Today, 1st May, Beltane (Bealtaine in Irish), is an old Celtic festival that marks the mid-point between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. It’s one of the so-called Cross-Quarter Days that lie exactly halfway between the equinoxes and solstices. These ancient festivals have been moved so that they take place earlier in the modern calendar than the astronomical events that represent their origin: the halfway point between the Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice is actually next week. Anyway, “May Day”, Lá Bealtaine in Irish, is today – the name Bealtaine applies to the whole month of May.
In Ireland the Bank Holiday associated with Bealtaine is on Monday 4th May, so another long weekend beckons.
Workwise, after today we will have completed the penultimate teaching week of Semester 2 so after Monday’s Bank Holiday we will have just four official days of teaching left, before a Study Week and the start of examinations. Yesterday I correctedthe last of my Computational Physics class tests so I am up to date with the continuous assessment and feedback of both my modules. I now have a week before the Computational Physics projects are submitted, and another week before the exam period starts.On Wednesday last we had project presentations for about half of the final year class; the other half do their things next Wednesday.
Now, I have a particle physics lecture to give – the antepenultimate one of the semester – after which I’ll be launching myself into the long weekend.
I laughed out loud when I saw an item in the Times Higher about new Masters courses at the London School of Innovation (which I had never heard of before) that will be taught and assessed by AI. I see that for the new courses – apparently in subjects such as machine learning, digital innovation, entrepreneurship and business transformation
Content will be delivered through an online learning system that the university built from scratch. Students can choose to have content delivered in a written format or presented to them by an AI avatar.
Moreover,
…assignments will be assessed and given feedback by AI…
and
At the end of each module, students will engage in a “Socratic dialogue” with their AI tutor about the content to answer questions and reflect on their learning.
Whether the AI bot will end up corrupting young people and being compelled to drink hemlock is not specified…
I laughed when I read all this because it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that if you have a qualification that can be delivered and assessed by chatbots then the job that you think it will qualify you for can also be done by chatbots…
Still, the London School of Innovation has been granted degree-awarding powers by the “Regulator” so it must be kosher.
Yesterday the Open Journal of Astrophysics published a paper by Porredon et al which will feature in the usual Saturday round-up. That paper, which is based on the First Data Release from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) reminded me that I should mention that DESI recently reached an amazing milestone – it has now mapped the positions and redshifts of 47 million galaxies and quasars! There is a full press-release about this achievement here.
Here’s a little video showing how the survey works:
Here’s a nice picture showing a thin slice through the full survey that reveals the characteristic “cosmic web” of the large-scale structure of the Universe in all its glory:
This progress is great, but it really makes me feel old. Forty years ago, in 1986, I had just started my PhD. The state-of-the-art galaxy redshift survey slice then is shown in this plot, from de Lapparent et al 1986 (ApJLett 302, L1), one of the first papers I read as a research student (I got it in 1985 as a preprint), which contains just 1,100 galaxies:
It is worth mentioning that although DESI has now covered its original target area, it will continue until 2028. You can never have too many galaxy redshifts!
I’ve had these pictures for quite a while and can’t remember where I got them from, but I used to show them in my lectures on Theoretical Particle Physics when I was in Nottingham to illustrate CP-violation and used them in this morning’s lecture at Maynooth.
The following picture by M.C. Escher is called Day and Night:
If you look at it you can see two kinds of symmetry emerging. One is a kind of reflection symmetry about a vertical axis drawn through the centre of the picture that applies to shapes but not to colour. The other is between black and white. But it is obvious that the picture doesn’t display these symmetries separately: to get a picture unchanged from the original you would have to do the mirror reflection and change black to white (and vice-versa).
The mirror reflection in the image can be taken to represent parity (P). Strictly speaking parity refers to a reflection through the origin in 3D rather than a mirror reflection, but it’s just for illustration. We know that a parity symmetry is violated in weak interactions just as it is in the picture.
The other possible symmetry, between black and white can be taken to represent charge-conjugation (C), the operation that converts particles into anti-particles and vice-versa.
While P is not an exact symmetry of weak interactions, it was long thought that the combination of C and P (CP) would be. Actually it isn’t. The story of the discovery of CP-violation is fascinating but I don’t have time to go into it here. It suffices to say that the Escher print also displays CP violation.
First lets do `C’, i.e. convert black to white and vice-versa. The result is:
Now reflect about the vertical mid-line to illustrate `P’:
If `CP’ were an exact symmetry then that image would be identical to the original, which I reproduce here:
You can see, however, that while some elements of the picture do look the same after this combined operation (e.g. the birds), others (e.g. the buildings at the bottom) do not. Although CP is not an exact symmetry of this picture, it is almost (just like it is in particle physics).
There are just two weeks of teaching left in the Spring Semester at Maynooth University. Actually slightly less than that because next Monday (May 4th) is another bank holiday. That day doesn’t make any difference to my own teaching, however, as I have no teaching sessions on Mondays anyway.
As I mentioned last week, the formal teaching part of one of my modules (Computational Physics) is already over and the students are now – or should be – busy doing mini-projects.
My other module, Particle Physics, has four remaining lectures. That means that I’m on schedule, despite missing one lecture on Good Friday. The very last lecture for this module is on the last day of term, May 8th, so I don’t know how many students will be there. Come to think of it, because this is a final-year module, it may actually be the last lecture of all at Maynooth for some students…
The end of teaching does not mean the end of the term, however. We have a short “break” and then, on May 15th, the examinations start. In the break I’ll have to mark a stack of Computational Physics projects. That’s always quite hard work as I have to run the codes and check the results as well as read and grade the written reports.
This week and next we also have the final presentations for project students. That will take up two whole full afternoons (this Wednesday and next Wednesday). There’s usually a bit of a do after these to give the students a send-off, as these are projects done by the graduating class. I have been supervising two students this year, plus an MSc student (though the latter will not finish until August).
People sometimes ask me why we have such heavy teaching loads at Maynooth University. Four modules a year – other staff do five (as I did a few years ago when was also Head of Department) – plus projects is far more than one would expect of a “research-led” University outside Ireland. Part of the reason is what I mentioned yesterday – that the University (along with most others) spends far too much of its income on Management salaries and projects that have nothing to do with research or teaching. Other than that I can’t comment. According to this document, Maynooth University has committed to
Introduce a University Workload Allocation Model (WAM) enhancing transparent processes and procedures in the allocation of work.
If there is such a model, it is news to me…
P.S. There’s an even older document here (dated 2014) that says:
The University is committed to ensuring that the allocation of work is reasonable and fair across and within academic units. It is also required to exercise oversight of the implementation of academic workload management. In support of this, the Head of Department / School / Institute will monitor and record workload allocations and will provide to the university, via the Faculty Dean, an annual report on the procedure and model used to allocate workloads, and also an anonymised summary of the average and range of workload distributions between teaching, research and service among all academic staff in the Department/School/Institute.
The design and implementation of workload allocation models will be undertaken by Departments/Schools/Institutes in accordance with the general principles outlined above.
The UK University sector is currently struggling very badly. The latest piece of news I have seen is from the University of Nottingham, where it seems the Management is planning to cut over 600 jobs. New appointments are being frozen and a voluntary severance scheme launched, but it may well come to compulsory redundancies given the scale of the proposal. I feel sorry for anyone there caught up in this because the mood must be very gloomy right now. None of this is the fault of the academics or support staff on whose positions the axe will fall.
The financial predicament of the University of Nottingham is largely the result of a reckless management decision to acquire a new campus called the Castle Meadow complex.
I worked in Nottingham from 1999 to 2007. At that time the Castle Meadow campus (left) was owned by HM Revenue & Customs. It’s next to the canal and not far from the Railway Station, but not very close to the main campus. I remember passing it many times on the train going in and out of Nottingham.
The University of Nottingham bought the campus from HMRC in 2021 for £37.5 million and spend over £45 million redeveloping it, with the idea of siting the Business School there (among other things), but there was no demand for it and in 2025, the university announced plans to sell the campus at a considerable loss.
Now you would think that the people responsible for this fiasco would be held to account and pay at least some of the price for their incompetence. But no. The former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nottingham, Prof. Shearer West, with whom the responsbility for the Castle Meadow campus disaster, left her post in 2024 to take up the position of Vice-Chancelor at the University of Leeds on a salary of more than £330K, leaving others to clean up the mess. I’m sure the staff and students at Leeds are waiting nervously to see what plans she has in store for their ruination. No doubt she received a glowing reference from Nottingham.
Anyone who thinks that positions with high salaries are always held by highly skilled people need only look at the Higher Education sector for definitive counter-examples.
The pattern of incompetent “leaders” switching jobs before the impact of their incompetence is revealed is a well-established one, but it’s not only the fault of the people at the very top. The entire system of governance is rotten, and not only in the UK. universities and other higher-education institutions have forgotten that the exist above all for education and research. Nowadays they have been captured by a self-serving management class that has lost sight of this and instead acts as if the only purpose is the generation of revenue, not to be spent on teaching and research but on vanity projects (like the Castle Meadow campus) and employing even more managers. Even if they were not being steered unerringly onto the rocks, universities would in any case be in danger of sinking because they are unable to support the weight of their bloated management superstructure.
I saw a post on Bluesky recently that included the following:
I asked a senior administrator what’s causing the University budget deficit.
‘Research & teaching,’ he said, ‘both lose money, not financially viable’
I said, ‘Funny, then, we weren’t losing money in the past when central administration was half the size’
That’s it in a nutshell.
I only wish this were an isolated example. It’s a systemic problem. Management bloat, expensive vanity projects requiring the diversion of funds from teaching and research, and deeply flawed strategic decisions, are symptoms of a widespread malaise. Unless there are drastic changes, the HE sector is going to shrivel and die.
It had been a month since my last visit to the National Concert Hall in Dublin, as I have had many distractions recently, so I was pleased to find the time yesterday evening to go again. The walk through Dublin was very pleasant in the fine weather, with lots of people outside the bars and pubs having a drink and enjoying the sunshine.
National Symphony Orchestra Ireland was conducted for the occasion by Peter Whelan for a concert of two pieces by Johannes Brahms either side of the Clarinet Concerto No. 1 by Carl Maria von Weber. When I first started writing this blog years ago, I mentioned that I didn’t really get why people think Brahms is so good. It’s not that I actively dislike Brahms, it’s just that I don’t find that he moves me as much as many other composers and so many people rave about him that I think I must be missing something. Anyway, I have persevered and now enjoy at least some of his music.
The Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn was written in 1873, when Brahms was three years before wrote his First Symphony. Interestingly it’s not clear whether the theme concerned was actually due to Haydn at all, but whoever supplied the raw material, this is one of the first compositions by anyone that featured a set of variations for a full orchestra. I had never heard this work before found it generally enjoyable, pedestrian in places, but with some excellent sections. There are 8 variations, bookended by the Introduction of the Theme and a Finale 7th variation is very lyrical and romantic, others are more upbeat and light-hearted.
After that introduction the Orchstra was joined on stage by Portuguese clarinetist Carlos Ferreira for the Clarinet Concerto No. 1 by Carl Maria von Weber. This is one of only two works by this composed that I’ve ever heard – the other being the Opera Oberon (which, incidentally has its original libretto in English) – and I have a couple of recordings on CD. It’s a very popular element of the clarinet repertoire and I’ve heard the last movement – a sprightly and tuneful Rondo – played on its own quite a few times on the radio. This piece was written in 1811 and you could say it provides an early Romantic contrast with the late Romantic style of Brahms. You can hear the influence of Mozart in it, and it has a slow-fast-slow three movement structure very reminiscent of the classical period.
I really enjoyed the playing of Carlos Ferreira. I especially liked the tone he produced and his ability to project even when apparently playing rather softly. The audience liked it too, and he got a standing ovation at the end (and did an encore).
After the wine break interval came the main course in the form of the Symphony No. 4 in E Minor by Johannes Brahms. This is of course a very familiar work, but that there’s always something new to find in it. and the 4th Symphony is a very fine work, which is now up among my favourite symphonies. There’s a great deal of interest in every moment from the simple phrase that introduces the first movement to the last movement, which is in three sections and which owes a lot to Bach and is almost a symphony in itself. It was performed beautifully last night by NSOI under the direction of Peter Whelan.
It was still quite warm in Dublin when I walked to Pearse Station to get the train back to Maynooth. The train filled up at Drumcondra with Shelbourne supporters on their way home from a match at Tolka Park, so it was much busier than usual but there wasn’t any trouble at all.
So here we are again, on a Saturday morning, with another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further five papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 87 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 535.
I will continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience) to encourage you to visit it. Mastodon is a really excellent service, and a more than adequate replacement for X/Twitter (which nobody should be using); these announcements also show the DOI for each paper.
The first paper to report this week is “Bayesian Cosmic Void Finding with Graph Flows” by Leander Thiele (U. Tokyo, Japan). This was published on Monday 20th April in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The paper presents a method using a deep graph neural network to identify cosmic voids in sparse galaxy surveys, improving upon traditional deterministic algorithms by considering the problem’s probabilistic nature. The overlay is here:
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here and the announcement on Fediverse here:
The second paper for this week, published on Wednesday 22nd April in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Sifting for a Stream: The Morphology of the 300S Stellar Stream” by Benjamin Cohen (U. Chicago, USA) and 20 others distributed around the world. This study analyzes the morphology of the $300S$ stellar stream, revealing three density peaks, a possible gap, and a kink, suggesting significant influence from the Large Magellanic Cloud on its structure.
The overlay for this one is here:
The official version of the paper can be found on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Sifting for a Stream: The Morphology of the 300S Stellar Stream" by Benjamin Cohen (U. Chicago, USA) and 20 others distributed around the world.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "IRMaGiC: Extending Luminous Red Galaxy Selection into the Infrared with Joint Rubin Observatory’s Large Survey of Space Time and Roman’s High Latitude Imaging Survey" by Zhiyuan Guo & Chris. W. Walter (Duke U., USA) and Eli S. Rykoff (Stanford U., USA) on behalf of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The Diagnostic Temperature Discrepancy as Evidence for Non-Maxwellian Coronal Electrons" by Victor Edmonds (Final Stop Consulting, USA)
The fifth and final paper for this week was published on Friday 24th April in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The title is “Galaxy evolution in the post-merger regime. IV – The long-term effect of mergers on galactic stellar mass growth and distribution” by Sara L. Ellison (U. Victoria, Canada) and Leonardo Ferreira (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, Brazil). This study uses a large sample of post-merger galaxies to demonstrate that galaxy mergers trigger significant and extended stellar mass growth in their central regions, independent of stellar population modelling.
The overlay is here:
You can find the authorized version of this paper on arXiv here and the Fediverse announcement is here:
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Galaxy evolution in the post-merger regime. IV – The long-term effect of mergers on galactic stellar mass growth and distribution" by Sara L. Ellison (U. Victoria, Canada) and Leonardo Ferreira (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, Brazil)
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Galaxy evolution in the post-merger regime. IV – The long-term effect of mergers on galactic stellar mass growth and distribution" by Sara L. Ellison (U. Victoria, Canada) and Leonardo Ferreira (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, Brazil)
Set against a dark blue, almost black surface, a white splotch of paint has been hurled out impulsively, and loses itself in innumerable spots and spatters, a cosmic gesture thrust against the empty void of nothingness – almost a metaphor of the artist’s creative activity. Some spots of colour flare up among this galaxy of creativity, of which the largest and most irregular is the red one which gave the painting its title. Minute symbols are scattered around the edges of the entire constellation – stars of hair and little hooks which give this action painting a new poetic dimension and connect it unmistakably with Miro’s world of symbols.
So here I am, sitting in the (empty) Physics Computer Lab. The formal Computational Physics lab sessions are over, but I’m on duty to provide help the students with their project work, which will take up the remaining two-and-a-bit weeks of term. It’s a lovely day outside which explains why there are very few people in the lab, and none of them have asked for help so I’ve been busy getting on with some work. Past experience with these sessions suggests that they’ll all come just before the project deadline, which is May 8th.
Up until last week I had a Computational Physics lecture at 9am on Thursdays, but the last one of those happened last Thursday. It was nice to have a more leisurely start this morning. I did think I might get a haircut on the way to work but when I passed my usual barber’s I saw it was full of people waiting their turn so I walked on. It seems that the good weather gave quite a few people the same urge to have shorter hair.
Yesterday was the last Class Test for my other class, Particle Physics, and I’ve taken the opportunity to correct all the scripts for that. I even had time to type up the solutions all neatly and tidily in Latex (including doing Feynman diagrams, which is fun).The end of that job means no more grading for that module until the main examination, which is about a month away. I do however, have lectures and tutorials still to do, including two at 9am on Tuesdays.
The finest weather is usually reserved for the exam period, of course, to maximize the annoyance of students. In my memory all my undergraduate examinations took place in very fine weather, with the exception of my Physics practical the night before which there was an enormous thunderstorm. Come to think of it, that could well have been a portent that warned me off experiments and made me become a theorist.
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In the Dark 