One thing that I forgot to mention in my post about examinations a few days ago is that students at Irish schools all sit exactly the same examination papers at the same time. This is very different from the UK where there are several different Exam Boards that have different syllabuses and set different papers. One consequence of the Irish system is immediately an exam is over, there is a national discussion of the students’ and teachers’ reaction to it. The examination papers are posted online after the examination too – you can find them here – so that everyone can join in the discussion.
I have to admit that when I was a student I was never one for talking about examinations after I had taken them. While most of my peers stood around outside the Exam Hall conducting a post mortem on the paper, I usually just went home. I always figured that there was nothing I could do about the results then so it was best to put it behind me and focus on the next thing. That’s what I’ve recommended to students throughout my career too: don’t look back, look forward.
Anyway, the first Leaving Certificate examination this year (on Wednesday) was English Paper 1, followed by Paper 2 on Thursday. Both seem to have been received relatively favourably by students; see some discussion here and here. Paper 1 is really an English Language Examination, with exercises on comprehension and composition while Paper 2 focuses on literature. Every year summer I look at the set books and poems for the English Leaving Certificate Paper 2 and they’re usually an interesting mix. This year the novels included Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The list of poets for the Higher examination was Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Patrick Kavanagh, Derek Mahon, Paula Meehan, Adrienne Rich, and W.B. Yeats. Not all the texts come up in the examination. In the case of the poets, for example, Mahon, Kavanagh, Meehan, Donne and Rich appeared on Paper 2 but there was no Dickinson, Donne or Bishop.
While I have a personal interest in English literature, the English examinations are not relevant to me in a professional capacity. On the other hand, the Leaving Certificate papers in Mathematics are of direct relevance to me as a Professor in the Department of Theoretical Physics because they indicate the level of mathematical preparation of students likely to come in next academic year.
General reaction to Higher Mathematics Paper 1 seems to have been much more mixed than for the English papers, with many students taking to social media to express shock that it was so difficult: the hashtag #MathsPaper1 is still trending on Irish Twitter; you can also find some reaction here.
I have looked at the paper but can’t really comment on the level of difficulty because I haven’s studied previous years examinations in detail but I will say that (a) there’s quite a lot to do in the 150 minutes allowed and (b) there’s nowhere near as much calculus as in my A-level Mathematics over 40 years ago (though remember that Irish students do more subjects in the LC than UK students who do A-levels). Note also that because of the pandemic, this would have been the first state examination taken in Mathematics by many students.
The Leaving Certificate Higher Mathematics examination is split into two sections of equal weight. Section A (‘Concepts and Skills’) requires students to answer 5 questions from 6 (each split into parts); Section B (‘Contexts and Applications’) gives a choice of 3 out of 4 longer questions. That’s less choice than I expected; students have to answer 8 out of 10 questions. The Ordinary Level Examination has the same structure, but the questions are much more straightforward.
Mathematics Paper 2 is on Monday, so I’ll update this post then.
With the launch of the Euclid spacecraft due next month, and the last Euclid Consortium meeting before the launch coming up in just over a week, I thought I’d share another one of the nice little taster videos prepared by the European Space Agency:
The Euclid Mission has long been “sold” as a mission to probe the nature of Dark Energy in much the same way that the Large Hardon Collider was often portrayed as an experiment designed to find the Higgs boson. But as this video makes clear, testing theories of dark energy is just one of the tasks Euclid will undertake, and it may well be the case that in years to come the mission is remembered for something other than dark energy. On the other hand, big science like this needs big money, and making the specific case for a single big ticket item is an easier way to persuade funding agencies to cough up the dosh than for a general “let’s do a lot of things we’re sure we’ll fin something” approach. These thoughts triggered a memory of an old post of mine about Alfred Hitchcock so, with apologies for repeating something I have blogged about before, here’s an updated version.
Unpick the plot of any thriller or suspense movie and the chances are that somewhere within it you will find lurking at least one MacGuffin. This might be a tangible thing, such the eponymous sculpture of a Falcon in the archetypal noir classic The Maltese Falcon or it may be rather nebulous, like the “top secret plans” in Hitchcock’s The Thirty Nine Steps. Its true character may be never fully revealed, such as in the case of the glowing contents of the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, which is a classic example of the “undisclosed object” type of MacGuffin, or it may be scarily obvious, like a doomsday machine or some other “Big Dumb Object” you might find in a science fiction thriller. It may even not be a real thing at all. It could be an event or an idea or even something that doesn’t exist in any real sense at all, such the fictitious decoy character George Kaplan in North by Northwest. In fact North by North West is an example of a movie with more than one MacGuffin. Its convoluted plot involves espionage and the smuggling of what is only cursorily described as “government secrets”. These are the main MacGuffin; George Kaplan is a sort of sub-MacGuffin. But although this is behind the whole story, it is the emerging romance, accidental betrayal and frantic rescue involving the lead characters played by Cary Grant and Eve Marie Saint that really engages the characters and the audience as the film gathers pace. The MacGuffin is a trigger, but it soon fades into the background as other factors take over.
Whatever it is real or is not, the MacGuffin is the thing responsible for kick-starting the plot. It makes the characters embark upon the course of action they take as the tale begins to unfold. This plot device was particularly beloved by Alfred Hitchcock (who was responsible for introducing the word to the film industry). Hitchcock was however always at pains to ensure that the MacGuffin never played as an important a role in the mind of the audience as it did for the protagonists. As the plot twists and turns – as it usually does in such films – and its own momentum carries the story forward, the importance of the MacGuffin tends to fade, and by the end we have usually often forgotten all about it. Hitchcock’s movies rarely bother to explain their MacGuffin(s) in much detail and they often confuse the issue even further by mixing genuine MacGuffins with mere red herrings.
Here is the man himself explaining the concept at the beginning of this clip. (The rest of the interview is also enjoyable, convering such diverse topics as laxatives, ravens and nudity..)
There’s nothing particular new about the idea of a MacGuffin. I suppose the ultimate example is the Holy Grail in the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and, much more recently, the Da Vinci Code. The original Grail itself is basically a peg on which to hang a series of otherwise disconnected stories. It is barely mentioned once each individual story has started and, of course, is never found.
Physicists are fond of describing things as “The Holy Grail” of their subject, such as the Higgs Boson or gravitational waves. This always seemed to me to be an unfortunate description, as the Grail quest consumed a huge amount of resources in a predictably fruitless hunt for something whose significance could be seen to be dubious at the outset. The MacGuffin Effect nevertheless continues to reveal itself in science, although in different forms to those found in Hollywood.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), switched on to the accompaniment of great fanfares a few years ago, provides a nice example of how the MacGuffin actually works pretty much backwards in the world of Big Science. To the public, the LHC was built to detect the Higgs Boson, a hypothetical beastie introduced to account for the masses of other particles. If it exists the high-energy collisions engineered by LHC should (and did) reveal its presence. The Higgs Boson is thus the LHC’s own MacGuffin. Or at least it would be if it were really the reason why LHC has been built. In fact there are dozens of experiments at CERN and many of them have very different motivations from the quest for the Higgs, such as evidence for supersymmetry.
Particle physicists are not daft, however, and they realized that the public and, perhaps more importantly, government funding agencies need to have a really big hook to hang such a big bag of money on. Hence the emergence of the Higgs as a sort of master MacGuffin, concocted specifically for public consumption, which is much more effective politically than the plethora of mini-MacGuffins which, to be honest, would be a fairer description of the real state of affairs.
While particle physicists might pretend to be doing cosmology, we astrophysicists have to contend with MacGuffins of our own. One of the most important discoveries we have made about the Universe in the last decade is that its expansion seems to be accelerating. Since gravity usually tugs on things and makes them slow down, the only explanation that we’ve thought of for this perverse situation is that there is something out there in empty space that pushes rather than pulls. This has various possible names, but Dark Energy is probably the most popular, adding an appropriately noirish edge to this particular MacGuffin. It has even taken over in prominence from its much older relative, Dark Matter, although that one is still very much around.
We have very little idea what Dark Energy is, where it comes from, or how it relates to other forms of energy with which we are more familiar, so observational astronomers have jumped in with various grandiose strategies to find out more about it. This has spawned a booming industry in surveys of the distant Universe, all aimed ostensibly at unravelling the mystery of the Dark Energy. It seems that to get any funding at all for cosmology these days you have to sprinkle the phrase “Dark Energy” liberally throughout your grant applications.
The old-fashioned “observational” way of doing astronomy – by looking at things hard enough and long enough until something exciting appears (which it does with surprising regularity) – has been replaced by a more “experimental” approach, more like that of the LHC. We can no longer do deep surveys of galaxies to find out what’s out there. We have to do it “to constrain models of Dark Energy”. This is just one example of the (not entirely positive) influence that particle physics has had on astronomy in recent times.
Whatever the motivation for doing these projects now, they will undoubtedly lead to many new discoveries, so I’m not for one minute arguing that the case for, e.g, the Euclid mission is misguided. I’m just saying that in my opinion there will never be a real solution of the Dark Energy problem until it is understood much better at a conceptual level, and that will probably mean major revisions of our theories of both gravity and matter. I venture to speculate that in twenty years or so people will look back on the obsession with Dark Energy with some amusement, as our theoretical language will have moved on sufficiently to make it seem irrelevant. That’s how it goes with MacGuffins. In the end, even the Maltese Falcon turned out to be a fake, but what an adventure it was along the way!
I didn’t know until today that there is a meeting going on this week at the University of St Andrews with the title 40 Years of MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics). Here’s a description of the conference.
The source of the gravitational field in objects ranging from individual galaxies to the largest scales in the universe is one of the biggest unanswered questions of modern physics. It is generally assumed that the gravitational field in extragalactic systems is dominated by dark matter particles occupying a dark sector that represents new physics beyond the stubbornly successful Standard Model of particle physics. So far, candidates for these particles have evaded detection in remarkably sensitive laboratory experiments: the evidence for missing mass remains entirely astrophysical in nature.
Forty years ago, Weizmann-Institute professor Mordehai Milgrom published a series of three articles in The Astrophysical Journal in which he proposed that the dark matter phenomenon is not due to unknown particles, but to a departure from the known laws of dynamics when the acceleration is about eleven orders of magnitude smaller than that on Earth’s surface (Milgrom 1983). Only one year later, in 1984, Jacob Bekenstein and Mordehai Milgrom developed this Modified Newtonian Dynamics (or Milgromian Dynamics, MOND) into a non-relativistic Lagrangian theory (Bekenstein & Milgrom 1984). During the ensuing decades, MOND has developed into a multifaceted paradigm that includes several non-relativistic and relativistic theory proposals, as well as possible connections with quantum gravity theories. Most remarkably, MOND has successfully made many striking and unique a priori predictions.
This conference will commemorate the last 40 years of this modern gravitational paradigm, of its predictive successes as well as its outstanding challenges, and will look to the road ahead.
It looks like an interesting meeting but what caught my eye in particular about it was this pic I found on Twitter today taken at the start of one of the talks:
Just a very quick note to advertise a new book by former colleague (now Emeritus) Professor Brian P. Dolan, who retired a couple of years ago, but is still active in research.This textbook (left) is based on the lecture notes he used to teach a final-year undergraduate course in General Relativity to Mathematical Physics students here in Maynooth.
The book’s description reads:
Einstein’s general theory of relativity can be a notoriously difficult subject for students approaching it for the first time, with arcane mathematical concepts such as connection coefficients and tensors adorned with a forest of indices. This book is an elementary introduction to Einstein’s theory and the physics of curved space-times that avoids these complications as much as possible. Its first half describes the physics of black holes, gravitational waves and the expanding Universe, without using tensors. Only in the second half are Einstein’s field equations derived and used to explain the dynamical evolution of the early Universe and the creation of the first elements. Each chapter concludes with problem sets and technical mathematical details are given in the appendices. This short text is intended for undergraduate physics students who have taken courses in special relativity and advanced mechanics.
You can order the book and/or recommend a copy to your library here.
I just read the sad news of the death, on Monday 5th June at the age of 83, of legendary Brazilian Bossa Nova and Samba singer Astrud Gilberto.
There was a time in the 1960s when the Bossa Nova seemed to be everywhere, and the reason for that was a collaboration between singer, guitarist and composer João Gilberto and tenor saxophonist Stan Getz that resulted in the award-winning album Getz/Gilberto that made the Bossa Nova go global, penetrating not only the world of jazz but the much wider cultural sphere including pop and film music. It also made a star of João Gilberto’s then wife, Astrud, who had never recorded before but sang on some of the tracks, the most famous example being The Girl From Ipanema. The popularity of this track resulted in a shorter version being released as a single which was a smash hit around the globe in 1964. Whether or not it’s true, the story goes that she was not under contract at the time the recording was made so never received any royalties for it, although the single made millions. It is said that it was Stan Getz – a wonderful musician but a notoriously horrible man – was responsible for swindling her.
Although an inexperienced singer at the time of this famous session, Astrud Gilberto had a direct, uncomplicated style and an aura of cool detachment that proved very appealing to audiences around the world, earning her a Grammy Award and turning her into a star almost overnight. Her relationship with her husband did not survive this transformation, however, and they divorced a few years later.
There was a lot more to Astrud Gilberto than that hit record, however. She started writing her own songs and her singing style matured. As a matter of fact I was lucky enough to see her perform live in London in the mid-1990s – at the Jazz Cafe in Camden, if I remember correctly – and she sang a very interesting mixture of music. I liked that later style more than the Getz/Gilberto recordings actually.
Anyway, here is a video of Astrud Gilberto singing The Girl From Ipanema in 1964 in what looks like it must be a clip from the film Get Yourself A College Girl – though I stand to be corrected if wrong! – and the music is exactly the same as the hit single so the band and the singer were obviously miming…
No sooner is yesterday’s departmental Examination Board done and dusted (after just two and a half hours) when attention switches to school examinations. The Junior Certificate and Leaving Certificate examinations both start today, so the first thing I need to do is wish everyone taking examinations the very best of luck!
Among other things, the results of the leaving certificate examinations are important for next year’s University admissions. As we gradually dispense with the restrictions imposed during the pandemic, it seems this year we just might have the results before the start of teaching at the end of September. That will make a nice change!
In the system operating in England and Wales the standard qualification for entry is the GCE A-level. Most students take A-levels in three subjects, which gives them a relatively narrow focus although the range of subjects to choose from is rather large. In Ireland the standard qualification is the Leaving Certificate, which comprises a minimum of six subjects, giving students a broader range of knowledge at the sacrifice (perhaps) of a certain amount of depth; it has been decreed for entry into this system that an Irish Leaving Certificate subject counts as about 2/3 of an A-level subject for admissions purposes, so Irish students do the equivalent of at least four A-levels, and many do more than this. It’s also worth noting that all students have to take Mathematics at Leaving Certificate level.
Overall I prefer the Leaving Certificate over the UK system of A-levels, as the former gives the students a broader range of subjects than the latter (as does the International Baccalaureate). I would have liked to have been allowed to take at least one arts subject past O-level, for example.
For University admissions points are awarded for each paper according to the marks obtained and then aggregated into a total CAO points, CAO being the Central Applications Office, the equivalent of the UK’s UCAS. This means, for example, that our main Science pathway at Maynooth allows students to study Physics without having done it at Leaving Certificate level. This obviously means that the first year has to be taught at a fairly elementary level, but it has the enormous benefit of allowing us to recruit students whose schools do not offer Physics.
As much as I like the Leaving Certificate, I have concerns about using a simple CAO points count for determining entry into third-level courses. My main concern about is with Mathematics. Since the pandemic struck, students have been able to choose to questions from just six out of ten sections. That means that students can get very high grades despite knowing nothing about 40% of the syllabus. That matters most for subjects that require students to have certain skills and knowledge for entry into University, such as Physics.
I’ve been teaching the first year Mathematical Physics course in Maynooth for about 5 years. At the start of the module I put up a questionnaire asking the students about various mathematical concepts and asking them how comfortable they feel with them. It’s been noticeable how the fraction that are comfortable with basic differentiation and integration has been falling. That’s not a reflection on the ability of the students, just on the way they have been taught. As well as making adjustments during the pandemic for online teaching, etc, I have changed various things about the teaching, in particular adjusting the way I have introduced calculus into the module. Another problem is that we have been forced to start teaching first-years a week late because of delays to the CAO process caused by the pandemic.
I’ll be on sabbatical next academic year so I won’t be teaching the first-years (or anyone else) in September. It’s time to hand these challenges on to someone else!
I’ve mentioned on here before that I had an English teacher at school who used to set interesting creative writing challenges, in which we would be given two apparently disconnected topics and asked to write something that connected them together. The inspiration was ‘Only Connect’, the epigraph of E.M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End. Since I’ve spent all afternoon in an Exam Board meeting I thought I’d do a little bit of connecting now.
Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.
Tout suffocant Et blême, quand Sonne l’heure, Je me souviens Des jours anciens Et je pleure;
Et je m’en vais Au vent mauvais Qui m’emporte Deçà, delà, Pareil à la Feuille morte.
I posted the above poem by Paul Verlaine for two reasons. One is that lines from the poem were broadcast on the eve of the Normandy Landings. The landings themselves began in the morning of June 6th 1944 and the excerpt – the last three lines of the first verse – formed a coded message broadcast to the French resistance by Radio Londres, 5th June 1944 at 23.15 GMT, informing them that the Allied invasion of France was imminent and that sabotage operations should commence.
The other reason is that that it was just two weeks ago that I attended a concert featuring settings by Benjamin Britten of prose poems taken from Les Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud. I didn’t know until that Verlaine and Rimbaud were lovers and that they lived for some time together in London. Their relationship was on the tempestuous side – at one point Verlaine fired a gun at Rimbaud, wounding him in the hand. Here’s a detail from a painting showing the two of them (Verlaine on the left, Rimbaud on the right).
It was said of Rimbaud that, as well as writing remarkable poetry, he was cute-looking, had a very dirty sense of humour, drank a bit too much, and liked lots and lots of rough sex. I think I would have liked him (although perhaps not enough to risk being shot by his jealous older boyfriend).
Anyway, this provides me with an excuse not only to commemorate D-Day but also Pride Month!
Today has been (and indeed continues to be) the June Bank Holiday (Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh) in Ireland. It is the equivalent of the usual May Bank Holiday in the UK in that both have their origin in the old festival of Whitsuntide (or Pentecost) which falls on the 7th Sunday after Easter. Because the date of Easter moves around in the calendar so does Whit Sunday, but it is usually in late May or early June. Here in Ireland the Bank Holiday is always on the first Monday in June whereas on the other side of the Irish Sea it is on the last Monday in May.
Anyway, in a break with tradition, we have had and still are having lovely weather over the holiday long weekend. It’s not exactlly a heatwave, but as I write the temperature is a pleasant 20° C. It being warm last night, I thought it would be nice to light a big candle and sit out in the garden for a bit with a glass of wine, but I was beset by moths and had to come back inside. My concern is that the garden is bone dry, especially considering it is early June. The lawn is looking parched. Some of the plants in my garden are also struggling a bit because of the lack of rain but some others seem to be thriving so much they’re crowding out the ones that prefer the more normal damper conditions.
Alumroot, Silver Ragwort, Alpine Rose, and Oxeye DaisiesBush Vetch (and more Alpine Roses)Scarlet Firethorn
The Scarlet Firethorn – so called because it produces bright red berries – is growing like wildfire as well as flowering profusely. The flowers are nice, but I think past their peak so when they’re done I’ll take some remedial action. The other plants are basically wild flowers, which I like having in the garden as they tend to be rather robust. The long green leaves in the first two pictures are Montbretia, which produced bright red flowers later in the summer, and which is grown from bulbs.
My rear garden is enclosed by high walls but gets the sun in the morning, so I’ve been having breakfast and lunch out there for the last several days.
Anyway, it’s back to work tomorrow for our Departmental Examination Board so I’ll take it easy for the rest of the day off. After all, I’m an old man now…
So here I am, now officially ancient, although I’ll have to wait another 6 years until I qualify for a free bus pass.
I’ve always assumed I’ll feel a bit depressed when I reached 60 years old, but as it turns out it doesn’t bother me at all. I feel more grateful that I made it this far! I suppose it helps that I’m in pretty good health, we’re having lovely weather, most of the stress of the academic year is over, it’s a Bank Holiday weekend, and I have a sabbatical to look forward to.
Anyway, I’m not going to spend my birthday sitting at the computer – it’s far too nice outside – so I’ll leave it there, except to say thank you to everyone who sent birthday greetings and to ask you all if you haven’t done so already please to consider giving to my birthday fundraiser.
My birthday is coming up and for my birthday this year I’m asking for donations to Pieta, which is a charity working to prevent suicide and self-harm. I’ve chosen this cause because their mission means a lot to me. I hope you’ll consider contributing; every little bit will help.
You can donate here by my Facebook Fundraiser. Facebook takes care of the donation processing with no fees. If you decide to give, you can choose who can see that you donated, or donate privately. The Fundraiser will stay open for a couple of weeks or so.
If you prefer you can also donate directly to Pieta here and you can do that at any time.
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In the Dark 