Opacity impoverishes

Dear Editor,

I come to the debate as an engineer rather than a scientist, but my experience at sea, first as a seaman and later as a marine journalist, seems to bear on some of the issues raised by your correspondents (‘Self-limiting technology’, SPA September/December 2005).

It’s true – looking at a printed circuit won’t tell you anything about its function, and it may be irrelevant as long as it works, but its opacity, in terms of allowing you to understand its working, impoverishes you.

I cross the Millennium Bridge almost every week, and I’m fascinated when I look underneath it (as I do every time) to see how it’s made, and how they solved the problems of it swaying. I’m glad I have just enough engineering knowledge to make a stab at understanding the wonderful engineering that’s gone into it. Pity, with me, the thousands who use the bridge every day, and have no interest or knowledge of what lies beneath their feet. Richard Hallam  (SPA September 2005) says: as long as the mobile phone works, it’s not important how it does so. Maybe: but you lose a lot.

So let’s get back to sea.  Once you were far enough away from shore, there was nobody to help you when you broke down. No email ordering of spares, nor express delivery. You improvised, you sweated you swore and eventually you managed. It taught us a lot about how engines were made and shafts aligned and the chemical composition of fuel oil. The best and most useful engineering education you could ever hope for.

Many years later, when I became a journalist, I was at first astonished and then depressed when I found how digital technology had taken over the ships. Most ships’ engineers are competent at diagnostics and few know how things work. A few clicks on the mouse show them any problems on screen, and which pc boards to replace. And if they aren’t quick enough, head office, 12 000 miles away will immediately tell them what to do. Not a dirty rag or oil-stained boiler suit to be seen.
Comparable changes on the bridge have also led to a much more insulated life, yet despite almost every week there’s a collision or a near collision because the man on watch is looking at the radar or the vdu, rather than over the bow; lookouts have been more or less been replaced by video cameras.

It would be stupid to suggest a return to those earlier days: it’s an impossible thought anyway, and ships – the one area I know something about - are more efficient than ever they were. We have to accept that technology is no longer transparent, and is likely to become even more obfuscated. It won’t be a case of looking at a pc board in bewilderment; it will be so small you won’t be able to see it anyway.

So do we need to know how a mobile phone works? I think we should try to find out. We must discourage the attitude that ‘if it works - don’t ask why’. If we never ask why we’ll turn into printed circuits ourselves.

Fabian Acker is a freelance science writer

Homeopathy

Dear Editor,

It was refreshing to see three sides of the debate into the issue of homeopathy.

An important aspect of this debate was the raising of the much maligned placebo response as a potential mechanism of action for homeopathic treatment. Any treatment which leads to a benefit (even one only perceived by the patient) is something we should embrace rather than use as a tool to discredit.

A minor error was the inclusion of a picture of the Echinacea flower. Echinacea is used for its effects on the immune system at pharmacological doses, not homeopathic ones.
This serves to illustrate a misconception held by much of the general population, namely the similarity between homeopathy and herbal medicine. There is a greater similarity between herbal medicine and pharmaceutical medicine than there is with homeopathy.

Peter W McCarthy is Reader at the Welsh Institute of Chiropractic, University of Glamorgan, and a herbalist