Archive for August, 2011

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Is Space Expanding?

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , on August 19, 2011 by telescoper

I think I’ve just got time for a quick post this lunchtime, so I’ll pick up on a topic that rose from a series of interchanges on Twitter this morning. As is the case with any interesting exchange of views, this conversation ended up quite some distance from its starting point, and I won’t have time to go all the way back to the beginning, but it was all to do with the “expansion of space“, a phrase one finds all over the place in books articles and web pages about cosmology at both popular and advanced levels.

What kicked the discussion off was an off-the-cuff humorous remark about the rate at which the Moon is receding from the Earth according to Hubble’s Law; the answer to which is “very slowly indeed”. Hubble’s law is v=H_0 d where v is the apparent recession velocity and d the distance, so for very small distance the speed of expansion is tiny. Strictly speaking, however, the velocity isn’t really observable – what we measure is the redshift, which we then interpret as being due to a velocity.

I chipped in with a comment to the effect that Hubble’s law didn’t apply to the Earth-Moon system (or to the whole Solar System, or for that matter to the Milky Way Galaxy or to the Local Group either) as these are held together by local gravitational effects and do not participate in the cosmic expansion.

To that came the rejoinder that surely these structures are expanding, just very slowly because they are small and that effect is counteracted by motions associated with local structures which “fight against” the “underlying expansion” of space.

But this also makes me uncomfortable, hence this post. It’s not that I think this is necessarily a misconception. The “expansion of space” can be a useful thing to discuss in a pedagogical context. However, as someone once said, teaching physics involves ever-decreasing circles of deception, and the more you think about the language of expanding space the less comfortable you should feel about it, and the more careful you should be in using it as anything other than a metaphor. I’d say it probably belongs to the category of things that Wolfgang Pauli would have described as “not even wrong”, in the sense that it’s more meaningless than incorrect.

Let me briefly try to explain why. In cosmology we assume that the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic and consequently that the space-time is described by the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric, which can be written

ds^{2} = c^{2} dt^{2}-a^{2}(t) d\sigma^{2}

in which d\sigma^2 describes the (fixed) geometry of a three-dimensional homogeneous space; this spatial part does not depend on time. The imposition of spatial homogeneity selects a preferred time coordinate t, defined such that observers can synchronize watches according to the local density of matter – points in space-time at which the matter density is the same are defined to be at the same time.

The presence of the scale factor a(t) in front of the spatial 3-metric allows the overall 4-metric to change with time, but only in such a way that preserves the spatial geometry, in other words the spatial sections can have different scales at different times, but always have the same shape. It’s a consequence of Einstein’s equations of General Relativity that a Universe described by the FLRW metric must evolve with time (at least in the absence of a cosmological constant). In an expanding universe a(t) increases with t and this increase naturally accounts for Hubble’s law, with  H(t)=\dot{a}/a but only if you define velocities and distances in the particular way suggested by the coordinates used.

So how do we interpret this?

Well, there are (at least) two different interpretations depending on your choice of coordinates.  One way to do it is to pick spatial coordinates such that the positions of galaxies change with time; in this choice the redshift of galaxy observed from another is due to their relative motion. Another way to do it is to use coordinates in which the galaxy positions are  fixed; these are called comoving coordinates.  In general relativity we can switch between one view and the other and the observable effect (i.e. the redshift) is the same in either.

Most cosmologists use comoving coordinates (because it’s generally a lot easier that way), and it’s this second interpretation that encourages one to think not about things moving but about space itself expanding. The danger with that is that it sometimes leads one to endow “space” (whatever that means) with physical attributes that it doesn’t really possess. This is most often seen in the analogy of galaxies being the raisins in a pudding, with “space” being the dough that expands as the pudding cooks taking the raisins away from each other. This analogy conveys some idea of the effect of homogeneous expansion, but isn’t really right. Raisins and dough are both made of, you know, stuff. Space isn’t.

In support of my criticism I quote:

 Many semi-popular accounts of cosmology contain statements to the effect that “space itself is swelling up” in causing the galaxies to separate. This seems to imply that all objects are being stretched by some mysterious force: are we to infer that humans who survived for a Hubble time [the age of the universe] would find themselves to be roughly four metres tall? Certainly not….In the common elementary demonstration of the expansion by means of inflating a balloon, galaxies should be represented by glued-on coins, not ink drawings (which will spuriously expand with the universe).

(John Peacock, Cosmological Physics, p. 87-8). A lengthier discussion of this point, which echoes some of the points I make below, can be found here.

To get back to the original point of the question let me add another quote:

A real galaxy is held together by its own gravity and is not free to expand with the universe. Similarly, if [we talk about] the Solar System, Earth, [an] atom, or almost anything, the result would be misleading because most systems are held together by various forces in some sort of equilibrium and cannot partake in cosmic expansion. If we [talk about] clusters of galaxies…most clusters are bound together and cannot expand. Superclusters are vast sprawling systems of numerous clusters that are weakly bound and can expand almost freely with the universe.

(Edward Harrison, Cosmology, p. 278).

I’d put this a different way. The “Hubble expansion” describes the motion of test particles in a the coordinate system I described above, i.e one  which applies to a perfectly homogeneous and isotropic universe. This metric simply doesn’t apply on the scale of the solar system, our own galaxy and even up to the scale of groups or clusters of galaxies. The Andromeda Galaxy (M31),  for example, is not receding from the Milky Way at all – it has a blueshift.  I’d argue that the space-time geometry in such systems is simply nothing like the FLRW form, so one can’t expect to make physical sense trying to to interpret particle motions within them in terms of the usual cosmological coordinate system. Losing the symmetry of the FLRW case  makes the choice of appropriate coordinates much more challenging.

There is cosmic inhomogeneity on even larger scales, of course, but in such cases the “peculiar velocities” generated by the lumpiness can be treated as a (linear) correction to the pure Hubble flow associated with the background cosmology.  In my view, however, in highly concentrated objects that decomposition into an “underlying expansion” and a “local effect” isn’t useful. I’d prefer simply to say that there is no Hubble flow in such objects. To take this to an extreme, what about a black hole? Do you think there’s a Hubble flow inside one of those, struggling to blow it up?

In fact the mathematical task of embedding inhomogeneous structures in an asymptotically FLRW background is not at all straightforward to do exactly, but it is worth mentioning that, by virtue of Birkhoff’s theorem,  the interior of an exactly spherical cavity (i.e. void)  must be described by the (flat) Minkowski metric. In this case the external cosmic expansion has absolutely no effect on the motion of particles in the interior.

I’ll end with this quote from the Fount of All Wisdom, Ned Wright,in response to the question Why doesn’t the Solar System expand if the whole Universe is expanding?

This question is best answered in the coordinate system where the galaxies change their positions. The galaxies are receding from us because they started out receding from us, and the force of gravity just causes an acceleration that causes them to slow down, or speed up in the case of an accelerating expansion. Planets are going around the Sun in fixed size orbits because they are bound to the Sun. Everything is just moving under the influence of Newton’s laws (with very slight modifications due to relativity). [Illustration] For the technically minded, Cooperstock et al. computes that the influence of the cosmological expansion on the Earth’s orbit around the Sun amounts to a growth by only one part in a septillion over the age of the Solar System.

The paper cited in this passage is well worth reading because it demonstrates the importance of the point I was trying to make above about using an appropriate coordinate system:

In the non–spherical case, it is generally recognized that the expansion of the universe does not have observable effects on local physics, but few discussions of this problem in the literature have gone beyond qualitative statements. A serious problem is that these studies were carried out in coordinate systems that are not easily comparable with the frames used for astronomical observations and thus obscure the physical meaning of the computations.

Now I’ve waffled on far too long so  I’ll just finally  recommend this paper entitled Expanding Space: The Root of All Evil and get back to work…

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Astronomy Look-alikes, No. 62

Posted in Astronomy Lookalikes with tags , on August 19, 2011 by telescoper

I’d say that Professor Subir Sarkar of Oxford University bears more than a passing resemblance to cricketing legend Sir Vivian “Viv” Richards, although I couldn’t comment on whether that extends to his batting ability…

Subir Sarkar

Viv Richards

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Artikulation

Posted in Art, Music with tags , , on August 18, 2011 by telescoper

I just spent an amusing evening watching a football match with the sound turned off on the TV and some experimental compositions by George Ligeti playing on my sound system. I thoroughly recommend playing music instead of listening to the commentators, by the way; it’s much more fun! Anyway, a piece that worked particularly well was the pioneering electronic composition Artikulation (1958). Having a look on Youtube I found this wonderful video which adds an even more appropriate visual to Ligeti’s extraordinary sound world than a football match, in the form of a graphical score (created by Rainer Wehinger) which you can follow along as the music plays.

To quote from an explanatory article I found on the web:

In order to capture the dynamics of the performance Rainer abandoned the conventions of standard notation, concluding it was ineffective in dealing with compositions devoid of regular meter and harmonic scale. The alternative system he developed relied on color, shape, width and position to capture Ligeti’s work. Color in the score was used to denote pitch or timbre, combs represented noise, dots marked impulses and the width of the elements indicated their duration. The video below maps Ligeti’s compostion on to Rainer’s graphical score to demonstrate how effectively it describes the performance.

I imagine many readers of this blog won’t agree with me, but I find the result absolutely fascinating. The visual score has an abstract beauty on its own, but together with the music it creates a particularly interesting effect; each page of the score had me trying to imagine in my mind’s ear what was going to happen next….

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More Cosmological Haiku

Posted in Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on August 18, 2011 by telescoper

In view of my current rather hectic schedule – why else would I be up at this ungodly hour? – I thought I’d combine another bit of recycling with some audience participation. I’ve updated below the list of Haiku I posted some time ago with some new ones I’ve jotted down at random intervals over the intervening months.

How about a few Haiku of your own on themes connected to astronomy, cosmology or physics?

Don’t be worried about making the style of your contributions too authentic, just make sure they are 17 syllables in total, and split into three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables respectively.

Here are some of my own to get you started:

Quantum Gravity:
The troublesome double-act
Of Little and Large

Gravity’s waves are
Traceless; which does not mean they
Can never be found

The Big Bang wasn’t
So big, at least not when you
Think in decibels.

Cosmological
Constant and Dark Energy
Are vacuous names

Microwave Background
Photons remember a time
When they were hotter

Isotropic and
Homogeneous metric?
Robertson-Walker

Galaxies evolve
In a complicated way
We don’t understand

Acceleration:
Type Ia Supernovae
Gave us the first clue

Cosmic Inflation
Could have stretched the Universe
And made it flatter

Astrophysicist
Is what I’m told is my Job
Title. Whatever.

“Clusters look cool,”  said
Sunyaev and Zel’dovich,
“because they are hot”.

Gaussianity
is produced by inflation,
normally speaking.

Gravity waves are
a kind of perturbation;
they make you tensor

Bubble collisions
Leave marks in the C-M-B
To please A. Linde

This Haiku contains
“Baryon Oscillations”
in its middle line.

What should we build next:
S-K-A or E-L-T?
Or maybe neither…?

J W* S T,
(the James Webb Space Telescope);
long name, big budget

* “W” has to be pronounced “dubya” for this one to work!

Contributions welcome via the comments box. The best one gets a chance to win Bully’s star prize.

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The Hawking Paradox on BBC iPlayer

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on August 17, 2011 by telescoper

I just heard at lunchtime that a TV programme I was in was recently repeated on BBC4 and is consequently now available on BBC i Player, so I thought I’d advertise it on here.  I didn’t see the broadcast myself, because I scarcely watch TV these days.

The programme was originally made for the BBC TV series Horizon and first broadcast in the UK in 2005. You’ll find yours truly in a couple of places, when I was working at the University of Nottingham and had more hair. In fact I got quite a bit of stick, from some people at a certain University I used to attend, for being insufficiently reverential in my comments about Stephen Hawking but, for what it’s worth, I stand by everything I said. I do admire him enormously as a physicist, but I think his very genuine contributions are sometimes lost in the cult that has developed around him.

Anyway, I thought the programme turned out relatively well but you can watch it yourself by clicking here and form your own opinion!

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More on MacGuffins

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , on August 17, 2011 by telescoper

I’m very pressed for time this week  so I thought I’d cheat by resurrecting and updating an old post from way back when I had just started blogging, about three years ago.  I thought of doing this because I just came across a Youtube clip of the late great Alfred Hitchcock, which you’ll now find in the post. I’ve also made a couple of minor editorial changes, but basically it’s a recycled piece and you should therefore read it for environmental reasons.

–0–

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.

Whatever it is or is not, the MacGuffin is 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 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..)

North by North West is a fine example of a multi-MacGuffin movie. The centre of its convoluted plot involves espionage and the smuggling of what is only cursorily described as “government secrets”. 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.

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 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 have realised 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.

Even this MacGuffin has its problems, though. The Higgs mechanism is notoriously difficult to explain to the public, so some have resorted to a less specific but more misleading version: “The Big Bang”. As I’ve already griped, the LHC will never generate energies anything like the Big Bang did, so I don’t have any time for the language of the “Big Bang Machine”, even as a MacGuffin.

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 we are more familiar with, 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 (such as the Dark Energy Survey) 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 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 necessarily positive influence that particle physics has had on astronomy in recent times and it has been criticised very forcefully by Simon White.

Whatever the motivation for doing these projects now, they will undoubtedly lead to new discoveries. But my own view is that there will never be a 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.

But that’s how it goes with MacGuffins. Even the Maltese Falcon turned out to be a fake in the end.

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Deep River

Posted in Literature with tags , , , on August 16, 2011 by telescoper

I’ve just finished reading a strange but wonderful book entitled Thames: Sacred River written by Peter Ackroyd. On one level it’s a kind of biography of the River Thames, from prehistoric times to the present day, but it’s much more complex and involving than a simple narrative history. What Ackroyd does is to look a the river from many different angles, each time focussing on a different aspect. There are chapters on connections between the Thames and human life- religious observance, art and artists, poetry and literature, commerce and crime and so on – as well as its wildlife, geology and other physical properties. As you can probably imagine, this means that the book jumps backwards and forwards through history, often visiting the same period many times but from a different perspective.

Rather like the river whose progress it charts, this book is both large and meandering.  I have to admit that at times I found it heavy going. Ackroyd’s prose is often magisterial in its beauty, but he does get a bit grandiose every now and then. I got a bit irritated by his persistent use of the word “riverine”, for example. I’ve nothing against the word itself, but he uses it with such regularity that you can predict when the next appearance is due, as if he’d  allowed him a certain number at the outset and determined to spread them uniformly through the text.

Despite all that, what makes this book so wonderful  is that,  for all its majestic sweep, it’s also full of rich and fascinating detail. Surprising little tidbits of information appear on practically every page to illustrate some aspect of the river, some playful and amusing, others dark and disturbing. Ackroyd’s mastery of the little details is really marvellous and it more than compensates for his occasional verbosity. I’d heartily recommend this as a work that can be read all the way through, but is also very rewarding to dip into.

As usual with my little reviews I’m not going to give a systematic description of the book, but just pick something that struck me as a read it to try to convey an impression of the content.  Near the end there’s a chapter about a particularly dark side of the Thames,  namely its association with death by drowning. For a start I was staggered to read that there are approximately 400 suicides each year involving people jumping into the Thames at some point along its length; most, but by no means all, of these happen in London. It’s also striking that this figure appears not to have changed much over the past couple of centuries. The Thames seems to be a magnet for the suicidal. Not long ago, a young French lady travelled all the way to London from Paris, specifically to throw herself in the Thames.

But, of course, not all deaths by drowning are suicides. Over the centuries countless unfortunate people have lost their lives by falling accidentally into the water. The worst peacetime  loss of life in the history of the Thames occurred on September 3rd 1878 when a paddle steamer, the Princess Alice, collided with a collier and sank almost immediately. Many passengers on the Alice died by drowning, but most of those that didn’t drown suffered the perhaps worse fate of being poisoned by the heavily polluted water in the river. Many of those rescued died in the ensuing days and weeks of unknown ailments almost certainly caused the range toxic materials that were routinely dumped in the Thames in thos days. It’s estimated that around 700 people died altogether as a result of the sinking of the Princess Alice.

I knew about this terrible event before reading Ackroyd’s book, as it features prominently in others I read about the East End of London when I  lived there, years ago. However, one particularly unsettling  coincidence  had escaped my attention until now. Apparently, one of the very few survivors of the Princess Alice disaster was a young woman by the name of Elizabeth Stride. She lived another ten years, in fact. But her ultimate fate was to be no happier than the many who died in 1878. On 30th September 1888 she became the third victim of Jack the Ripper….

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The inexorable decline of English culture

Posted in Crosswords with tags , , , on August 15, 2011 by telescoper

As politicians, journalists and academics struggle to explain the recent outbreaks of violent disorder in English cities, I think it’s time for me to provide the definitive analysis. I believe that the sense of alienation, disenchantment and despair that seems to be sweeping the country can be traced back to a single appalling event, the occurrence of which was surely enough to drive even the most law-abiding citizen into acts of wanton destruction. The enormity of the offence perpetrated against the cultural fabric of our society cannot be overestimated, as it casts doubt on the very survival of western civilisation.

So what is this thing of which I speak? I’ll tell you, although I can hardly bring myself to talk about it. There was an error in last week’s Guardian Prize Crossword.

The shocking evidence for this breakdown of all that is right and good can be seen in stark graphic terms below:

The offending item, which can be found in the bottom left hand corner, is 22 down, the clue to which reads

9’s heart lifted, I gathered, over 7’s opener (6)

The answer to 9 across is BEETHOVEN, which serves to suggest a definition of a piece by said composer. “Heart lifted” is CORE written upside down, “I gathered” means that you stick an “I” in that, and “7’s opener” is A (from ALBION). The answer is then clearly EROICA…

Except – oh the shame of it! – the Guardian setter, Paul, clearly can’t spell and thus it appears in the completed grid above as ERIOCA. I can think of no clearer evidence for the descent of our country into anarchy and chaos.

I rest my case. There’s no doubt in my mind that this outrage was the real reason for the recent outbreak of riots. Or, as Paul would no doubt say, “roits”.

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Acting and Clearing

Posted in Education, Finance, Politics, Science Politics with tags , , , , , , on August 14, 2011 by telescoper

Now that I’m back from my trip to Copenhagen, it’s going to be back to work with a vengeance. To those of you who think academics have massively long summer breaks, I can tell you that mine ends on Monday when I will be doing a stint as Acting Head of School. That’s not usually a particularly onerous task during the summer months, but next week happens to be the week that A-level results come out and it promises to be a hectic and critical period. It’s obviously a sheer coincidence that all the other senior professors have decided to take their leave at this time…

There are several reasons for this being a particularly stressful time. First the  number of potential students applying to study Physics (and related subjects) this forthcoming academic year (2011/12) in the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University was up by a whopping 53% on last year. I blogged about this a few months ago when it became obvious that we were having a bumper year.

The second reason is that Cardiff’s  School of Physics & Astronomy has been given a big increase in funded student numbers  from HEFCW. In fact we’ve been given an extra 60 funded places (over two years), which is a significant uplift in our quota and a much-needed financial boost for the School. This has happened basically because of HECFW‘s desire to bolster STEM subjects as part of a range of measures related to the Welsh Assembly Government’s plans for the regions. Preparations have been made to accommodate the extra students in tutorial groups and we’re even modifying one of our larger lecture rooms to increase capacity.

Unfortunately the extra places were announced after the normal applications cycle was more-or-less completed, so the admissions team had been proceeding on the basis that demand would exceed supply for this year so has set our undergraduate offers rather high. In order to fill the extra places that have been given to us late in the day, even with our vastly increased application numbers, we will  almost certainly have to go into the clearing system to recruit some of the extra students.

In case you didn’t realise,  universities actually get a sneak preview of the A-level results a couple of days before the applicants receive them. This helps us plan our strategy, whether to accept “near-misses”, whether to go into clearing, etc.

On top of these local factors there is the sweeping change in tuition fees coming in next year (2012-13). Anxious to avoid the vastly increased cost of future university education many fewer students will be opting to defer entry than in previous years. Moreover, some English universities have had cuts in funded student places making entry highly competitive. As an article in today’s Observer makes clear, this all means that clearing is likely to be extremely frantic this year.

And once that’s out of the way I’ll be working more-or-less full time until late September on business connected with the STFC Astronomy Grants Panel, a task likely to be just as stressful as UCAS admissions for both panel members and applicants.

Ho hum.

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Heebie Jeebies

Posted in Jazz with tags , , on August 14, 2011 by telescoper

I was looking through Youtube this morning and found this, which I noticed was recorded exactly 60 years ago today, on 14th August 1951, which gave me an excuse to post it. Not that I needed an excuse. It’s a bit of contrast with my previous jazz post, but I’ve never had a problem with loving New Orleans traditional jazz as well as its more modern varieties.

Apart from the fact that this is a joy to listen to, it also gives me an opportunity to pay tribute to a much underrated figure in the history of British jazz. I don’t mean, “The Guv’nor”, Ken Colyer, who plays super lead cornet on this track (and who, incidentally, was one of John Peel’s favourite musicians), but the fabulous trombonist Keith Christie who led this band together with his brother Ian, who played clarinet.

Before forming the Christie Brother Stompers, Keith Christie was a mainstay of Humphrey Lyttelton band that made many wonderful recordings for the Parlophone label. Together with Humph on trumpet and Wally Fawkes on clarinet he was part of  the finest front line of any band of that era. His characteristically rumbustious trombone playing can be heard to particularly good effect on this track, a version of the classic  Heebie Jeebies, first recorded by Louis Armstrong and his famous Hot Five way back in 1926.

Clearly inspired by Kid Ory, Keith Christie’s always seemed to bring out the comic  aspects of the rorty old tailgate trombone style without ever mocking it. It’s interesting to reflect that although this kind of music is suffused with a robust humour, the musicians themselves were deadly serious. When he was with Humph’s band, Humph tried many times to persuade Keith Christie to tone down the humorous aspect, something that he admitted in later life was entirely the wrong thing to do.

Indeed, Humph’s band at one point in 1949 had the chance to do a recording session with the great Sidney Bechet, after which Bechet summoned Humph into his dressing room and gave him a kind of end-of-term report on the band, pointing out little criticisms of their playing. Humph recalled in radio programme many years later the unqualified admiration with which Bechet spoke of Keith Christie’s trombone playing then. I can’t think of  higher praise.

When Keith left to form a band with Ken Colyer it was a topic of great speculation how his playing would go down with the Guv’nor, a name Colyer acquired because of his strict adherence to New Orleans principles. I don’t know what went on behind the scenes, but it is a fact that the band didn’t stay together very long.

When this particular record was made it was heavily influenced by the revivalist records coming over from the USA at the time of Bunk Johnson’s 1940s band and also the Kid Ory band, so the “recorded in garage” sound was sedulously acquired. It might be low-fi, but you can hear well enough to enjoy it, especially Keith Christie’s absolutely brilliant trombone, both in solo and in as part of the front line collective passages.

 

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