The Editor

15:1:99

Dear Sir

Pssst! Can I tell you a secret? It might just help to save your reputation! Science has not, as Marcus Chown so calmly reports in his review (9 January, p43) of Igor Novikov's "The River of Time", actually "shown that [time] can be slowed down by motion or gravity, that time loops ... are not forbidden by theory, that time actually turns into space ... on entering a black hole." This is careless writing, and careless writing costs sanity! Science has no more "shown" this than it has actually demonstrated "non-locality" and "quantum entanglement" (See Mark Buchanan's report of Dik Bouwmeester's recent work, December 5, p14).

Surely the New Scientist, in its heart of hearts, knows this! These weird ideas belong to science fiction. They are just result of a modern fad, taking mathematics and whimsical assumptions too seriously! Neither the mathematics not the assumptions are testable, so the loudest voice wins. And woe betide the unfortunate, naïve, newcomer, or the honest observer of the heavens or the micro-world, who happens to discover new facts that conflict with the edicts of the Nobel-annointed high priests!

But does the New Scientist really need to join in the game, confusing its readers by propagating these myths? Would it be that difficult to forgo the striking story in the interests of honesty and the future of science? How about inserting the odd phrase of doubt, to avoid that peculiarly-human phenomenon whereby constant repetition causes eventual acceptance of the absurd?

For scientists are human too. They come to believe their own fairy tales, reinforced by the strange idea that even the ridiculous must be accepted if no better "theory" can be found. This system is preventing questions being asked that should be asked, preventing the publicising of the facts that, given fresh examination, might lead to genuine understanding.

This is not just vague idealism. I have been studying an actual case - the perpetuation of the myth of the photon, which is preventing common sense interpretations of those "quantum entanglement" experiments. For more on this, see my Web site (http://www.aber.ac.uk/~cat).

Caroline H Thompson