Letters archive

The article "A daily dose of creativity" by Daisy Fancourt has a very appropriate subtitle including the phrase "benefits of creative expression". The article goes on to conflate creativity with art, at which I demur. As someone who has no artistic abilities at all (well, pretty much), in my youth, I wrote computer programs. These …

The question of whether we live in a simulation is of intellectual interest, but is ultimately irrelevant. Whether we live in the "real" universe or a simulation, we exist solely on account of its laws, and so we cannot ever leave. Communicating with any programmer, however (I imagine an acne-prone teenager with a universe simulator), …

One of the most common forms of simulation is a video game. The entities within that are bit patterns. What happens to the bit patterns has been programmed and all that can happen is only that which has been programmed. If we are in a simulation, remember that not only are we in it, but …

Your article made me wonder who would be running our simulation. If the advanced civilisation discovered how to do simulations when it was 1,000,000 years ahead of us, it is just as likely they've had this technology for 50 years or more, and the know-how and ability to create a simulation has spread widely throughout …

Wai Wong writes that painting roofs white is trivial in effect when it comes to reflecting the sun's energy back into space. While it is trivial, it is not nothing and is easy to accomplish. Winning strategies in sports are about accumulating small margins and improvements ( Letters, 27 December 2025 ). It is true …

Hans Jenks is certainly correct in identifying how remarkably successful we are as a species relative to chimpanzees, who are still "slinging poop at each other". But Hans does not appear to recognise that 35,000 years ago, early modern humans – genetically indistinguishable from us today – had produced little of note after tens of …

Guy Cox isn't comparing apples with apples when it comes to the fuel efficiency of his diesel SUV. Diesel engines are inherently more thermodynamically efficient than petrol engines because the compression ratio is much higher, plus his old, original Minis would have used inefficient carburettors rather than modern fuel injection. Thus it's hardly surprising that …

The proper resolution of the conceptual puzzle raised by Loschmidt's demon is instructive. Imagine a glass sphere floating in space shattered by a bullet. To an observer seeing the fragments flying apart, it would be evident that they had come from the same locality at more or less the same time, but it would take …

In your leader article, you write that from "vaccine sceptics at the heart of the US government to the continued global paralysis when it comes to climate action, science has been under siege in 2025", and that those "who believe in rationality and evidence must continue to fight back against the encroaching darkness" ( 13/20 …