stuck to it. That a computer can be taught to work like that has always been a controversial proposition; even today there are observers who believe that it is impossible to build a machine ( at least with current programming techniques) that can plan even remotely as well as a human. None- theless, working in the artificial intelligence centres that began to open in the 1950s and 1960s, computer scientists began to make progress of a sort. The first need was for a way to evaluate positions: to see which side was ahead, and by how much. As it happens, there are a small number of positional characteristics in chess that are roughly associated with advantage and are easy to quantify. One is material strength: usually the side with the most pieces and pawns will win (though not always). Similar charac- teristics are piece mobility (the number of squares open to attack by one side's pieces) and the control or occupa- tion of the centre four squares. These qualities could be expressed numerically and combined, after a fashion, into a single inclusive measure. It was thus possible to write a program that allocated scores to all the possible legal moves in a given position. That done, the program would select the play that promised the highest score. From a chessplayer's point of view there were two problems with such programs. First, the evaluation functions were awfully crude (there is much more to chess than material, mobilty, and the centre). But far worse, the computer's grasp of specific positions was cripplingly short-sighted. If it "saw" a way to take a queen it would do so, even if the opponent could give mate on the next play. In theory there was a simple enough answer to that problem: have the machine protect itself by looking several moves ahead. Instead of having the machine score the varicus positions that could be reached after one play, it could generate and then evaluate all the positions possible after a play and a reply, or a play, a reply and a counter-reply. The computer would then pick the play that would culminate, a "move" later, in the best score. (The word "move" has several meanings in chess. I use it here in the formal sense of one play by each side). The problem with that solution was that the number of positions to be evaluated expands to astronomical levels very rapidly. There are more than 30 legal moves in the average chess position, which means that more than 30 different chess positions can be generated out of the average position with a single play, about a thousand (the rough product of 30 x 30) with one full move, a million with two move, and so on. Most good chess players would probably agree that it is impossible to play an adequate game of chess unless one can look ahead at least five moves, when necessary. To do this systematically would require a computer to examine a quadrillion possibilities. There is nothing technically difficult about this; if the computer can look one play ahead it can look 20. It is all a question of time. It might be possible, using the latest technology, to build a computer today that could put scores on a million positions a second; such a machine would need more the 30 years to look five moves ahead. A computer built with the technology available in the 1950s have required millenia. To be practical (and tolerable) a computer should be able to find its move in an average of three minutes, which is the limit set by normal tournament regulations. To summarise, the problem was to build a machine that could examine enough positions in three minutes to give it some protection against the clumsiness of its evalution functions. (All this had been laid out by the father of information theory, Claude Shannon, in an influential paper published in the late 1940s). The next major contribution to the field was made at the Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1957. A team at Pittsburgh realised that the fact that a move need only be proven bad once could be the key to enormous time savings. In other words, imagine a machine that can look ahead one move. It is given a position and starts to oonsider play <1A.>1 Upon reviewing all the comment's replies to <1A>1, it con- cludes that it can get at least 10 (hypothetical) "points" with <1A.>1 Then it goes on to look at a second play, <1B>1, and the replies to that. Imagine that the very first reply results in a score of 5. At that point the machine can forget about <1B>1 entirely; looking at the other 30-odd replies to B is a waste of time. The machine knows that if it plays <1B>1 it will be vulnerable to a reply that will leave it with fewer points than the least it can get by choosing <1A.>1 So it just skips past <1B>1, giving it no more than a quick glance, and takes up C. As simple as it is, the concept seemed to be potentially very powerful. Most of the possible legal moves in a chess position have simple refutations; refusing to go beyond those refutations should allow a machine to screen out enormous numbers of possibilities, and focus its evaluating time on just those moves about which there are serious questions. The team that hit on the idea became cocky enough to predict that a computer would beat the world chess cham- pion by 1967; but the concept has a logical flaw. Time savings appear only if the best plays are looked at early on in the game. In the example given above, play <1B>1 is discarded quickly only because the refutation was the first reply looked at. But how can the machine know the right order in which to look at the various possibilities? It seems that for a computer to find a strong play, it first has to arrange the options in order of strength. There appears to be a philosophical problem here. Clearly more research was called for. Over the next 20 years scientists tried, mostly by trial and error, to find ways of ordering the possibilities so that the benefits of "refutation screening" could be achieved. One idea that worked was to examine checks and captures early. A second, more sophisticated approach, has the machine put plays in order according to the results of earlier evalua- tions. To return to the example, if the machine finds that one particular reply to A is especially strong (leads to an unusually large change in score), it remembers that fact, and puts that reply high in the list of plays to be looked at when <1B>1 and <1C>1 are examined. This is known in the field as the "killer heuristic'. These examples give only a hint of the technical finagling that went on in the research centres. Progress turned out to be frustratingly slow. As late as 1976, most serious chess players thought that the day when computers would play master-level chess was still far off. In that year a senior master and professor of psychology, Eliot Hearst of Indiana University, wrote in a long review article: "About the only way a current computer program could ever win a single game against a master player would be for the master, perhaps in a drunken stupor while playing 50 games simultaneously, to commit some once-in-a-year blunder . . . " As it happened, that very year, for the first time, a computer won a tournament: a program developed by North-western University came in first in the Class B sec- tion of the Paul Masson American Chess Championship. This victory was a harbinger of a new era in machine chess. In 1977, an improved version of the same program won the 84th Minnesota Open against a field whose strength was just under the Master level. (The program became famous as a result, and went on a European tour). In 1980 a computer built at Bell Labs began to win regularly, though not invariably, against masters. In 1981, a programming on a powerful Cray computer became the Mississippi State Champion. At present there are two programs playing at Master levels and three others not much weaker than that. While such machines are still a long way from being able to beat the American champion (there are about 700 Masters in the US), it is clear that the period from 1977 to the present has seen a degree and pace of progress in machine chess that is very different in kind from what went on between 1957 and 1976. This winning streak caught a lot of chess players by surprise. It was hard to see a good reason for it. There has been no conceptual breakthrough in the science. The machines are still unable to plan; their routines for evaluating moves are as orude as ever. The only real pro- gress has come in learning how to drive those evaluation routines faster and faster, thus allowing larger numbers of positions to be examined in the time available. The Bell Labs machine referred to earlier (the World Computer Chess Champion), can calculate scores for about 100000 positions a second. This is a great advance over the rate achieved by earlier machines, but it still allows a routine lookahead of only four moves. Most chess players would have thought this was inadequate to play Master-level chess even for a machine with superior positional understanding. In 1976 and 1977 the first chess-playing microprocessors began to appear. Up to this point research in machine chess had all been basic, in the sense of having no very obvious point to it. After all, why spend gcod money teaching computers to play chess, especially as the original objective, making a machine than can plan, had proved so intractable? Over the following five years, in a textbook case of the value of basic research, the microprocessor programmers learned to adapt the ideas worked out by the academic researchers, and in doing so created a new, if quite small, industry. They have been so successful that the strongest machines available are now about as good as the best mainframes of five years ago. Programmers Dan and Kathe Spracklen, who have paced the industry Since their Sargon program won the first micro chess tournament in 1978, believe that about 90 per cent of this progress is due to faster speeds in the evaluation routines, and only 10 per cent because the routines themselves have become more chess-intelligent. (They add that most of the improvement in speed is due to better programming rather than advances in chip technology). The first machines looked at a few dozen positions a second; the more recent, 1200-1500 a second. The difference between these two numbers in chess terms is much smaller than one would think; not much more than being able to see an additional one or two moves ahead, plus giving special attention to checks and sequences involving piece exchanges and captures. Yet the first machines lost to just about everybody, while the most recent beat all but the strongest players. "The effect of looking a bit deeper made more difference than anyone thought," summarises Peter Frey, a psychologist at North-Western University who has written the basic text in the field, <1Chess Skill In Man and Machine>1 (Springer- Verlag 1977). There are many ways to beat the machines, but losses tend to follow a com- mon pattern. First, over the initial half of the game, the human builds up an over- whelming position. The ability to make long-range plans is at a premium in early middle game, and the machine's low level of ability in this department usually gets it into terrible trouble. Soon its pieces are driven out of the centre; its lines of com- munication are stressed and broken; the position of its king is compromised. The moment for the denouement has arrived. The human aims the coup de grace and strikes. There is a flurry of activity, a cascade of exchanges. And when the smoke lifts--Mein Gott!--the attack has failed. The machine has emerged with a fistful of material. The routed forces stream back across the board and behind them follow the now-superior armies of the computer. What happens next is not pleasant. When a human chess player finds himself ahead, the art of the game demands that he win in the most expeditious manner; some sort of lightning stroke that ends the game rapidly. By con- trast, anyone looking at the record of a computer attack would think it had been managed by a sadist wishing to extract the last possible drop of pain our of the victory. Computers follow the same strategy that General Grant followed against the South: do nothing fancy, stay out of trouble, take no risks and just grind the opponent bit by bit, piece by piece and square by square, into the dust. This happens to be a good strategy for a side with material superiors ,and computers have won quite a lot of games with this strategy. In short, computers win primarily through their ability to find and exploit miscalculations in human initiatives. Apparently there are far more of these mistakes, much closer to the surface, than any chess player imagined. The improvements made in the machines to date do not seem as though they ought to have added up to much, but they appear to have allowed the crossing of a psycho- logical threshold, after which a rich harvest of human error becomes accessible. Re- search into computer chess began with the hope of making a machine that could operate with ideas, generalisation and expectations, the way humans do. While programmrs have not been able to do that the results they have achieved suggest that this may not be such a good idea. At least so far as chess is concerned, working on the level of ideas, instead of specific calculations, seems to let a tremendous amount of imprecision into one's thinking. The lesson to chess players is more clear-cut: chess turns out to be a much richer world than they thought. We play it much more poorly than we thought. It may be that we can learn from computers something of what we have been missing in the game; or, that chess is so rich, that only a symbiosis between man and machine can explore it adequately. So although machines may beat us, there is no need to despair. The point is that they think differently from us; and we and they make a great team. [] <2Of microbes and movie stars>2 <2Bugs and men who study them have inspired great literature and pages and pages of nonsense>2 <2But even the finest fiction has rarely improved on real Iife>2 Bernard Dixon One day in 1905, George Bernard Shaw visited Professor Almroth Wright's laboratory at St Mary's Hospital, London, to see the great bacteriologist's work on phagocytosis and the assessment of immunity by his "opsonic index" (a primi- tive measure of antibodies). Shaw was fascinated, but heard one piece of information which he recognised as quite barmy--that a cubic millimetre of blood contained five million red corpuscles. This was just as silly, he opined, as the yarn he had been told about the Sun being at a distance of 93 million miles from the Earth. Such incredulity (which Wright's colleague and later biographer Leonard Cole- brook attiributed to Shaw being an autodidakt) did not prevent the playwright going on to develop his brilliant satire on the medi- cal profession, <1The Doctors>1 <1Dilemma.>1 Centred on one Sir Colenso Rigeon, a cari- cature of Wright, it con- cerned the decision as to which of the two men should be saved from death --a sixpenny doctor ("an honest decent man, but is he any use?") or a scoun- drel of an artist ("a rotten background, but he's a genuine source of pretty and pleasant and good things"). But <1The Doctors Dilemma>1 was not simply about doctor- ing and fashions in medicine. It was quite specifically about microbiology, and as such is one among an unusual number of plays, novels and films that have revolved around this particular science. Physics and chemistry, for example, seen to have had nothing like as much attention from the writers of fiction. True, the bacteriology that emerges from Shaw's play and its accompanying preface is heavily tainted by his own tetchy brand of anti-science. His hostility towards scientific medicine is highlighted by the passage where the artist, not to be treated by Rigeon, is referred to an eminent but stupid physician, Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonnington. He, in his enthusiasm for "stimulating the phagocytes", chooses the wrong moment for an inoculation and thus kills the patient. It was at this point when Wright, invited by Shaw to see a performance, walked out. Although Rigeon, Wright's stage representation, made no mistakes, Wright disliked the slur on scientific doctoring. At the same time, however, anyone attending the play after it opened at London's Court Theatre in 1906 could hardly fail to learn a fair amount about the young disci- pline of bacteriology and about attempts to treat illnesses by immunotherapy. And re-reading the preface today, one is struck not by Shaw's obscurantism but by the reason- ablenless of his remarks concerning specific aetiology and the relative significance of pathogens and social conditions as causes of infectious disease. "When Florence Nightin- gale said bluntly that if you overcrowded your soldiers in dirty quarters there would be an outbreak of smallpox, she was snubbed as an igorant female who did not know that smallpox can be produced only by the importation of its specific microbe," Shaw remarks. Who would now quibble with the implications of that? The one man who, more than any other, has been the inspiration behind the fictional (and "factional") portrayal of bacteriologists is Paul de Kruif. It was de Kruif who in 1919, as a young PhD just returned to the University of Michigan after two years at war, decided on a career that would make more money for himself and his future wife than what he called <2"microbe>2 hunting". Heavily influenced by reading H. G. Wells and Thomas Henry Huxley, he resolved to write about science rather than to prac- tise it. <1Microbe Hunters>1 (1925), a marvellous, rum- bustious picture of Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and the other pioneers, was one famous outcome. That book has not only attracted in- numerable youngsters to- wards a laboratory career, it has also triggered off a wide range of faction-- from Warner Bros's contri- butions to bacteriology (The <1Story of Louis Pasteur>1 with Paul Muni in 1935 and <1The>1 <1Story of a Ehrlich's Magic>1 <1Bullet>1 with Edward G. Robinson in 1940) to the BBC Tele- vision series <1Microbes and Men>1 in 1974. But it was also de Kruif who played a very considerable role in shaping the one novel that all microbiologists recognise as their literary classic, Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. The two men met during 1922, in an office at the American Medical Association where they were introduced by Dr Morris Fishbein. With <1Main Street>1 already a raving success and <1Babbitt>1 about to hit the bookstores, de Kruif was in awe of the great novelist. Forty years later, in his biography <1The Sweeping Wind>1 (1962), he described his first impressions: "a young red-headed man, very tall and slightly stooped, nervous, his face spotty red as if about to explode into a dermatosis . . . An unearthly character, not to be forgotten once seen; a man in the stylish accout- rements of an English country gentleman or retired guards officer--without a moustache--but totally lacking in the phlegm and equanimity associated with one. Here was a creature who was wild, freewheeling, intense, outlandish." Lewis, for his part, was to pay the following compli- ment to de Kruif--surely the most gracious acknowledge- ment of its sort ever--when <1Arrowsmith>1 appeared in 1924: "To Paul de Kruif I am indebted not only for most of the bacteriological and medical material in this tale but equally for his help in the planning of the fable itself--for his realisation of the characters as living people, for his philosophy as a scientist." Lewis then went on to record the months of companionship and collaboration, during which they had evolved the characters of the tough young microbe hunter Martin Arrowsmith and his boss Max Gottleb--who de Kruif modelled on Jacques Loeb and his own former chief, Frederick Novy. During this period de Kruif and Lewis visited London, where they talked with such future luminaries as Dr Henry Dale and Dr Patrick Laidlaw at the Medical Research Council laboratories in Hampstead. Their meeting with Dr Clifford Dobell, an authority on intestinal amoebae and later author of <1Anton van Leeuwenhoek>1 and <1his Little>1 <1Animals>1 ( 1932), was particularly fruitful in one respect, because it triggered off a discussion afterwards about honesty and bribery in science. Britishers, de Kruif told Lewis, did not get their science and their dollars mixed up to the same extent as Americans. The spirit of that dialogue (though without direct US-English comparisons) became a central theme in Arrowsmith. One can learn a considerable amount of science from this tremendous novel--about bacteriophage, for example, the virus that attacks bacteria, which Arrowsmith discovers independently of Felix-Hubert d'Herelle in 1917. In his biography <1Changing Patterns>1 (1968), Sir Macfarlane Burnet mentions his great interest in this section when he read the book on board ship from Australia to England in 1925. Just as important for the general reader, though, are the scientific ideas that Lewis purveys, painlessly and enter- tainingly. Above all, there is Arrowsmith and Gottleib's fanatical insistence on controls for all of their experiments. Just as the most penetrating analysis of the human prob- lems behind double blind drug trials is to be found not in any treatise of medical ethics but in John Rowan Wilson's novel <1The Double Blind>1 (1961), so the stern and rigorous standards of experimental science are uniquely illustrated in Arrowsmith. <2Fiction with a sprinkle of fact>2 Turning from medical microbiology to the applied variety which has now been glamourised by the term "biotechnology", the prime candidate for an archetypal novel must be Lionel Davidson's <1The Sun Chemist,>1 pub- lished in 1976. Here too there is much science to learn in the story of a Soviet defector's son who stumbles on a discovery hidden away in some late papers by Chaim Weizmann--a method of making high-octane petrol by fermenting the juice of a special variety of potato with a special variety of bacteria. The geopolitical impact of such a process, shifting the balance of power from oily areas to starchy areas of the world, is nicely explained. And there is a fine yarn too, a microbiological version of those spy thrillers based on a frantic search for "the formula". The biology, all the way, is satisfyingly realistic. But how real? Davidson bases his story in Rehovot and names actual names. He begins by telling us that, while researching the novel at the Weizmann Institute, he real- ised that his ideas for the story were remarkably close to the truth. And he leaves us with the teasing comment: "Weizmann's fermentation process with regard to oil works; but that, for the moment, is all that can be stated." Interesting, then, that his book was published at a time when the Western world was still recoiling after the oil sheikhs' first shock to our system. Readers and reviewers, in that climate, were certainly keen to believe. There is a similar uncertainty about Richard Gordon's <1The Invisible Victory,>1 described as a novel and published in 1977. Appearing during a period that has seen a stream of reassessments of the discovery and development of penicillin, Gordon's work is his fictional version of the same episode--together with <1some>1 real events and charac- ters. Often enchanting, occasionally frustrating, this account (supposedly written by young chemist Jim Elgar) must inevitably leave many readers wondering which twists in the plot are genuine, which characters are real, which pieces of dialogue are plausible The use of authentic details--such as the likely origin of the <1Penicillium>1 on Alexander Fleming's famous plate, from C. J. La Touche's Laboratory--makes for even greater difficulty in asses- sing happenings that have not been documented else- where. And Gordon's use of the melodramatic (a vital dose of vanishingly scarce penicillin to treat a key character turns up at a crucial time) is disappoint- ing alongside the excellence of his writing elsewhere. Far more telling is his astute portrayal of the humdrum: "The hospital did not hold its breath and look on in admiration. It was a busy place, everyone had his own work to do, and new drugs were always being tried and forgotten." One stratagem a fiction writer can employ to persuade his audience that he is writing fact is to append yards of references. So it was with Michael Crichton's The <1Andromeda Strain.>1 Published in 1969, this purported to be a record of a major American crisis and of the ensuing Project Wildfire--"the crash mobilisation of the nation's highest scientific and medical resources when an unmanned research satellite returns to Earth mysteriously contam- inated". Replete with citations of papers in <1Science,>1 The <1Journal of Microbiology>1 and <1Parasitology, the Journal of>1 <1Biological Chemistry, and>1 <1other organs>1, the "book car- ries a mass of genuine in- formation about microbes, their behaviour and identi- fication. Add to this the author's credentials as Dr Crichton, a graduate of Har- vard Medical School, and the ground is well prepared for ready belief. Indeed, when the film came out in 1971, it was preceded by a clever advertising campaign suggesting that release had been delayed because the makers felt the movie was too dangerous for general viewing. As with public response to Report from Iron <1Mountain>1 in 1967 (another well-referenced work), there was enormous capital in the implication that the events described just might have really happened. But could they? Does it make sense to suppose that, as in <1The Andromeda Strain,>1 members of a crew sent out to recover a satellite would be infected and killed by an exobiological organism it carried? In his recent <1The Science>1 <1in Science fiction>1 (1982), Peter Nicholls describes as one of the commonest but also unlikeliest cliches in <1SF>1 the idea of an alien male lusting after an Earthwoman. He might have added another, and for a similar biological reason: the exotic virus from out there which is exquis- itely well adapted to infect and destroy terrestrial man. (It's true, of course, that Sir Fred Hoyle has been writing recently about Earthly plagues that have originated in space, but he has devised an ingenious way of converting this objection into a virtue. And he is talking of fact, not I fiction.) (Shome mishtake here shurely? Ed.) Whatever the implausibility of Crichton's story, how- ever, there is no doubting its merit as a rattling good read. And this is more than can be said for the majority of other books which have exploited the same theme: that of man battling away, amid ignorance and fear, against some novel, lethal, unknown microorganism. For every good read, like Harry Harrison's <1Plague>1 from Space I (1966)--in which an apparently natural infection turns out to have been tailor-made for <1Homosapiens>1 by odious extraterrestrials--there are countless bum offerings. Russell Foreman's <1The Ringway Virus>1 (1979) has a plot that stretches credulity to the utmost: a virulent virus spreads around the globe, the Israelis blaming the Arabs and the Indians blaming the Pakistanis, until nearly everyone is wiped out--except for a "new Adam and Eve" who then inherit the Earth. L. T. Peters' <1The 11th Plague>1 (1974) describes "an infinitesimal germ, a microorganism, unleashed upon a helpless giant, the United States", and a doctor who risks his life to do something about it and "for one terrible moment finds that the fate of the world is in his hands". Then there is Alistair Maclean's <1The Satan>1 Bug (1962), based upon the Morden Microbiological Research Establishment in Wiltshire, which contrives to make a tiresome tale out of "a madman on the loose with the Satan bug threatening to wipe out God knows how much of England if his conditions aren't met". Sinclair Lewis would have wept. There is one other type of microorganism to be found not in general fiction but in science fiction: the colonial organism, individually composed of microscopic bits but vastly intelligent as a collective. Examples include Olaf Stapledon's Martians who, in <1Last and First Men>1 (1930), invaded Earth during the period of the Third Men; and the Venusian virus in Eric Prank Russell's <1Three to Conquer>1 (1968). But as Professor W. T. Williams pointed out some years ago <1(The Advancement>1 of <1Science,>1 August 1965, p 195), this whole idea is fallacious. If there is to be intelligence there must be memory, and if there is to be memory there must be a permanent, ordered structure to which each of the individual units is uniquely linked. Maybe the authors realised this anyway, as they each made their colonies telepathic--and for that to solve the problem the collective mind must in some sense exist as a permanent, ordered structure of its own. One final aspect of microbiology which we can learn from novels far more effectively than from textbooks is the symptomology of disease. If you really want to know what rabies is like, turn to pp 120-125 of David Anne's vivid and powerful Rabid (1977). For a pervasive view of tuberculosis, read Emily Bronte's <1Wuthering Heights>1 (1847). And for a lesson in the differential diagnosis of leprosy and ichthyosis, try Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story <1The Blanched Soldier>1 (1927). But if you are looking for an energetic, pacy saga about medical scien- tists on the hunt for the cause of a mysterious and horren- dously lethal infection, forget about Foreman, Peters and the hordes of novelists who continue to exploit that particular lode. Instead buy, borrow or steal a copy of John Fuller's <1Fewer!>1 (1974), the real story of the emerg- ence of Lassa fever in January 1969. Fact, in this instance, is far stranger and more profoundly disquieting than any- thing in the annals of fiction. Even Sinclair Lewis could not have done better. [] <2Laboulbenilales: a meek and successful>2 <2social disease>2 <2In the season of goodwill it seems appropriate to contemplate a fungus that makes a good living out>2 <2of parasitising insects; but it is so mild-mannered that its hosts (and most biologists) are hardly aware>2 <2of its existence>2 <2Kenneth Whitney>2 In many contests between insects and their fungal parasites the insects do not fare well. For example, the devastating fungus <1Cordyceps militaris>1 nearly fills its host's body cavity with fungal tissue, absorbing nutrients from the rich haemolymph (the body fluid of the insect), literally starving the hapless insect to death from within. When the fungus is finished with its host, large club-shaped fruiting structures punch out through the insect's exoskeleton, leaving the lifeless husk grotesquely studded with bizarre outgrowths. Yet the largest group of fungi parasitic on insects and other arthropods cause their hosts only minor blemishes. These fungi, the Laboulbeniales, seem almost gentle. The Laboulbeniales are ectoparasites--most of their tissue remains outside the host--and only superficially penetrate into the host. They do obtain their nutrients from the host's living tissue, but apparently there are ample supplies for both host and guests, and the arthropods usually suffer no ill effects. Laboulbeniales are a relatively recent discovery in the mycological scheme of things. Pioneering entomologists undoubtedly saw Laboulbeniales quite frequently while examining insects, but mostly regarded these oddities as some sort of malformed exoskeletal growths. The fungal affinity of these bizarre forms was not recognised until the 1850s, when Charles Robin and Camille Montagne described the genus <1Laboulbenia>1 and placed it in the class Ascomycetes. But some remained sceptical. Even the great German mycologist Anton de Bary doubted that there odd things attached to insects were actually fungi, and with some justification. In most fungi the main structure consists of a number of threads (hyphae) which collect- ively form a mycelium, but the vegetative body of Laboulbeniales usually consists of an ordered array of cells, a precisely-arranged axis on which the reproductive organs are borne. Compared with the tangled mass of filaments that form the mycelium of most growing fungi, the Laboulbeniales appear decidedly non-fungal. It remained for one of the great investigators of the Laboulbeniales to settle the question of their true affinities. The mycologist Roland Thaxter at Harvard University began a series of monographs on the Laboulbeniales in the 1890s, a study that ended only with his death in 1932. Some of his most important early contributions were his detailed descriptions and illustrations of the development of many species of Laboulbeniales. He clearly demon- strated that they formed their spores in sac-like structures known as asci, typical of the Ascomycetes. These asci develop in elongate, hollow structures called perithecia, and in order to establish proper contact with a potential host, the ascospores are oriented within the perithecium in a precise manner. The so-called basal cells of the two-celled spore point toward the tiny opening of the perithecium, the ostiole, and newly-formed asci in the lower part of the perithecium push the maturing asco- spores towards the ostiole. Ascospores are usually releascd in pairs as an insect brushes against a loaded perithecium. Each spore is surrounded by a thin protective sheath which may initially aid in sticking the spore to a potential host; once in place, its first task is to establish contact with the living tissue of the host, penetrating the tough exc- skeleton to gain access. The supportive, protective exoskeleton of insects and other arthropods is a complex multi-layered barrier of a highly cross-linked polymer called chitin, with layers of living cells, the epidermal cell layer, which form a boun- dary between the central body cavity (the haemocoel) and the exoskeleton. Laboulbeniales are thought to degrade the exoskeleton with enzymes, allowing a small penetrat- ing organ, the haustorium, to enter the host. The haustorium penetrates no deeper than the host's epidermal cell layer in most species, and the fungus obtains its nutrients from this sheet of living cells. Other Laboul- beniales may develop from the host, especially those on soft-bodied insects. In place of a haustorium a simple or branched system of fungal tissue penetrates into the haemocoel, drawing nutrients directly from the insect's body fluid. The evolution of parasitic relationships involves count- less compromises and adjustments between the two partners. Although many parasites can probably attack a variety of related species in the initial development of the relationship, the parasite fine tunes its metabolism as the symbicsis progresses and may eventually adapt to a single species of the host. The end product of such a course of evolution is an obligate parasite that is inex- tricably linked to a particular host. The Laboulbeniales demonstrate a high degree of host specificity, and by this criterion are highly advanced; most infect only a single species of arthopod, or at most a small group of closely- related host species, and only a few are known to occur on a variety of distantly related hosts. Many even carry their host specificity to the generic or family level, with quite a few genera of Laboulbeniales restricted to specific genera or families of arthropods. One glaring contradiction to host specificity in the Laboulbeniales is found among those that infest the members of ant colonies; both the ants and their arthropod guests. Ant colonies often entertain a variety of parasitic arthropods such as beetles and mites, and some that are merely commensal; that is they merely co-habit with the ants, and thereby perhaps gain protection, or scavenge for scrap food, but do no obvious harm. With a variety of subtle tricks, morphological, behavioural and biochemical, these social symbionts are accepted into otherwise closed ant societies. They frequently evolve drastically-altered body shape and ant-like behaviours, with the aim of fool- ing the ants. While these tactics usually spare the symbiont from ant attack they are not perfect, and the attrition rate of ant guests must be fairly high especially in newly-forged partnerships. <2Ants and their fellow travellers>2 Many arthropod guests also undergo physiological changes that smooth their integration into ant society. Many commensals or parasites of ant colonies have specialised glands that produce a variety of secretions appeasing the ants and preventing attack; these secretions may be identical or nearly identical to recognition pheromones produced by the ants. Thus the guests come to "smell" like the ants, which is a physiological convergence. But this is their downfall: some species of Laboul- beniales recognise this biochemical convergence and may infest both ant and guest. <1Laboulbenia ecitonis>1 is a para- site of the army ant <1Eciton quadriglume>1; it also grows quite well on hysterid beetles and mites that lodge in the ant colony. In contrast, another species of <1Eciron, E>1. hamatum, has a cohabitant species of staphylinid beetle, but in this case the ant appears to be immune to its guest's fungal disease. A species of <1Laboulbenia>1 is quite common on the beetle guest, but it has yet to be found on the ant that acts as host. A close study of the distribution of Laboulbeniales among the members of these social symbioses may indi- cate how well each guest is integrated into the ant colony. Presumably, arthropod guests that share a fungal parasite with the ants have a strong biochemical resemblance to their hosts, which probably indicates a long-standing asso- ciation. If the Laboulbeniales is found only on a single species of guest, or only on the host, this may indicate that the commensal relationship is of fairly recent origin. The order Hymenoptera includes, bees, wasps and sawflies as well as ants, yet only the ants are susceptible to infection by Laboulbeniales. Why is this? Did Laboul- beniales first arrive in ant colonies on the backs of invading commensals and parasites? Arthropods afflicted with Laboulbeniales have a social disease; in a vast majority of cases the infection is acquired through close contact with another individual carrying mature fungi ready to discharge spores. Quite often the interactions among insects, both social and sexual, lead to well demarcated patterns of infection. The first recorded example of this "position specificity" was noted in <1Stigmatomyces baeri,>1 found on house flies. In- fected male flies are almost always found to carry <1S. baeri>1 on their ventral surfaces, while the heaviest infections of females occur on the dorsal surface. This "front-back" pattern of fungal distribution has been observed in many variations among a number of insect groups, supporting the contention that insects are inoculated with the spores of their respective fungi during copulation. Richard K. Benjamin, now at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in California, and Leland Shanor of Florida University found even more dramatic examples of position specificity in the distributions of <1Laboulbenia species>1 in carabid beetles. Some of these patterns could undoubtedly be related to sexual activity (for example, a male infection on the lower surface of a leg with a female infection on the upper surface of the corresponding leg), but sexual contact could not explain all of the distribution patterns. Two species of Laboulbenia were found exclusively on males, and one occurred only on females. Similarly, of 16 species of <1Chitonomyces>1 on an aquatic beetle (gyrinid beetles) six were seen only on males and nine were limited to females. So it seems that Laboulbeniales not only show host specificity and position-on-host specificity, but may also display sex-of-host specificity. These highly restricted distribution patterns may result from unusual patterns of behaviour or even physiological differences between males and females that somehow affect the growth of these fungi; but the precise mechanisms behind this extreme specificity remain unclear. <2Infected appendage>2 An insect with a primary infection on a leg can easily spread spores to other locations simply by brushing the infected appendage against other parts of the body, and non-sexual contact with an infected individual can also initiate infections in randomly-scattered locations. How- ever, whereas most studies suggest that the fungi develop- ing in these secondary sites are normal, regardless of their position, studies by Glenn Richards and Myrtle Smith, of Minnesota University, on <1Herpomyces>1, a parasite of cock- roaches, indicate that different parts of an insect's exoskeleton may differ in their susceptibilty to Laboul- beniales. They found that cockroaches infected with <1Herpomyces>1 and kept in close confinement inoculated one another with spores over the entire surface of their bodies, but only the spores adhering to the upper three-fourths of the antennae were able to germinate and grow. The fungi grows in just these sites in wild cockroaches. Perhaps <1Herpomyces>1 is able to penetrate the host's exoskeleton only where the exoskeleton is thin, as it is around the base of the sensory hairs that cover the cock- roach antennae. Perhaps these thin areas are the chink in the armour. Similarly, some species of <1Chironomyces>1, common on the aquatic beetle family Dytiscidae, often occur around the row of hairs on the outer margins of the insect's hard anterior wings. Aquatic beetles of the family Hydrophilidae often bear a number of different species of Laboulbeniales, often in precise locations. Some of these fungi, <1Phurmomyces>1 for example, are known to occur only on or between the tarsal claws at the tips of the insect's legs. After examining a large number of hydrophilids infected with Laboulbeniales, H. W. Scheloske of Erlargen University surmised that many of these "claw forms" actually represent abnormally- developed individuals of species that produce a different "growth form" in other places on the insect's body; perhaps the tarsal claws of these beetles offer less than ideal conditions for vigorous growth. If this is the case, some examples of position specificity on other insects may also reflect environmental, rather than genetic, variation. Laboulbeniales are rather frugal with their spores. Unlike many other parasites which release multitudes of propagules (reproductive bodies) and rely on chance to unite parasite and host, the Laboulbeniales seem almost carefully to choose where theirs are placed. New hosts are infected by direct contact with perithecia loaded with mature spores, each contact releasing a spore or two. Some Laboulbeniales even have so-called trigger organs to ensure judicious use of spores. The perithecia of these species have long, often multicellular "horns" that originate just below the openings of the perithecium. Bioligists believe that as this horn is pressed, hopefully by the proper host, spores are extruded, usually two to the customer. The spores apparently can live only a few weeks at most in the environment; infections have been induced experimentally by contact with spores from the insect's surroundings, but this is probably a minor source of infection in nature. Because the spores are viable for a short time, Laboul- beniales are effectively restricted to arthropod hosts that have overlapping generations, especially in temperate regions; that is they cannot easily establish relations with those insects in which all the adults die at the end of the summer, with the species surviving in the form of larvae or pupae. The difficulties of transmission are well illus- trated in beetles, which are the hosts for the greatest number of Laboulbeniales. Beetles undergo a complete metamorphosis in their life cycle: the eggs hatch out into a variety of larval forms which only faintly resemble the adults, both morphologically and physiologically. Beetle larvae and adults usually occupy different habitats and rely on different food supplies. After the larvae pupate, they undergo the dramatic transformations into the adult that constitutes metamorphosis. Such complicated life cycles pose a problem for obligate parasites. Laboulbeniales found on adult beetles apparently do not infect the larvae, so adult-to-adult contact is the sole method of spread. Beetles that have at least a portion of the adult population over- wintering, carry some Laboulbeniales through the winter; when the new adults emerge, the old, infected ones are ready to carry the infection to them. But what happens, in winter, to the Laboulbeniales that live on beetles that overwinter only as larvae or pupae? <2The family life of earwigs>2 In some insects, including cockroaches, locusts, earwigs and termites, the young, known as nymphs, are very similar to the adults in structure and physiology, and advance to adulthood through an ordered series of moults. When the generations overlap, and when the insect is gregarious (cockroach) or social (termite), the juveniles are often infected and infection passes freely between juveniles and adults. In the earwigs (Dermaptera ) the female lays her eggs in burrows or nests and vigorously defends her brood. If mother has a fungal infection when the young hatch, she readily inoculates them. The nymphs remain with their mother through one or two moults, infecting and reinforcing one another,and they may go on doing this after they leave the nest, as the young of any one year remain more or less together in a loose family association. Nymphs afflicted with Laboulbeniales have one advan- tage over their adult counterparts. With each successive moult the current crop of fungal parasites is shed along with the old exoskeleton. But these insects bump into infected neighbours almost immediately, so reinfection is the rule. Text books of mycology typically end the chapter on Laboulbeniales with a statement on their economic and commercial insignificance. And so it is. They yield no anti- biotics, cause no human disease, cannot be eaten, and they are not sought, bought or sold. For such a ubiquitous group of organisms this is something of a paradox, especially with today's interest in biological control of insect and other arthropod pests. Yet the Laboulbeniales seem a likely group to solicit as mercenaries against our arthropod adversaries, so why have they been ignored as potential agents of biological control? Of course their non- pernicious parasitism is far too mild mannered for such a task, but could virulent strains be developed through selective breeding? Unfortunately not; or not yet. Detailed study of Laboulbeniales is thwarted by their persistent reluctance to cooperate with mycologists. They simply refuse to be grown in artificial culture. Their spores have been nurtured on everything from apple peel to flies' wings, with no solid results. The spores do germinate, go through a few perfunctory cell divisions, then give up the ghost. Thus, they remain one of the few fungal orders that have not had at least one member grown from spore to spore in artificial culture, a prerequisite for any sort of genetic, physiological or biochemical research. Until this barrier is broken, the Laboulbeniales will remain obscure, fascinating, gentle parasites, virtually ignored by their hosts and humans alike. [] <2Ord crocks take a return trip>2 <2Transport appears in the most bizarre forms from time to time. Steam>2 <2cars hold speed records, libraries fly, leg-propelled carriages run,>2 <2double-boilered steam engines balance on monorails,>2 <2trams clang cross-country and trains lean a little.>2 <2Stranger still is the way that the daftest vehicles get re-invented>2 <2Mick Hamer>2 Eighty years ago the London County Council inaugurated its first electric trams. The official opening, on 15 May, 1903, was a splendid celebration of municipal enterprise. The Prince of Wales (later King George V) drove a specially decorated, virginal white tramcar from Tooting to Clapham. The royal party included Princess Mary and two future kings, Edward VIII and George VI, in sailor suits. The tram conductor was the chairman of the LCC's high- ways committee, John Benn, (a Progressive Party member and grandfather of Tony Benn). Benn collected the 12d fares from the royal party, who paid with specially-minted coins. A party afterwards was attended by 2500. It cost #639, expenditure which the district auditor disallowed. During the Conservative Party conference in October David Howell, the Secretary of State for Transport, an- nounced the return of the tram, as part of the plans to renew London's dock- lands. Howell said that it was "a novel type of rail- way. The tram is one example of a form of transport that flourished and then faded. But what is more surprising is not that mechanised transport has had its fair share of false starts but that since the oil crisis many planners have been looking at abandoned forms of transport. The airship is another example. German Zeppelins began carrying passengers in 1910, when heavier-than-air machines were (literally in many cases) struggling to take off. It was only the year before that the first aeroplane had flown the English Channel. Regular air services, by aeroplane, did not start until after the First World War. Airships also began the first regular transatlantic ser- vices. In the 1930s the Graf Zeppelin and, from 1936, the Hindenburg ran regularly to Rio de Janeiro and the United States. These services came to an abrupt halt in May 1937 when the Hindenburg burst into flames at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Thirty-three died, as apparently did passenger airships. Transatlantic crossings by airship had ended before aeroplane services had begun. But in the past few years a phoenix has risen from the flames of Lakehurst. Airships Industries, a firm backed by the Commercial Union insurance company, is developing a new range of airships. The prototype, Skyship 500 <1(New>1 <1Scientist, 2 September, p 616) is well on the way to getting>1 a full certificate of airworthiness, amd was demonstrated at this year's Farnborough airshow. The Skyship differs from the 1930s' airships in two major respects. Its lifting gas is not hydrogen, which is extremely flammable, but helium, which is inert. And the Skyship is a pressure airship, whereas the old airships had rigid bodies. A Greek firm has bought three Skyships, which will be used for coastal patrol and leased to Olympic Airways for luxury tourist travel in the Greek Islands. The Hindenburg was luxurious, comparable with liners like the Queen Mary. The Hindenburg had a library, (passengers could borrow books), a 60-metre promenade deck, a sick bay with its own doctor and a lounge complete with a grand piano. It also had a smoking room, which was furnished with one electric light and pressurised to prevent hydrogen seeping in. But if airships were the last word in luxury then the penultimate word belonged to the flying boat. It was a flying boat that started the transatlantic aeroplane ser- vice in 1937, which the Americans kept running even during the war. [In fact, Lufthansa had pion- eered an airmail service to South America in 1934, by way of a depot ship in the South Atlantic. The flying boat left the African coast and landed by the depot ship. It was then hoisted aboard, refuelled and ser- viced and finally catapulted back into the air again]. Flying bcats made a lot of sense in the early days of civil aviation. Runways were usually grass, while a flying boat needed only a reasonably calm stretch of water [preferably without driftwood, which tore terrible holes in the thin hulls of these planes]. From 1937 Imperial Airways, the forerunner of BOAC, used flying boats on all its African services. Its main flying boat aerodrome (if that's the right word) was on the Solent, near Hythe, but Imperial Airways also ran to a number of other places around Britain, including the Pool of London. Flying boats were larger than most aircraft of the time. The Boeing 247 a conventional plane which literally landed, was introduced in 1934. It carried just 10 passen- gers, together with two pilots and a stewardess. The Boeing 314, a flying boat known as "The Clipper", could carry 89 passengers. This was the plane which kept the transatlantic service going during the Second World War. It had a dining room, a state room and cabins with bunks. The Short Empire flying boat, as operated by Imperial Airways, was smaller than the Boeing 314, carrying only 24 passengers. But it had a promenade deck, like the Hindenburg, and carried its passengers in considerable luxury even allowing for the natural exaggeration of the <1ImperiaI Airwoys Gazette:>1 "passengers making air jour- neys in the new Empire type flying boats of Imperial Air- ways not only express their admiration for the speed and quietness in flight of these air liners, and for the spacious- ness of their saloons, but they also pay warm tributes to the efficiency of their catering arrangement". Yes, these were the days before the uniform plastic lunch: "Here . . . is a luncheon menu served the other day in the flying boat Challenger. It began with iced melon. Then followed roast chicken. York ham and veal galantrie with tomatoes and asparagus tips. Then came fruit salad and cream, followed by Cheshire, Cheddar or cream cheese, with 'toast Imperial', assorted biscuits, crystal- lised fruit, coffee and liqueur brandy". But then you had to get something for your #225 fare for the flight from Britain to Durban. The world's largest aircraft is a flying boat, the 200 tonne Spruce Goose, which was built by the elusive millionaire Howard Hughes. This eight-engined monster is made of spruce and has a wingspan of almost 100 metres. It was designed to be a troop transport plane. Hughes flew it once and put it away under wraps. It is now on display (along with the liner Queen Mary) at Long Beach, California. The demise of the flying boat came with the develop- ment of jets and the spread of concrete runways. BOAC run its last flying boat to Madeira in 1958, before the advent of package holidays, although isolated services persisted into the 1970s among the islands of Australasia and the West Indies. The seaplanes that do remain are small aircraft, not generally used for scheduled passenger services. Another 1930s hybrid was the Karrier Ro-railer. The idea of using roads for local distribution and the railways for the long-distance trunk haul is as old as the railways themselves. What was new about the Ro-railer was that it could be used on both rails and road. The bus had two sets of wheels, one with conventional tyres and another set of iron wheels with flanges. The Ro-railer was tested on the branch line between Blisworth and Stratford-upon- Avon in 1930. Contemporary accounts say that it could reach quite high speeds on the rails and that it saved fuel. Its fuel consumption was eight miles per gallon (2-5 km per litre) on the road and 16 mpg on rails. After these trials the Rorailer disappeared from view. But two years ago the idea popped up again, as part of the Lucas Aerospace workers' alternative corporate plan. This vehicle was developed from a 1963 patent. It also has two sets of wheels, one set to guide it on rails and a set of rubber tyres for roads. The Lucas workers' Centre for Alternative In- dustrial and Technological Systems and the North East London Polytechnic bought a secondhand Bristol bus and converted it. In August 1980 they successfully tested the conversion on a private railway in Somerset. The advantages of the Lucas bus is that the rubber tyres give it better grip on steel and help to reduce shocks on the chassis. And because many railway sta- tions are built on the edge of town, the Lucas bus could drop passengers in the centre just the sort of vehicle that could be useful on branch lines--if there are any left by the time its development is complete. Even the ubiquitous in- ternal combustion engine has had its competitors. Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, a Cornishman, designed and built a steam-powered carr- iage which carried 19 pass- engers in 1827. (His first design was for a vehicle propelled by legs). It had a top speed of just under 20 km/h. And as late as 1906 a Stanley steam car held the world speed record of 204 km/h. At the turn of the century there were also steam trams, steam buses and steam lorries. But most of these vanished quickly. The last steam bus ran in Ryde in 1923. Steam lorries lingered on after the Second World War, largely because of the shortage of oil. Seers now say that the petrol car will eventually be replaced by a battery-powered version. But the battery car is not new. It was an electric car that first broke the 100 km/h barrier, when it set a world speed record of 104 km/h in 1898. The eclipse of electricity as a means of propulsion has been one of the more curious facets of the evolution of transport. In 1900 coal was king. Coal powered factories, warmed homes and moved the railway steam engines (as well as polluting our cities' air). In the intervening years the general use of electricity (and oil) has increased dramatically. These days about 15 per cent of our energy is obtained at the flick of a switch. Yet only 0-75 per cent of the fuel used for transport is electricity; the rest is virtually all oil. On the face of it electric traction has many advantages. The electric engine is extremely efficient at converting electrical energy into movement, far more efficient than petrol, diesel or steam engines. (Although this advantage is offset by the inefficiency of power stations). The engine is very durable ( the new Southern Region commuter trains have engines taken out of the trains they are replacing). It does not need a gearbox, and it needs little maintenance. And electric vehicles are pollu- tion-free and quiet. One of the major prob- lems with electric vehicles has been the lack of a battery with a high power- to-weight ratio. Electric vehicles with lead acid bat- teries cary a lot of weight in order to get a reasonable speed. This drawback de- feated the electric car. It also defeated the battery bus. The London Electro bus Company introduced the battery bus to London. The company was formed in 1906 and planned to have 300 electrobuses on the road within a year. Its first bus appeared in 1907. In 1908 it assured share- holders that it was "now remunerative", the prelude of course to going out of business in 1910. An attempt in the 1970s to resurrect the battery bus also had mixed fortunes. The bus performed satisfactorily until it was sent to Nottingham in 1973, which is very hilly. The bus failed to get up the first steep hill it came to. Two other electric vehicles, the tram and the trolleybus have all but disappeared from British streets. Blackpool was the first town to have electric trams, in 1885. It is now the only town on the mainland to be left with trams. The number of tram passengers expanded rapidly. By 1913 trams were carrying twice as many passengers in Britain as the railways, although for shorter distances. Many British tramways were municipally owned (legisla- lion enabled councils to buy out private tramways). And the corporation often owned the electricity supply as well. This was a highly effective marriage of convenience, help ing to balance the demand for electricity. Although tramway traffic was still increasing in 1930 much of the equipment was due for renewal. In the first 30 years of this century, bus technology had improved considerably, with pneumatic tyres, better roads and, during the 1930s, the replacement of petrol by diesel engines. If trams no longer had an obvious technological advantage they also suffered from an institutional dis- advantage-of having to pay for the upkeep of the roads they used, up to a distance of 46 cm (18 inches) either sides of their tracks literally paving the way for motor buses. London led the way, deciding to replace its trams in 1934-although the last tram did not run until 1952. Even councils which modernised their trams in the 1930s, such as Glasgow and Leeds, abandoned them in the 1950s. Yet many towns in Europe, like Amsterdam, Brussels, Cologne and Rome, kept their tramways and modernised them. In retrospect the decline of the tram in Britain was not so much a response to technological change but more a decision to cut capital investment in public transport. Many cities, including London, replaced trams with trolleybuses. These vehicles, originally called "trackless trams", could move either side of the overhead wires. But the main reason that trolleybuses were often preferred to buses as replacements for trams was that the electrical distribution system was still in good condition. In most cases conversion meant little more than adjusting the overhead wires to allow for two conductors instead of one. And there was a powerful political argument for relying on home-produced power (from (coal) rather than im- ported oil, especially when mining was an important local industry. British trolleybuses followed the tram to the scrap- yard when their equipment needed renewing. Again London led, its last trolleybus ran in 1962. The last British trolleybus ran in Bradford 11 years ago. The trolleybus's major advantages are that it is quiet and pollution-free. Britain had largely abandoned its trolleybuses before these advantages became politically important with the increase in environmental concern in the 1970s. Again many European cities have kept their trolley- buses, Lausanne and Lycn to quote two at random. And the EEC this year set up a technical committee to help the development of trolleybuses. The United States developed a particularly curious form of transport--the inter-urban tram. The inter-urban tram falls between what is usually understood by "train" and "tram". They linked independent communities, usually running across country. But in the towns they ran on the streets, just like other trams. Today the express coach has much the same sort of function In the first years of the century the number of inter- urbans grew rapidly. Peak mileage, in 1916, was 25 000 kilometres in the US--a system larger than British Rail's today. But their de- cline was equally rapid. Most of the lines had been built by property specula- tors, who once they had sold their land for housing, had no further interest in running trams. Los Angeles is often thought of as being the creation of the motor car. But it was not. It was built about an inter-urban tram- way--the Pacific Electric Railway. Every major road out of the centre had its tramway running up the centre of a dual carriageway. And very soon a bungaloid growth replaced the orange groves. The inter-urban trams suffered badly from un- licensed competition during the First World War. It was in Los Angeles in 1914 that some bright car owner first started running up the main street, picking up passen- gers waiting for trams and charging them a "jitney"-- 5 cents. Legislation curbed the "jitneys", as they came to be called. But trams also had to face some sharp practice from competing bus companies. And in 1949 General Motors was con- victed of conspiring with Standard Oil of California and Firestone Tire to re- place electric trams in sev- eral cities (including Los Angeles) with buses. Gen- eral Motors says that this was "a close point of law", but it was fined $5000. The last of the Pacific Electric cars ran in 1961 to be replaced by buses. This year the US Secretary of State for Transportation an- nounced $60 million for preliminary work on a new high-speed rail network for Los Angeles. The first train should run in about 1990. Monorails have always attracted inventors because the structure can be lighter than that of conventional rail- ways. Ireland opened the first commercial monorail in 1888. It ran from Ballybunion to Listowel. The train straddled the rail, splitting the carriages and engines in half. Each locomotive for example had two boilers. It had a major problem when trains had to change tracks and instead of points the railway had a turntable. It lasted until 1924, when it got blown up during the Irish civil war. The first electric monorail was opened in Wu%ppertal in 1900. The 13 kilometre line is still open, running for most of its length over the River Wu%pper. Periodically someone rediscovers the monorail, the French for example, developed the Safege system in the 1970s. And Jakarta is now plan- ning a monorail system. But apart from a few minor lines the Wu%ppertal line re- mains the only substantial operations. In 1839 a British engineer Samuel Clegg patented an "atmospheric" railway. This had a tube in between the two rails. Te train had a piston which ran along the tube and a stationary steam engine pumped air out of the tube to suck the train forward. The piston was connected to the train by a vertical plate and a leather flap on top of the tube maintained the seal after the train had passed. Isambard Kingdom Brunel used this system on the South Devon Railway, which ran between Exeter and Plymouth and opened in 1848. But it quickly closed, after only a year. The salt air caused the leather to deteriorate and the local rats ate it. Brunel sold his engines for only #81 000, less than a fifth of its cost. Only this year Brazil ordered an experimental one kilometre line. Oskar Coester, the engineer, claims that his railway will cost one-third that of a con- ventional line. According to <1New Civil Engineer>1, Coester was unaware of Brunel's earlier failure. Railways's seem to have thrown up more than their fair share of curiosities. In the Second World War Hitler planned a high-speed (300 km/h) railway with a three metre gauge. Then in the 1960s British Rail came up with a novel idea for a faster train. Instead of straightening out the bends on railways te train would tilt as it entered a curve. It was called the Advanced Passenger Train. [] <2ARIADNE>2 NEW SCIENTIST discovered a newspaper editor in the US who thought that nuclear power generated elec- tricity contaminated the fish in his frying pan. Fish is thought by many to be "brain-food". Loch Ness was in the pages again, this time because the only known Wel- lington bomber to exist is on the bottom. Genetic engin- eering, matily called "geemag" by those in the know, was, said two articles, ready for exploitation, not least in producing crop plants never seen before and in correcting genetic diseases in man. Many people were shocked, but not much, when NALGO threatened to stop all register office weddings, because the registrars were not paid enough. The CBI saw no recovery on the way. Howe, in a message of hope, said that he hoped unemployment had peaked, but he wasn't banking on it. In Poland mass demonstrations for the release of Lech Walesa brought entirely unconnected Rus- sian army manoeuvres in nearby territory. Thatcher said she was "deeply wounded" by Reagan's threats of sanc- tions over the pipeline. A hang glider, piloted by a gorilla playing a saxophone, made several sweeps round the Houses of Parliament. <1New Scientist>1 celebrated the return of the airship, in the shape of helium-filled craft pioneered by the British firm of Airship Industries, with just a little nail-biting. In a long feature by its news editor, it gave all the facts about the neutron bomb and the conclusions to be drawn from them. The ordinary man finds no difficulty in drawing them. Brasshats do, and, seemingly, leaders of nations find it utterly impossible. A US peace plan for the Middle East, which would have recognised a place for Palestinians, was rejected by Begin. The TUC cheered Arthur Scargill as he said the law should be defied if one jot of trades union legislation were changed. He called for a one-day strike in September. A society of master chefs was formed to achieve professional status similar to that of doctors or lawyers for its mem- bers. The Home Office made sure that anyone legally buying a cordless telephone and using it illegally, could have one to work legally that would soon become illegal. It was clear that original thought was being shown all round. <1New Scientist>1 took up some original thought on an old idea, the flywheel, which can store energy with high effi- ciency. A French telephone exchange runs on one, it said, and Harwell's Energy Technology Support Unit is inter- ested but equivocal. In its pages, the forthcoming break- fast TV authority advertised for a "weatherperson". In a report on the future of the Falklands, Lord Shackle- ton said that it would take #100 million or so for re- development. The president-elect of the Lebannon was assassinated. Israeli troops instantly drove into Beirut, a move to be followed by the massacre of hundreds of people, with the knowledge or participation of Israeli troops a hor- rendous question. Reagan demanded a pull-back by the Israelis, with the by now familiar result. The Schmidt government in Bonn fell. Thatcher, in Japan, hobnobbed with Sumo wrestlers, adjured the japanese to invest in Britain and moved on to China. There was uproar in Israel over the massacres, Begin coming near to defeat in the Knesset. The man found in the Queen's bedroom admitted a long list of offences. He was immediately found not guilty and re-arrested on others. As Shirley Williams was elected president of the SDP, Mary White- house, the prominent housewife called Roy Jenkins "the architect of the permissive society" when launching her autobiography. An inquiry into the Beirut massacres was held up because of lawsuits against the Israel government for <1not>1 setting up an inquiry. <1New Scientist>1 published an article with the transfixing title of "The search for scale- invariant cosmology", showing that there was a search going on for a deeper understanding of the Universe. It was hard to disagree that it was necessary. It also carried speculation on why plants need aspirin. They were, many people thought, not the only things. For, as <1New Scientist>1 reported, true to its function (as a barrister once said about a toilet roll revolving when stood on, causing injury) the Home Office had held an exercise about an attack on Britain by the USSR. The Reds dropped a few small bombs, killed far fewer people than calculation suggests and ignored militarily-attractive targets. In Salford, according to <1The>1 <1Guardian,>1 sodium chloride had exploded and wrecked a warehouse. In a world in which common salt might blow up, could anyone count himself safe? October opened auspiciously with Everards looking at the possibility of set- ting up a brewery in the Falklands. COHSE members coming out on strike because of their refusal to take a little boy into the theatre for an operation, pin-ups being removed from the Yorkshire miners' news- paper, painkillers being laced with poison in the US, John Nott walking out on Robin Day in front of the TV cameras, Helmut Kohl taking over from (crash) Helmut Schmidt and public service pay rises being kept down to 3 1/2 per cent, every single event being, in some eyes, a disaster. <1New Scientist>1 kept a lofty attitude about it all by celebrating three anniversaries in the history of space flight, or, alternatively, dropped its gaze discreetly on to the Mary Rose, about to surface from the Solent. It also carried a behind-the-scenes look at the fire in a nuclear reactor at Windscale that flamed into the headlines in 1957 and, almost by accident, discovered, via Dr David Jones, that Napoleon died the victim of poisoning by arsenical wallpaper. "Monkeys mug mountain men", said a newspaper, re- porting a gang of thieving apes in China, while a less elegant construction was used by President Reagan about the military leaders of Poland--"a bunch of no good, lousy bums". He suspended Poland's status as a most favoured nation. The Mary Rose was brought up, to the jeers and tears of salvage experts who considered the technique used amateur. Nottinghamshire miners went on strike to protest against losing money because of their own ban on overtime. Begin won a slim victory in the Knesset for his foreign and defence policy, though having to concede an inquiry into the Beirut massacres. Edward Teller, in a reassuring article in <1Readers Digest,>1 said that the human race would survive nuclear war because radioactivity was finite and you could wash off fall-out. Few sighs of relief were heard, especially as the Swedes, plagued once more by submarines prowling round their defences, said they would sink intruders. In an ad- vertisement for paperbacks, two bcoks were pictured side by side. One was <1The Last Days of America,>1 the other <1The Fall of the Russian Empire>1, both set in the future. The French manufacturers of the Exocet missile, Aero- spatiale, had been done a lot of good to by the Falk- lands imbroglio and re- ported far better order books. <1New Scientist>1 pub- lished an article by Profes- sor Keith Runcorn on the Moon's history and geology with beautiful illustrations in colour. It was called "The Moon's deceptive tran- quility". Earth could have done with some, decep- tive or not. Tony Benn and Eric Heffer were voted off several committees that the Labour Party considered important, while Thatcher lent her teddy bear to a Lincolnshire museum's ex- hibition. The Admiral who had been appointed as the boss of Playboy UK got a golden handshake of nearly #12 million for four months' tenure as the firm was taken over. A judge was divorced by his wife be- cause he had taken to the idea that she was possessed by the devil and gave her a thump or two to drive Satan out. There was no rest for the wicked as John Gribbin told <1New Scientist's>1 readers that the results of a Chinese study of the alignment of the planets meant we were in for years of terrible weather. Be- sides, the magazine reported that almost unbelievably, the government had stopped advance copies of scientific annual reports being issued to weekly journals because London's evening newspaper, <1The Standard>1, had printed (heinous! dastardly!) details of awards to Falkland troops as much as 12 hours before they were officially released. The same kind of yelping small-mindedness was shown when Thatcher refused to allow Roy Jenkins to take part in the Cenotaph service. Britain, said the press, was considering buying Exocet missiles, having been caught with trousers down. So was Chancellor Howe, as his were stolen on a train, along with #100. The bank rate went down, and so did the Irish government, while the weight of lorries allowed on the roads of Britain went up from 3212 to 38 tonnes. Mitter- rand and Thatcher were said to be "in harmony" over the EEC the day before France said it was opposed to flexible arrangements for the British contribution to the EEC. The Thames barrier was proved to work and there could well be tax cuts in the Spring, said Howe. Reagan lifted the pipeline sanctions and Britoil went up for sale and Lech Walesa was freed. On the other hand, the French boasted they could make a neutron bomb, the US was still anguished over the spy story of Cheltenham as Prime got 35 years' rumours of Brezhnev's death proved true. <1New Scientist,>1 in a rich week, reported the successful attachment of glass fibre beaks to injured pelicans, asked, oddly, who made the Andes islands of ice (perhaps an outbreak of creationism) and explained why chimpanzees are not people, concluding that the chimps would probably not want to be, anyway. Its 11 November issue appro- priately included features on what progress had been made towards war in space, following this with the other end of technology--all the facts on animal power--which proved that running horse transport could be cheaper than vans or lorries, though not mentioning that animal ex- hausts can be put to good use as well. Foot said that he could cut unemployment to under one million in five years by public spending, tax reduction and devaluation. The pound kept falling, Tony Benn failed to get into the shadow cabinet and 70 per cent of Britoil shares failed to find buyers. This was hailed as a success by the Energy Minister. In Sicily the Pope told hearers that they should fight the Mafia. You are not alone, he said, the Pope is with you. He then flew back to Rome. Reagan announced that MX missiles were to be grouped together to frustrate attack by missiles. Scientology circles were shaken by allegations that L. Ron Hubbard was dead and a group of opportunists were forging his signature. After the Labour Party conference Dame Judith Hart had said that "we can now go forward as a united party". Foot was attacked by MPs for not uniting the party. <1New>1 <1Scientist,>1 the jokers, headed an article on the prospects for a popular fish, "Britain's native trout is floundering". All in all, the winner of the Periodical Publishers Asso- ciation Consumer Magazine of the Year Award had an anxious time, along with everyone else, in the first 11 months of the year, which is as far as we go. December is unlikely to have been any better, though it will see one example of international cooperation as the US, USSR and UK combine to trim the happy, carefree money- spenders of the United Nations. NB for Christmas: There is to be agreement on a standard glass of wine in the UK. We are now being metricated. The standard is to be four fluid ounces. []