Blakemoor Farm’s new field corner ponds are doing nicely. The
freshly hatched tadpoles of a couple of weeks ago (see 3rd April) are now plump and assertive. They
are also playing statistical games. In one of the ponds all the tadpoles are squirming
together in a dense black swarm. In the next door pond they litter the
sediment, scattered with a pleasing eye for complete coverage. In a third pond there
are none. Statistics are not what inspires
many people’s interest in natural history,
although I know of mathematicians who have been lured into ecology on the grounds
that it is much more challenging. Statistics have their uses though, especially
to summarise and test observations. The trouble is when nature plays fast and
loose like these tadpoles. In the first pond there are fairly simple quantitative
methods that will tell you that tadpoles have a clumped distribution, whilst in
the second pond that they are more or less evenly scattered about. The trouble
is that the perfectly clear maths makes no sense overall because the tadpoles
are doing different things in different ponds, or not turning up at all in the third
pond. I doubt that the Large Hadron Collider, turned back on again today to
crack even more secrets of fundamental particles, could help unravel the
problem of the mathematically inconsistent tadpoles. Tadpole uncertainty may not have the ring of
quantum uncertainty or the fame of Schrödinger’s cat as a conundrum but they
are a lovely mystery right on our doors step, just over a wall from the dune
road.
No comments:
Post a Comment