John Gribbin (2022) Impossible, Possible and Improbable. Science Stranger Than Fiction.

John Gribbin writes about physics. In modern parlance, he popularises science. As a starting point, he quotes Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes:

‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’.

He offers some parameters:

Our Universe about 13.8 billion years old (Milky Way galaxy a little younger).

Solar System and Earth 4.5 billion years old

Formation of single-cell, eukaryotic, life on Earth around 3.8 billion years ago.   

2 billion years ago, more complex multicellular life (with nucleus and mitochondria).

13 million years ago, no ice sheets. Antarctica locked and merged with the South Pole.

Continent drift. 6 million years ago, Australia and South America break away from Antarctica.  

Homo habilis, out of Africa, around 2.5 million years ago. Posited less than a 1000 survivors.

Homo sapiens 500 000 years ago.

We are a fraction of a fraction of creation.  

‘Quantum physics is strange.’ Quanta can be both a wave and particle. It can be alive or dead, and be two places at once. You’re probably thinking it’s a Catholic saint, but the answer is there is no answer. Only interpretations based on probability and ‘as if’.

1) The world does not exist unless you look at it.

2) Particles are pushed around by waves, but the particles have no influence on the waves.

3) Everything that could possibly happen does, in an array of parallel realties.

4) Everything that could happen already has happened and we only notice part of it.

5) The future influences (bends) the past.

Are we alone in the universe?

Probably. There are other Solar Systems. And a plethora of Earth-like planets, but for intelligent life to emerge and thrive, our blue planet must suffer the right number of catastrophes and improbabilities. Everything is connected.  

Thomas Henry Huxley: ‘The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact’.

We are people of the Ice Age. But as we evolved and burn fossil fuels we changed the climate. What matters isn’t how cold the winters are, but hot our summers. James Lovelock predicts a sudden shift as we become locked into global warming. No ice in Antarctica, again. I’m hypothesising. I couldn’t pass muster in what used to be called O’grade physics. I wouldn’t be allowed a university education because of my lack of maths. Gribbin is a genius, but compared to the most basic software, he’s slow and nothing in relation to digital intelligence. We’ve always lived in the Impossible, Possible and Improbable worlds. We just need to smell the digital roses. Worth a look or the world doesn’t exist. And if we live in multiple worlds we need multiple Christ figures, self-multiplying Buddhas, as well as your more mundane devils and Judas figures. We are not alone in this. Read on.  

The Murder of Jill Dando, BBC 1 and BBC iPlayer, directed by Marcus Plowright

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0003w40/the-murder-of-jill-dando

There seems to be a plethora of anniversaries and murder reconstructions on all of the main channels. We’ve had the Bulger, The Yorkshire Ripper and Jack the Ripper recently and before that Fred and Rose West. The list goes on. Partly, I’d guess to the world-wide success of The Making of a Murderer.  BBC couldn’t let the twentieth anniversary, 26^th April 1999, of one of its own, the presenter of the Holiday programme, Crimewatch UK and The Six O’Clock News, without a commemorative mock-up of the main actors, talking heads and what we know about the killer. The Queen commented on Jill’s death as did the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

The police were under enormous pressure to bring the killer to justice. Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Hamish Campbell, who led the investigation, features in the programme. He tells us how he came to identify Barry George as a suspect, how he came to be convicted of Jill Dando’s murder in June 2001 and released on appeal seven years later after the UK High Court ordered a retrial and the Court of Appeal found the forensic evidence in the case ‘inconclusive’.

The presenter Nick Ross, who appeared alongside Jill Dando in Crimewatch, said, he’d also have acquitted Barry George.

Yet, we have DCI Campbell, giving the impression he got the right man. The evidence was circumstantial. After five months, the police were getting nowhere and had spent over two million pounds on the investigation. A tip had come from Hafad Taxi Company that someone, later identified as Barry George, had been acting strangely on the day Dando was killed. Six months later he was still acting strangely. A warrant and search of his house found that he’d filmed women, kept a log of car numbers and had press cuttings of Jill Dando. He also has a three-quarter length coat.

I must admit to also having a three-quarter length coat. My partner Mary hates it and wants to give it to the Salvation Army of some other charitable institute. But I’m quite oddly attached to it.  I was never a suspect in Dando’s killing.

Let’s get to the forensics on which the case was won and lost. Locard’s principle, sounds very much like Sherlock Holmes’, ‘every contact leaves a trace’.  A single particle of gunshot residue was found in the three-quarter length coat Barry George admitted to wearing. To describe it as gunshot residue is to place Barry George in the coat and have him pull the trigger and shoot Jill Dando on the doorstep. Such is the power of forensic evidence to captive a jury and convict Barry George.

Remember the newspaper headlines ‘Auntie Annie’s bomb-making factory’ associating trace elements of nitroglycerine with the Maguire Seven. Trace elements that were found in handling an ordinary pack of playing cards.

A single particle of gunshot residue would have to be magnified around 2000 times before it was the size of a pea. How else could it have got into Barry George’s pocket? Someone handling guns, perhaps a policeman, could have brushed against him on public transport.

The Crown won and lost its case on a single particle of evidence. Barry George in Scottish law would be found Not Proven. The hunt for Jill Dando’s killer goes on – only it doesn’t. The police have no new leads.  Case closed.