From:
c.h.thompson
To:
<letters@newscientist.com>
Subject:
There's reporting, and there's Michael Brooks!
Date: 09 May
2003 23:36
The Editor
Dear Sir
Are there
no limits to journalistic licence (re May 10, p28: Michael Brooks,
"Curiouser
and curiouser")? What are you
thinking of? In any other
subject, as
far as I can see, you stick to the facts. Come to quantum
theory,
though, and you seem compelled to overdramatise, and, in this
instance,
to forget the meaning of ordinary English words such as "look"!
Quantum
theorists may be mad, but need their reporters follow suit?
So now we
can "see inside the quantum world", can we? Pull the other one!
The article
is mainly about yet another *thought* experiment. How can the
results of
an experiment that has never been done be reported in these
terms? How can Brooks report with a straight face
that Aharonov and Popescu
"looked"
at their "device" [a diagram on a piece of paper] and found that
"a
reading
there was -1. Somehow there was a
'negative presence'"?
To compound
the confusion, Brooks quotes Hardy's opinion that "there is
definitely
a case to answer because the apparatus [What apparatus?]
consistently
gives the same error -- a negative number of particles whenever
both ...
detectors click".
It's bad
enough these days trying to fathom out in the journals whether a
theoretical
physics paper concerns a real experiment or just a simulaton.
They are
presented in the same terms, and computer-generated graphs are
indistinguishable
from genuine observations. We don't need the same
confusion
in New Scientist.
Yours
sincerely
Caroline H
Thompson