Since CERN, the Geneva home of the Large Hadron Collider, is currently celebrating its 60th Anniversary, I thought I would use this organ to correct a widespread misapprehension concerning the the true historical origin of that organization. I have to say the general misunderstanding of the background to CERN is not helped by the information produced locally which insists that CERN is an acronym for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire and that it came into being in 1954. This may be the date at which the Geneva operation commenced, but the organization has a far older origin than that.
CERN is in fact named after the Dorset village of Cerne Abbas, most famous for a prehistoric hill figure called the Cerne Abbas Giant. The following aerial photograph of this outstanding local landmark proves that the inhabitants of Dorset had the idea of erecting a large hardon facility hundreds of years ago…
I don’t usually post about poetry two days running, but circumstances seem to justify reblog of the poem Three Street Musicians by wonderful Welsh poet Dannie Abse, who died on Sunday.
Indoors the tang of a tiny oil lamp. Outdoors The winking signal on the waste of sea. Indoors the sound of the wind. Outdoors the wind. Indoors the locked heart and the lost key.
Outdoors the chill, the void, the siren. Indoors The strong man pained to find his red blood cools, While the blind clock grows louder, faster. Outdoors The silent moon, the garrulous tides she rules.
Indoors ancestral curse-cum-blessing. Outdoors The empty bowl of heaven, the empty deep. Indoors a purposeful man who talks at cross Purposes, to himself, in a broken sleep.
Remind me never again to travel on a Sunday. Needing to get back for some important meetings tomorrow I set out from Cardiff this lunchtime leaving plenty of time for the journey. Just as well.
For a start, First Great Western trains were disrupted by “planned engineering work”. Not very well planned, obviously. The train I got on was to be diverted via Bath Spa, adding about an hour to the usual journey time. But that wasn’t the main cause of vexation.
When it arrived at a crowded platform at Cardiff Central, the 12.53 consisted of just seven coaches, three of which were First Class. To add to the chaos and consternation, Coach B, in which several people standing beside me had reserved seats, did not exist.
Not having a reservation in a real or imaginary coach, rather than stand for 3 hours I went and sat in any empty First Class carriage and when the guard arrived I paid the £15 upgrade to Weekend First, congratulating First Great Western on a cleverly-worked scam. Deliberately running a short train on a busy route to increase revenue this way is cynical and exploitative but that’s what it means to run a train company these days.
Anyway, the weather being quite nice when I arrived in Paddington I walked through Kensington Gardens and along the Serpentine before heading down to Victoria.
Stage two of my journey via Southern Railways turned out to be no better. More “planned engineering works” meant all Victoria to Brighton trains were diverted through Littlehampton. A replacement bus from Three Bridges was offered as an alternative “possibly a little quicker” but having no confidence at all that a bus would actually materialise I stayed on the train as it trundled through rural Sussex.
I got to Brighton Station around 7pm, about 6 hours after leaving Cardiff Central, but at least I got a bus straight away.
I hope the rest of the week isn’t as exasperating as today, but something tells me that it might be..
Back in Cardiff for a couple of days to get some more writing done, I took a break to have a cup of tea in the garden. All the signs that summer is now over have now shown themselves: the start of undergraduate lectures (Monday); the Autumnal Equinox (Tuesday); the end of the County Championship on Friday; and so on.
Here in Cardiff the weather is still warm, but the leaves are turning brown and starting to fall. Conkers too. And, most spectacularly, the Virginia Creeper growing at the back of my house has turned blood red. It does look pretty, but I’m sure it’s not good for the gutters or the chimney stack above..
I thought I’d wind things down for the weekend by posting a little bit of British jazz history. It’s perhaps not very well known that the great Sidney Bechet came to England in 1949 and did a concert and a recording session with Humphrey Lyttelton’s band while he was here. What’s also not very well known is how controversial this was, as in the immediate post-war years the Musician’s Union had persuaded the UK government to ban American artists from performing over here. Humph was having none of it, thank goodness, and here we have the legacy. Here is the unmistakeable Sidney Bechet on soprano sax, playing a traditional blues called I told you once, I told you twice with Humph on trumpet, Wally Fawkes on clarinet and, stealing the show, the absolutely superb Keith Christie on trombone. The only problem is that the youtube version cuts out a bit early…
After the concert they played together, Bechet summoned Humph in order to deliver a kind of end-of-term report on the band in which he pointed out little criticisms of their playing and so on. Bechet was a forceful character and often a harsh critic but when he got to Keith Christie he expressed nothing but unqualified admiration. There’s not much higher praise than that in the world of jazz.
Only time for the quickest of quickies today, but I have some very good news to pass on so, without further ado, here we go. Today we learned that the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Sussex has received a the Athena SWAN Bronze Award in recognition of our commitment to advancing women’s careers in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM) employment in higher education and research. The Athena SWAN charter has been running since 2005, recognising the commitment of the higher education sector to address gender inequalities, tackle the unequal representation of women in science and to improve career progression for female academics.
This award has been the result of a huge effort led by Dr Kathy Romer but also involving many other members of staff in the Department and across entire the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences generally. The Department scored at or above the national average in all key areas: student intake (UG, PGT, PGR), research staff, academic staff, REF submissions and so on. That said, the Athena SWAN process has highlighted several areas where improvements can be made, such as in the mentoring of female postdoctoral researchers, and enhanced levels of training in equality and diversity matters such as the influence of unconscious bias. We are very pleased to have received the bronze award, but there is still a very great deal to do. Many other institutions and departments have already progressed to the Silver or even Gold award, but our Bronze is at least a start!
And you as well must die, beloved dust, And all your beauty stand you in no stead, This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head, This body of flame and steel, before the gust Of Death, or under his autumnal frost, Shall be as any leaf, be no less dead Than the first leaf that fall, —this wonder fled. Altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost. Nor shall my love avail you in your hour. In spite of all my love, you will arise Upon that day and wander down the air Obscurely as the unattended flower, It mattering not how beautiful you were, Or how beloved above all else that dies.
I’m struck by the similarity in visual appearance between distinguished astrophysicist Herr Professor Dr Auric Goldfinger and infamous Bond villain Reinhard Genzel. I wonder if by any chance they might be related?
My twitter feed was already alive with reactions to the paper when I woke up at 6am, so I’m already a bit late on the story, but I couldn’t resist a quick comment or two.
The bottom line is of course that the polarized emission from Galactic dust is much larger in the BICEP2 field than had been anticipated in the BICEP2 analysis of their data (now published in Physical Review Letters after being refereed). Indeed, as the abstract states, the actual dust contamination in the BICEP2 field is subject to considerable statistical and systematic uncertainties, but seems to be around the same level as BICEP2’s claimed detection. In other words the Planck analysis shows that the BICEP2 result is completely consistent with what is now known about polarized dust emission. To put it bluntly, the Planck analysis shows that the claim that primordial gravitational waves had been detected was premature, to say the least. I remind you that the original BICEP2 result was spun as a ‘7σ’ detection of a primordial polarization signal associated with gravitational waves. This level of confidence is now known to have been false. I’m going to resist (for the time being) another rant about p-values…
Although it is consistent with being entirely dust, the Planck analysis does not entirely kill off the idea that there might be a primordial contribution to the BICEP2 measurement, which could be of similar amplitude to the dust signal. However, identifying and extracting that signal will require the much more sophisticated joint analysis alluded to in the final sentence of the abstract above. Planck and BICEP2 have differing strengths and weaknesses and a joint analysis will benefit from considerable complementarity. Planck has wider spectral coverage, and has mapped the entire sky; BICEP2 is more sensitive, but works at only one frequency and covers only a relatively small field of view. Between them they may be able to identify an excess source of polarization over and above the foreground, so it is not impossible that there may a gravitational wave component may be isolated. That will be a tough job, however, and there’s by no means any guarantee that it will work. We will just have to wait and see.
In the mean time let’s see how big an effect this paper has on my poll:
Note also that the abstract states:
We show that even in the faintest dust-emitting regions there are no “clean” windows where primordial CMB B-mode polarization could be measured without subtraction of dust emission.
It is as I always thought. Our Galaxy is a rather grubby place to live. Even the windows are filthy. It’s far too dusty for fussy cosmologists, who need to have everything just so, but probably fine for astrophysicists who generally like mucking about and getting their hands dirty…
This discussion suggests that a confident detection of B-modes from primordial gravitational waves (if there is one to detect) may have to wait for a sensitive all-sky experiment, which would have to be done in space. On the other hand, Planck has identified some regions which appear to be significantly less contaminated than the BICEP2 field (which is outlined in black):
Could it be possible to direct some of the ongoing ground- or balloon-based CMB polarization experiments towards the cleaner (dark blue area in the right-hand panel) just south of the BICEP2 field?
From a theorist’s perspective, I think this result means that all the models of the early Universe that we thought were dead because they couldn’t produce the high level of primordial gravitational waves detected by BICEP2 have no come back to life, and those that came to life to explain the BICEP2 result may soon be read the last rites if the signal turns out to be predominantly dust.
Another important thing that remains to be seen is the extent to which the extraordinary media hype surrounding the announcement back in March will affect the credibility of the BICEP2 team itself and indeed the cosmological community as a whole. On the one hand, there’s nothing wrong with what has happened from a scientific point of view: results get scrutinized, tested, and sometimes refuted. To that extent all this episode demonstrates is that science works. On the other hand most of this stuff usually goes on behind the scenes as far as the public are concerned. The BICEP2 team decided to announce their results by press conference before they had been subjected to proper peer review. I’m sure they made that decision because they were confident in their results, but it now looks like it may have backfired rather badly. I think the public needs to understand more about how science functions as a process, often very messily, but how much of this mess should be out in the open?
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In the Dark 