Letters
By Science News
Get the real life In the article “Scientists get a second life” (SN: 5/24/08, p. 20), I take exception to Joanna Scott’s statement that “Second Life is real life.” In fairness, one could debate what she means by “life,” but the statement is just too strong to ignore. As technical director at a major theater, I spend part of each day making certain that the crews, performers and audiences are safe from the real-life, negative consequences of physics. To do this I use the senses of sight, hearing, touch and smell. (Taste isn’t often involved. Who wants to lick a hundred years of dust and grease?) Second Life engages very limited versions of two senses, sight and hearing. One only sees the images and hears the sounds that the designers have created. As a perfect example, look at the image of Terra Questi on the moon. (Great name, by the way.) The surface of the moon, the lander and the footsteps are far more detailed in reality than portrayed in the image. An unseen rock can pitch a person arse over teacup on the real moon, just as it can on our daily terra firma. Scott may be correct that Second Life is creating an exciting, enabling and encompassing medium for communication. But please don’t claim that it’s “real life.” GREG ANDERSON, BOSTON, MASS. Asking the right questions Thank you for the quotes from the late John Wheeler (“Quantum theory poses reality’s deepest mystery,” SN: 5/24/08, p. 32). A more famous but fictional Dane may have put the Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s “To be” phrase quite differently: “To be? To be? That is not the question!” JEFFRY D. MUELLER, ELDERSBURG, MD. Weak interaction with Earth There may be another way of proving the existence of WIMPs (“Battle over WIMPs goes another round” SN: 5/10/08, p. 12). Is it possible that Earth’s interaction with this wind of particles could slow Earth down, however slightly? If this is so, would the effect be more pronounced in the summer, when Earth’s rotation takes it through a stronger wind of these particles, than in the winter? Could this difference be measured? THEODORE J. BLINDER, WALLINGFORD, PA. According to Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago, any effect on Earth’s motion would be pretty noticeable to astronomers. Also, the “weakly interacting” part of “WIMP” does not allow for enough “friction.” —Ron Cowen