SCIENCE IS rather like the contents of a chamber pot - it's necessary, but the contents often don't bear close inspection. The telephone, for instance, seemed a good idea at the time, but because of it we now have that great scourge of modern life, the cell phone.

Every time I get wind of yet another scientific "advancement," I get a quivery feeling in the gall bladder (or maybe it's the spleen), that some dumb fool among the test tube and Bunsen burner set has gone and opened Pandora's box another parlous crack.

I've just been informed by one of the local rags that scientists have unveiled the television of the future, "a set that enables viewers to experience smells, temperatures and sensations as well as sight and sound."

Sounds great, the idea that you can watch "The Sound of Music" to the fragrant whiff of edelweiss and the gentle zephyrs drifting down the Alpine hills and mountains. But what happens if you get too near the lonely goatherd in his seventh week with the flock?

A double bill of "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Ice Station Zebra," with hours of Saharan heat followed by a sudden plunge into Antarctic frigidity, could send you straight to the emergency ward, with no stopping for popcorn and M&Ms.

I seem to recall that they actually tried a form of Smell-o-vision in theaters three or four decades ago, then promptly dumped the whole idea when the odor of on-screen corpses was augmented by spates of in-aisle barfing.

I, for one, wouldn't look forward to an evening of "ER" and the attendant aromas of operating table gore and the obligatory, once-per-episode throw-up all over the nearest doctor or nurse, not to mention exploding sinuses, butt cankers and athlete's foot, or maybe feet.

NFL football would hardly be enhanced by the aromatic exudations of jock straps, cleats and 22 rampant sets of sweat glands, nor would watching baseball be made a more joyful occasion by the aroma of tobacco-laden spit, surely a death to the delights of fried onions, hotdogs and Crackerjacks.

It's called "reality TV." There are times when reality's purpose would be better served by vivid imagination, which at least spares the more sensitive and delicate among us during the bean-farting scenes in "Blazing Saddles." Besides which, all that methane would render the local movie house a potential Krakatoa.

I have yet to forgive Alexander Graham Bell, who did for personal privacy what bubonic plague did for multi-generational families in the days of yore. The telephone ranks as the most insidious, invidious development since the Devil gave us golf. With all that and haggis, too, Scotland has a lot to answer for.

Britain's railroad system is having problems these days, largely because its trains have a tendency to come off the tracks. I attribute this to the hand of the Almighty, who is giving them a little shove because the instant a train is derailed, all the cell phones go quiet and He can get some peace.

Mobile phones, of course, are linear descendants of Bell's original "Mr. Watson, come here, I need you" thingie. With their "ringer" melodies ranging from the Lone Ranger's theme to "Dixie" to the "Toreador Song" from Carmen, they have become the bane of civilized life.

(In fact, the only good that has ever come from a mobile phone was in Chechnya a few years ago. The forces of good managed to turn a particularly nasty warlord into worm food by tuning in on his cellphone frequency and sending a missile down the waves and into his left ear when he phoned his missus to say he would be home late from the raping and pillaging.)

Wherever you go these days - on a train journey or to a restaurant or opera or the crapper or behind the shed for a bit of hanky-panky with Mary Lou from down the street - there is no escaping the mobile phone and its irksome rings, buzzes, tinny ditties and tin-brained users.

But what science gives, science can also take away, or at least make so miserable that it wishes it had never been born. Inventors have come up with a battery-powered gimmick about the size of a cigarette packet that acts as a sort of neutron bomb to cell phones.

What it does is to knock out mobile phone signals within a range of more than 200 yards, which pretty well covers your average restaurant, rail car, theater or public crapper. It's illegal, of course, but in the case of cell phones, it's a case of needs must.

These little jammers are proving quiet popular in Britain. "They're handy little things," says one online retailer who sells them at the rate of about 60 a day. "Women I know carry them in their handbags, and a lot of restaurants in London use them to stop diners being disturbed."

"Rail commuters are also big fans," says the retailer - who, with one eye out for the coppers and the other on his busy cash register, wishes to remain anonymous. "If you get on the morning train from Oxford to London, all you hear is mobiles going off all the time."

But the instant just one fed-up commuter flicks on his jammer, he says, "the carriage goes quiet." And since rail passengers in Britain go to great lengths to avoid talking to each other, what ensues are miles and miles of blissful peace and silence.

So cell phone users, beware - annoy us today, and it'll be jam tomorrow.

Now if someone would invent a gadget to instantly jerk to Jesus people who leave chewing gum on train seats...

Thought for the Week: The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up.

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