Peace by Christmas?

It seems that a grovelling apology from McLaren, and a commitment not to develop certain systems, has finally ended Formula One's espionage saga. The McLaren statement reads:

"To avoid even the possibility of Ferrari information influencing our performance during 2008, McLaren has offered a set of detailed undertakings to the FIA which will impose a moratorium on development in relation to three separate systems.

"McLaren wish to make a public apology to the FIA, Ferrari, the Formula One community and to Formula One fans throughout the world and offer their assurance that changes are now being made which will ensure that nothing comparable to what has taken place will ever happen again. McLaren have also agreed to pay the costs incurred by the FIA for their investigation."

One trusts, then, that in the coming days, Renault will issue a similar apology to McLaren, the Formula One community, and Formula One fans throughout the world, and will undertake not to develop their shock absorbers, fuel system, mass damper and seamless shift transmission, given that such development work could clearly have been influenced by the confidential McLaren information which they were in unauthorised possession of.

The FIA have published a redacted version of their recent report on the development of McLaren's 2008 car. The report demonstrates, as McLaren concede, that the information supplied by Ferrari employee, Nigel Stepney, propagated more widely through McLaren's engineering staff than they previously acknowledged. However, the report fails to establish whether the developments which McLaren planned to introduce arose from public domain information, or from information which they would not have had without the assistance of Mr Stepney. McLaren have, for example, undertaken not to use CO2 gas in their tyres, despite the fact that every other team will, presumably, be availing itself of CO2 next season!

The FIA suggest, with cynical sanctimony, that McLaren engineers in possession of information which, let us remember, they did not seek, but were given, should have refrained from using that information, and should instead have informed Ferrari and the FIA of the presence of the 'mole' within the Ferrari organisation. The last time I checked, Formula One was a competitive, engineering-based sport, in which teams identify how other teams have obtained a performance advantage, and then copy them.

Anyway, let us hope that this proves to be the end of the matter. Let us also hope that the sport can be administered, at some time in the near future, in a consistent and impartial manner.

John Gray and Straw Dogs

John Gray's Straw Dogs is an attack upon the purported faith which supports modern secular liberal humanism. Gray's book is important, for it is the source for many of the anti-humanistic mantras uttered by contemporary religious apologists. Gray's primary target is the belief in the possibility of human progress, hence the attraction of his ideas to those who believe that human suffering is a penance we must serve to atone for 'original sin'.

Gray's definition of humanism can be found on page 4 of Straw Dogs:

"Humanism can mean many things, but for us it means belief in progress. To believe in progress is to believe that, by using the new powers given us by growing scientific knowledge, humans can free themselves from the limits that frame the lives of other animals."

Unfortunately, however, this is not the definition of humanism, but the definition of transhumanism. Humanism is the belief in the possibility of human progress, whilst transhumanism is the belief in the possibility that humans can transcend their animal nature. Gray's entire book, then, is founded upon a mis-understanding of what humanism is.

Moreover, humanism should not be conflated with utopianism. The unattainability of a human social and political utopia does not entail the impossibility of human progress. If progress is defined to be the reduction of human suffering, then progress is undeniably possible. Consider as a simple example the invention of anaesthetic. If one accepts that it is better for medical surgery to be performed with, rather than without anaesthetic, then one must accept that a society makes progress when it first conducts medical surgery under anaesthetic.

Gray's opinions on progress, however, are confused and contradictory. On p4 he states: "in the world shown to us by Darwin, there is nothing that can be called progress," whilst on p155 he states: "anaesthetic dentistry is an unmixed blessing. So are clean water and flush toilets. Progress is a fact. Even so, faith in progress is a superstition...Improvements in government and society are...real, but they are temporary. Not only can they be lost, they are sure to be."

Humanism, however, does not assert that progress is certain or irreversible. Humanism merely holds that: (i) human progress is possible; and (ii) human progress should be pursued. Most humanists are all too aware of the possibility of regress, and the difficulty of achieving progress. And, whilst there is no guarantee of progress, contra Gray there is also no guarantee of eventual regression.

The arguments expounded by Gray in Straw Dogs are washed, tumble-dried, and hung on the washing line again in Black Mass, which received the following withering review from the philosopher AC Grayling:

In order to establish that secular Whiggish Enlightenment-derived aspirations are the child of Christianity, Gray begins by calling any view or outlook a “religion”. Everything is a religion: Torquemada’s Catholicism, the pluralism and empiricism of 18th-century philosophers, liberalism, Stalinism. He speaks of “secular religion” and “political religion”. This empties the word “religion” of any meaning, making it a neutral portmanteau expression like “view” or “outlook”. He can therefore premise a gigantic fallacy of equivocation, and assimilate secular Enlightenment values to the Christian “narrative” of reformation aimed at bringing about a golden age.

For starters this misreads Christianity, for which truths are eternal and the narrative is a very short story indeed (obey, get to heaven; disobey, do not get to heaven); but more to the point, it utterly misreads the secular view. The secular view is a true narrative of incremental improvement in the human condition through education and political action. Gray thinks that such a view must of necessity be utopian, as if everyone simplistically thought that making things better (in dentistry, in the rule of law, in child health, in international mechanisms for reducing conflict, and so forth for many things) absolutely had to be aimed at realising an ideal golden age to have any meaning. But it does not: trying to make things better is not the same as believing that they can be made perfect. That is a point Gray completely fails to grasp, and it vitiates his case. Since that is so, the point bears repeating: meliorism is not perfectibilism.

But in making a nonsense of the word “religion” Gray blurs and blends just where important distinctions are required. A religion is a view which essentially premises commitment to belief in the existence of supernatural agencies in the universe, almost always conceived as having intentions and expectations regarding human beings. Such is the myth derived from humankind’s infancy, a myth that survives for both institutional and psychological reasons, largely to the detriment of human affairs. Most religions, especially if given the chance, share the totalitarian impulses of Stalinism and Nazism (think Torquemada and the Taliban) for a simple reason: all such are monolithic ideologies demanding subservience to a supposed ideal, on pain of punishment for non-conformity.

Now let us ask whether secular Enlightenment values of pluralism, democracy, the rule of independently and impartially administered law, freedom of thought, enquiry and expression, and liberty of the individual conform to the model of a monolithic ideology such as Catholicism, Islam or Stalinism. Let us further ask how Gray imagines that these values are direct inheritances from Christianity – the Christianity of the Inquisition, which burned to death any who sought to assert just such values. Indeed, the history of the modern European and Europe-derived world is precisely the history of liberation from the hegemony of Christianity. I shall be so bold as to refer the reader to the case for this claim in my forthcoming (Autumn 2007) full-length discussion of it, Towards the Light.

As to the weary old canard about the 20th-century totalitarianisms: it astonishes me how those who should know better can fail to see them as quintessentially counter-Enlightenment projects, and ones which the rest of the Enlightenment-derived world would not put up with and therefore defeated: Nazism in 17 years and Soviet communism in 70. They were counter-Enlightenment projects because they rejected the idea of pluralism and its concomitant liberties of thought and the person, and in the time-honoured unEnlightened way forcibly demanded submission to a monolithic ideal. They even used the forms and techniques of religion, from the notion of thought-crime to the embalming of saints in mausoleums (Lenin and Mao, like any number of saints and their relics, invite pilgrimage to their glass cases). Totalitarianism is not about progress but stasis; it is not about realising a golden age but coercively sustaining the myth of one. This indeed is the lineament of religion: it is the opposite of secular progressivism.

Most of what was achieved in the history of the West from the 16th century onwards – most notably science and the realisation of the values listed above – was wrested from the bitter reactionary grip of religion inch by painful and frequently bloody inch. How can Gray so far ignore this bald fact of history as to make the modern secular West the inheritor of the ideals and aspirations of what it fought so hard to free itself from (and is still bedevilled by)? His accordingly is a bizarre fantasy-version of history. In the face of the central heating that warms him, the modern dentistry that allows him to chew his peanuts, the computer he writes his strange books on and the aeroplanes he travels in, he asserts that “progress is a myth”. But perhaps he does not mean to call material progress a myth, but rather alleged progress in the political condition of a large portion of mankind. Does he thus mean that the movement from feudal baronies to universal suffrage and independent judiciaries is not progress? If it is not, what is it? Regress?

Gordon Murray and hot baths

The coolest man in the human noosphere is surely Gordon Murray. Murray designed a series of beautiful and innovative Formula 1 cars in the 1970s and 1980s, and then proceeded to design both the McLaren F1 road car, and the Mercedes SLR. Interviewed in this month's Motorsport magazine, Murray reveals that "I'm unusual for an engineer in that I went to art school when I was 13. I still do a bit of drawing and painting, and I love styling. I couldn't bring myself to make an ugly car."

Murray (seen here on the right of Niki Lauda) is the most relaxed of individuals, and during his years in Formula 1 could typically be seen sporting a T-shirt, jeans and rock-star sunglasses. He also put together a rock band in the 1980s: "I play guitar and drums, both very badly...we'd have a jam session that would last all weekend. Leo Sayer sang with us for a bit, and George Harrison played with us one night. We had a lot of fun"

Murray introduced the idea of strategic pit-stops into modern Formula 1, and the genesis of this idea confirms my own long-held bathing beliefs:

"It started as a hot bath idea. I used to have a lot of good ideas after a hot bath. Apparently there's a physical reason for this, there's a channel in your spine that opens up in the heat and increases the blood supply to the brain. I knew how much the tyres used to go off. And I'd learned from running the cars light in qualifying that the weight of one litre of fuel cost around one hundredth of a second in lap times. So I lay in the bath doing the maths.

"The clever thing wasn't having the idea, it was developing all the stuff that went into it. That's the bit I love. Throw me a series of connected problems and I've got to find a way to make everything work together. In this case it was, how do you change the tyres quickly, how do you put the fuel in quickly, and how do you avoid losing pace going back out on cold tyres? We videoed the mechanics changing tyres, analysed it frame by frame, and I redesigned the hubs, bearing carriers, threads, nuts and wheel guns, with a device to retain the nuts. And I put titanium on-board air jacks on the car...Tyre warmers didn't exist then, so I made an oven, a big thing like the Tardis, with temperature probes and hot air circulating through four tyres. Then we did the fuel kit. Nowadays it all has to be done at atmospheric pressure, so it's pretty slow. But there were no rules about it then, so I designed a twin-barrel fuel system running at 4 bar. The damper barrel fed the fuel barrel and the fuel barrel fed the car, and we could push in 35 gallons in 3.5 seconds. Which is like an explosion, believe me.

"With the refuelling we had one guy on one side of the car opening the breather, one on the other putting in the fuel. Big heavy hoses over their shoulders. If the breather's not on when the fuel guy opens the pressure, the car disintegrates. Four bar inside a carbon and aluminium monocoque, you wouldn't find the pieces. So I designed all sorts of mechanical interlocks inside the tank and it all got really complicated, castellations and cams and Geneva mechanisms. And I looked at it and thought, on a racing car it's going to vibrate; one day it's going to fail to work and the car's going to explode. No more Brabham [the team for which Murray worked], no more pitlane, maybe no more F1. I studied the videos again, and I realised that during a stop the breather guy and the fuel guy would be facing each other each side of the roll hoop with their noses about four inches apart. So I scrapped the interlocks and I got the two of them together and I said to the breather guy, 'When you approach the car with your hose, you're looking down to where you've got to lock the hose on, so don't look up until it's on.' And I said to the fuel guy, 'Don't turn on the fuel until he looks up at you and you see the whites of his eyes four inches away.' So that's what they did, and it worked."

Lawrence Krauss and the Casimir effect II

A couple of days ago, I wrote about Lawrence Krauss's article in Physics World. At that time, the article referred to

...the Casimir force that pushes apart metal plates brought very close together.

I pointed out in my post that the effects typically referred to as the Casimir effect, are examples of an attractive force between a pair of parallel plates. I now note with amusement that the text of the on-line version has been changed to read:

..the Casimir force that draws together metal plates brought very close to one another.

I'm impressed! However, the original version is preserved for posterity in the printed copy of Physics World.

Alternative biochemical life

This month's Scientific American contains an article by Paul Davies on the possibility that life may have arisen on multiple independent occasions upon the surface of the Earth. A nice summary is provided of the biochemical differences which might exist between life forms of independent origin:

• "Large biological molecules possess a definite handedness: although the atoms in a molecule can be configured into two mirror-image orientations—left-handed or right-handed—molecules must possess compatible chirality to assemble into more complex structures. In known life-forms, the amino acids—the building blocks of proteins—are left-handed, whereas the sugars are right-handed and DNA is a right-handed double helix. The laws of chemistry, however, are blind to left and right, so if life started again from scratch, there would be a 50–50 chance that its building blocks would be molecules of the opposite handedness. Shadow life could in principle be biochemically almost identical to known life but made of mirror-image molecules. Such mirror life would not compete directly with known life, nor could the two forms swap genes, because the relevant molecules would not be interchangeable."
• "Another possibility is that shadow life might share the same general biochemistry with familiar life but employ a different suite of amino acids or nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA)...chemists can synthesize many other amino acids that are not present in known organisms...Some of these unfamiliar amino acids might make suitable building blocks for alternative forms of life."
• "Another popular conjecture concerns the basic chemical elements that make up the vital parts of known organisms: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus. Would life be possible if a different element were substituted for one of these five? Phosphorus is problematic for life in some ways. It is relatively rare and would not have existed in abundance in readily accessible, soluble form under the conditions that prevailed during the early history of Earth. Felisa Wolfe-Simon, formerly at Arizona State University and now at Harvard University, has hypothesized that arsenic can successfully fill the role of phosphorus for living organisms and would have offered distinct chemical advantages in ancient environments."
• "Some astrobiologists have speculated about the possibility of life arising from silicon compounds instead of carbon compounds." [Carbon, like silicon, possesses four valence electrons, enabling it to form rings and chains which form the backbone of biological molecules.]

Lawrence Krauss and the Casimir effect

The December issue of Physics World contains a number of features on dark energy, including this ludicrous piece by Lawrence Krauss. Consider the following statements made by Krauss:

Quantum mechanics, combined with relativity, implies that empty space is full of a wild brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence so quickly that we cannot directly detect them. Nevertheless, these particles leave a measurable imprint on everything from the spacing between atomic energy levels to the Casimir force that pushes apart metal plates brought very close together.

One might expect these virtual particles to contribute an energy to empty space, which would result in an identical term to Einstein's original cosmological constant that would lead to universal repulsion and hence an accelerating universe. This form of 'vacuum energy' is gravitationally repulsive because it possesses a negative pressure that is equal and opposite in magnitude to its energy density. In other words, the ratio of the pressure to the energy density — called the 'equation of state' parameter, w — has a value of –1.

This is factually incorrect in a very straightforward fashion: whilst there will be a repulsive force between a concentric pair of spheres, those effects which have typically been considered to be Casimir effects, are examples of an attractive force between a pair of parallel metal plates! The editor of Physics World might have wished to check previous articles on the Casimir effect within his own journal to verify this type of thing, but I guess he must have been otherwise engaged on this occasion.

Theory predicts that the vacuum expectation value for the energy density of the electromagnetic field, will not only be non-zero between the plates, but will be negative. Thus, it is believed by some that the Casimir effect demonstrates the physical existence of negative energy, at least on small scales. This is exactly why the Casimir effect was invoked as a mechanism for holding open wormholes in space, given that the latter require negative energy densities. The vacuum fluctuations between a pair of metal plates do indeed suggest an equation of state with a parameter of w =-1, but in the case of plates which are attracted together, this implies a positive pressure and a negative energy. This is the exact opposite of the conclusion which Krauss attempts to establish, that vacuum energy repels things due to the presence of negative pressure.

Krauss then proceeds to express some doubt that we can ever establish that dark energy is a cosmological constant. His argument is, once again, quite bizarre:

The only way we can determine from observations that dark energy is not a cosmological constant is to somehow measure its equation of state parameter, w, and find that it is not, or was not, equal to –1. If the measured value is indistinguishable from –1 within experimental uncertainties, then we have not learned anything at all because dark energy could either be a cosmological constant or something else less (or more) exotic that behaved very much like it.

If one applied this criterion generally in science, then one would have to conclude that the predicted value of a quantity could never be verified because, well, there are always some error bars associated with the measurement. On the contrary, if a theoretical hypothesis predicts a certain value for some quantity, and the value of that quantity is subsequently measured to agree with the predicted value to within, say, two multiples of the standard deviation due to measurement uncertainties, then one can say that: (i) the prediction has been verified, and (ii) the probability that the hypothesis is true has been considerably increased, in accordance with Bayes' theorem. Of course, if there is an alternative theory, which predicts a similar value for the quantity, then the measured value doesn't enable one to discriminate between the two theories. But, in the case of dark energy, there is, as yet, no theory of any 'exotic' something that behaves like the cosmological constant.

It was Krauss, of course, who suggested a couple of weeks ago that mankind may have reduced the life-expectancy of the universe...

Mis-engineering

Unbeknown to most, there is a secret cadre of benighted engineers who have, over the past decades, invented a new engineering discipline with no name. This new discipline is called Mis-engineering. The purpose of this highly distributed covert conspiracy, is the deliberate under-fulfillment of engineering potential, in order to satisfy moral, financial, or political objectives. The manifestations of this perverted underground include the following:

• The Amazon Search engine. The purpose of this is not to enable you to find the product you seek, but to generate a list of products which you must browse through before finding your intended quarry. En route, a significant proportion of customers will have their interest piqued by other items, which they will then choose to buy. It is the internet equivalent of forcing supermarket customers to walk past all the other food in a shop before they reach the bread and milk.
• Predictive text's Christian ignorance of slang taboo.
• Impaired road-junction visibility. People are not to be trusted in making judgements on the road, so hedges and barriers are deliberately engineered to prohibit road-users from spotting vehicles coming from the left or right approaching a junction. Vehicles must come to a stop, and the road-user must then, and only then, observe the traffic coming from either side.
• Famously, the interminable walk from an aircraft arrival gate to the luggage conveyor belt. The speed of delivery processes are not to be improved; rather, new methods for distracting people from the waiting are to be devised.
• Traffic lights which change according to fixed timing, and not the presence of cars. Traffic must be brought to a stop at traffic lights; a flowing stream of cars must be broken into bunches.

Hugh Everett III and J.P.Morgan

The December issue of Scientific American contains a feature on the life of Hugh Everett III, the inventor of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory. Everett left academia in a state of some bitterness at the initial lack of enthusiasm for his proposal. After a period of time working for the Pentagon on the mathematics of nuclear warfare, he established Lambda, a private defence research company. Under contract to the Pentagon, Lambda used Bayesian methods to develop a system for tracking ballistic missiles. Most intriguingly, though, the article suggests that Everett may have subsequently hoodwinked American bank J.P.Morgan:

John Y. Barry, a former colleague of Everett's...questioned his ethics. In the mid-1970s Barry convinced his employers at J.P. Morgan to hire Everett to develop a Bayesian method of predicting movement in the stock market. By several accounts, Everett succeeded - and then refused to turn the product over to J.P.Morgan. "He used us," Barry recalls. "[He was] a brilliant, innovative, slippery, untrustworthy, probably alcoholic individual."

This information appears to have been taken from an on-line biography of Everett, which quotes Barry as follows:

"In the middle 1970s I was in the basic research group of J. P. Morgan and hired Lambda Corporation to develop...the Bayesian stock market timer. He refused to give us the computer code and insisted that Lambda be paid for market forecasts. Morgan could have sued Lambda for the code under the legal precedent of 'work for hire'. Rather than do so, we decided to have nothing more to do with Lambda because they, Hugh, were so unethical. We found that he later used the work developed with Morgan money as a basis for systems sold to the Federal Government. He used us...In brief a brilliant, innovative, slippery, untrustworthy, probably alcoholic, individual."

What I don't understand here, is how this recollection is supposed to substantiate the claim that Everett had dubious ethics. Within an economy, there are some companies which provide the fundamental level of production within the economy, companies which invent things, design things, develop things, discover things, and make things; and then there are parasitic companies, such as banks and firms of lawyers, which produce nothing, and merely drain their wealth from the activities of others. Taking money from a large American bank to subsidise a research project, and then preventing that bank from harvesting the fruits of that project, is the very paragon of ethical behaviour.

Bear Grylls and Coleridge

Last night on the Discovery Channel, there was a gripping two-part 'Born Survivor' special, as Bear Grylls demonstrated how to survive in the Saharan desert. At one stage, Grylls was presented with a dead camel from a local tribe. To provide a blanket against the cold of night, he stripped the skin from the animal, then he cut into its side, and scooped out some water-like liquid to re-hydrate himself. He then cut into what I think was the camel's stomach, the inside of which contained a mass of yellowish manure. Grylls scooped some out, held it above his head, and squeezed the yellow liquid from the manure into his mouth! "It's better than nothing," he claimed.

This was all very impressive, but I couldn't held remembering the recent revelations that Andy Serkis actually performs all the survival stunts on the show, and Grylls's face is simply CGI-ed on in post-production. And at one stage, when Grylls, shot from an aerial perspective, stood atop a high escarpment and wondered aloud "How do I get down from this," I did blurt out: "Use the helicopter!".

Seriously, though, I noticed that the programme was now making the presence of the camera crew explicit, Grylls talking to them at times, and taking a hand-held camera from them on one occasion. Along with the rider displayed at the beginning of the programme, which emphasises that some situations are set-up in advance for Grylls to demonstrate survival techniques, this seems to be a reaction to the accusations of fakery which were levelled at this programme, amongst several others. Similarly, I noticed on a recent 'Top Gear', that when the lads were driving across Botswana, the presence of the film crew and supporting mechanics was made quite overt.

There was a time when TV documentaries, like films, would seek to transport the mind of the viewer to another place, and, to sustain this illusion, no reference would be made to the presence of the camera, or to the production process as a whole. There was no attempt in this to deceive the viewer, rather the viewer and programme-maker were conspiring together in the willing suspension of disbelief (© Sam Coleridge), with the ultimate purpose of enhancing the viewing experience.

The modern trend to make explicit the presence of the cameraman and sound recordist, and to refer within a programme to the programme-making process, is seen as lending a type of authenticity to a programme. The upshot, however, is to dissolve the possible suspension of disbelief in the viewer, and ultimately, therefore, to reduce the potential pleasure which a viewer can gain from a TV programme. This is not a positive trend.

Is Benitez going to be sacked?

Astonishingly, it seems that Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez could be on the verge of leaving the club. Benitez reacted petulantly last week when the club's American co-owners, George Gillett and Tom Hicks, postponed any decisions about expenditure in the January transfer window. It appears that Gillett and Hicks's tolerance threshold for insubordination is rather low, for they are now seeking to rid themselves of Benitez by the end of the season. Either that, or they are seeking to control Benitez with dismissal threats, which doesn't sound like a rosy way to proceed either.

Now, I've never been an unconditional fan of Benitez. I think he's an excellent manager for the European game, but he's never really sussed out how to win the Premiership. Even in his first season with Liverpool, Benitez made a succession of slightly odd team selections and tactical decisions, which restricted the team to only 5th place at season's end.

Benitez's greatest triumph, of course, was taking Liverpool to victory in the Champions' League that same year. But even there, in the final, he made an astonishing mis-judgement in selecting Harry Kewell to start the game, and by leaving Dietmar Hamann out of the team until the second half, AC Milan rampaged to a three-goal lead. Liverpool's come-back was remarkable, but hugely fortunate, and was driven more by Gerrard, Carragher and Hamann, than by Benitez.

Benitez's erratic decision-making has continued into a fourth season with Liverpool, and a stunningly inexplicable 'rotation policy' has again restricted the team to its current 5th-place in the Premiership table.

But should Benitez go? On balance, I don't think so. Whilst he's an odd fellow, he's also clearly got something about him as a manager, and I don't know who could replace him at the moment and be more effective. Nevertheless, I've felt for some time that Liverpool won't win the Premiership under Benitez, and it seems that I will be proven correct even earlier than I imagined...

Has mankind reduced the life-expectancy of the universe?

Hot on the heels of my post concerning the destruction of the universe, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss has suggested that mankind's detection of dark energy in 1998 may reduce the lifetime of our universe!

The idea, once again, is that the false vacuum energy of the scalar field responsible for inflation, (the hypothetical exponential expansion of the very early universe), may not have decayed to zero, and, since the time of inflation, may have been residing in another false vacuum state of much lower, but non-zero energy. It is suggested by Krauss and James Dent that the dark energy detected by cosmologists in the past decade, may simply be this residual false vacuum energy.

A false vacuum state is 'metastable' in the sense that it is a state of temporary stability, but one which is prone to decay, much like the nucleus of a radioactive atom. Krauss and Dent point out that in quantum mechanics, the survival probability of a metastable state will decrease exponentially until a critical cut-off time, at which point the survival probability will only decrease according to a power law. Given that a false vacuum expands exponentially, there will be a net increase in the volume of space in a false vacuum state after this cut-off time. Krauss argues that whilst the metastable residual false vacuum of our universe may have reached this critical cut-off, the act of observing the dark energy may have reset the decay according to the 'quantum zeno effect'. The consequence is that mankind's actions may have significantly increased the probability that the residual false vacuum will decay to the true vacuum, destroying all the structure in our universe.

With an irony that may have been lost on some readers, The Daily Telegraph's Roger Highfield refers to these as "damaging allegations."

There are also at least two reasons why the claims shouldn't be taken seriously. Firstly, as Max Tegmark points out in New Scientist, the quantum zeno effect does not require humans to make observations: "Galaxies have 'observed' the dark energy long before we evolved. When we humans in turn observe the light from these galaxies, it changes nothing except our own knowledge." Secondly, Krauss and Dent's assumption that dark energy can be equated with the energy density of a scalar field is inconsistent with the current observational evidence, which suggests that the dark energy is a cosmological constant. The energy density due to a cosmological constant is a property of space, not a property of any matter field in space. The energy density due to a cosmological constant is literally constant in space and time, unlike that attributable to the scalar fields postulated to explain dark energy.