During the course of a short perambulation around Bologna this morning I came across this statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the famous biscuit manufacturer.
Apologies for the stray light affecting the picture. It was a very sunny morning!
I was subsequently surprised to discover via the interwebs that the Garibaldi biscuit is in fact an English invention, first produced in 1861 and was inspired by a visit to England by Garibaldi in 1854. No doubt it was his impressive beard that made him so popular.
It has been a busy day. Partly this was because I had to give a talk (of which more in due course) but mostly it was thanks to the kind hospitality of my hosts, particularly Lauro Moscardini, whom I have known for many years. I’m just back to the hotel after an extremely pleasant dinner with Lauro at Trattoria Serghei, which is just a few yards from my hotel. I had Tortelloni Burro e Salvia followed by Coniglio Arrosto, accompanied by a fine Sangiovese, in case you’re interested.
When I got up this morning I soon realised the weather was beautiful so instead of getting the bus to the Observatory I decided would just walk there. It turned out to be a good decision. Despite being rather further than the previous site, it only took me 45 minutes to get there, and that included a stop for a coffee. The building is brand new. So new that it’s not fully occupied, but I managed to find my way to the guest office easily. Impressively, despite the incomplete state of much of the interior, I found the WIFI working perfectly.
Anyway, it has been a busy but very enjoyable day. I’ll say more about what my talk was about when I get back home. I’m doing another one on Thursday on a completely different subject, and will no doubt have a completely different dinner too!
After after a journey consisting of train+bus+plane+bus I’ve made it to my destination. I’m here in Bologna for a few days, giving a couple of talks and hopefully having some useful discussions. They’ve booked me into the Hotel Paradise shown above. The title may be a little overstated but it’s a nice friendly little place right in the centre of the city.
Tomorrow I shall be visiting the Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna, which is part of the Istituto Nazionale de Astrofisica. I’ve been to Bologna before, but the astronomers have moved to a new building which is further out of town than the old one, so it will be a bit of an adventure trying to find it. No doubt I’ll demonstrate yet again my ability to get on the wrong bus…
Anyway, that’s all for now. It is necessary for me to eat a pizza. I hope to have the chance to take a few pictures while I’m here, but that can wait!
Here’s a nice talk by Nobel Laureate Adam Riess delivered on May 11th at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre Center for Astrophysics and is now available for you to watch at your leisure. It’s an hour long, but well worth watching if you’re interested in cosmology in general and in apparent tension between different determinations of the Hubble constant in particular.
Here’s the description of the talk, which is introduced first by Bach and Daniel Eisenstein:
The Hubble constant remains one of the most important parameters in the cosmological model, setting the size and age scales of the Universe. Present uncertainties in the cosmological model including the nature of dark energy, the properties of neutrinos and the scale of departures from flat geometry can be constrained by measurements of the Hubble constant made to higher precision than was possible with the first generations of Hubble Telescope instruments. A streamlined distance ladder constructed from infrared observations of Cepheids and type Ia supernovae with ruthless attention paid to systematics now provide 2.4% precision and offer the means to do much better. By steadily improving the precision and accuracy of the Hubble constant, we now see evidence for significant deviations from the standard model, referred to as LambdaCDM, and thus the exciting chance, if true, of discovering new fundamental physics such as exotic dark energy, a new relativistic particle, or a small curvature to name a few possibilities. I will review recent and expected progress.
And here’s the talk in full.
After watching the video you be interested in voting in my totally unscientific poll on the matter:
I thought I’d just draw the collective attention of my vast readership (Sid and Doris Bonkers) to a bit of a row that has broken out between two groups of cosmologists concerning the theory of cosmic inflation.
This kerfuffle started with an article entitled Pop Goes The Universe in Scientific American by Anna Ijjas, Paul Steinhardt, and Avi Loeb that (among other things) asserts that inflation “cannot be evaluated using the scientific method” and is consequently not a scientific theory. Another group of cosmologists (including Alan Guth, the author of the paper that launched the inflationay universe model) penned a response that was signed by a long list of leading scientists, thirty-three of them to be precise. The original authors then issued a response to the response. Sean Carroll (who was one of those who signed the response the original paper has written a nice blog post summarizing the points of disagreement.
I’m not going to attempt to post a detailed response to every issue raised in this correspondence, but I will make a few points.
First, I think it’s important to realize that there isn’t a single simple definition of `the scientific method’: there are lots of scientific methods, each of which may employed to a greater or lesser degree in different disciplines. Most scientists would probably agree that some notion of `testability’ has to be included if a theory is said to be scientific, but it seems to me that testability is not an absolute, in the sense that not all predictions of a theory need to be observable for the theory as a whole to be testable to a degree. A theory might predict the existence of a phenomenon A that is impossible for all practical purposes to observe, but if that theory also has another necessary consequence B that is observed then the theory does not deserve to be dismissed as unscientific.
One aspect of modern inflationary theory that is singled out for criticism has been the incorporation of the idea of a multiverse. I have to make the confession here that I don’t like the concept of the multiverse, nor do I like the way it has become fashionably mainstream in the field. I’ve never seen it as a necessary (or even useful) addition to inflation theory. However, suppose you have a model of inflation that leads to something like Linde’s version of the multiverse. Causally disconnected domains of this multiverse may indeed not be observable, but if the theory has other necessary implications for things we can observe in our local universe then it is testable to a degree.
My position (such as it is) is that I like the idea of inflation, largely because: (a) it’s very neat; and (b) it provides a simple mechanism for generating fluctuations of the right form to account for so many of the observable properties of our universe, especially the fluctuations we measure in the cosmic microwave background seen by Planck:
These observations don’t prove that inflation is right, nor do they narrow down the field of possible inflationary models very much, but they do seem to be in accord with the predictions of the simplest versions of the theory. Whether that remains true for planned and future observations remains to be seen. Should someone come up with a different theory that matches existing data and can account for something in future data that inflation can’t then I’m sure cosmologists would shift allegiance. The thing is we don’t have such an alternative at the moment. Inflation is the preferred theory, partly for want of compelling alternatives and partly because we need more data to test its predictions.
That said, there are one or two points on which I agree with Ijjas, Steinhardt and Loeb. In particular there has developed what I consider to be a pathological industry dreaming up countless variations of the basic inflation model. There is now a bewildering variety of such models, few of which have any physical motivation whatsoever. I think this is a particularly a grotesque manifestation of the absurd way we measure scientific `success’ in terms of counting publications and how that has driven unhealthy research practice.
No doubt many of you disagree or wish to comment for other reasons either on the original communications or on my comments. Please feel free to offer your thoughts through the box below!
Gene Krupa didn’t exactly invent the image of the drummer as a madman who sat at the back of the band, but he certainly cultivated it. He may sometimes have lacked subtlety in his playing, but he always injected a huge amount of energy into a performance whether in a small group (as here) or behind a big band.
His extrovert personality proved an excellent complement to the rather introverted bandleader Benny Goodman which, together with his undoubted technical ability, led to them having a very long working relationship. That said, Gene Krupa did leave the Goodman Orchestra in 1938 reportedly because Benny Goodman didn’t his drummer’s tendency to hog the limelight, insisting on taking a drum solo in just about every number. They did continue to work together for many years afterwards, however, as this clip demonstrates.
Many people credit Gene Krupa for basically inventing the modern drum kit and was certainly one of the first drummers in Jazz to be well known as a soloist and, indeed, the first to become a nationwide celebrity. He also inspired subsequent generations of drummers: Keith Moon of The Who was an admirer of Gene Krupa and I was told some years ago that Krupa also provided the inspiration for `Animal’, the drummer in the Muppet Show band.
People don’t generally realize what a smash hit Benny Goodman’s band was in the pre-War years – their fame was exactly on the scale of the `Beatlemania’ of a few decades later.
My Dad taught himself to play the drums using a book called The Gene Krupa Drum Method. I found his (very old and battered) copy of it among his personal effects after he died almost a decade ago and gave it – along with his drums, sticks, brushes, etc – to a local school. One thing that came from learning from a book was that he learnt to read drum music very well, which helped him get jobs with various dance bands. Few Jazz drummers of his generation could read music.
This performance, dating from the 1960s, represents a kind of reunion the three members of Benny Goodman’s famous trio of the 1930s (Goodman, Krupa and Teddy Wilson), along with bassist George Duvivier. I never really understood how that original trio managed to get away without having a bass player, but it was hugely popular and made a number of terrific records.
There’s a (somewhat rambling) verbal introduction by Benny Goodman, so I’ll restrict myself to a couple of observations. One is that Gene Krupa (who is clearly enjoying himself in this clip – watch him at about 3:07!) shows off the `trad’ grip very effectively. The other is that if you look closely at Teddy Wilson’s right hand you can see that he doesn’t have the use of his index finger, which he was unable to unbend. I believe that came about as the aftermath of a stroke and it caused him a lot of problems in later life although he carried on playing well into the 1980s. Anyway, he still plays very nicely, as do they all. Enjoy!
I was walking along Queen Street in Cardiff last night when I encountered a group of people – mainly women and children – singing and marching in front of me with flags, banners and photographs of men in uniform decorated with medals, all escorted by a couple of police officers. I couldn’t figure out who they were from behind so I caught up with them and asked one of their number what it was all about.
It turned out to be a local (Cardiff) version of the Immortal Regiment March, part of Russian celebrations of victory in World War Two (`The Great Patriotic War’) which take place on 10th May, one day later than our own VE Day. This is a huge event in Russia, involving many millions of people. The Cardiff event was, of course, relatively small but many of those marching were direct relatives of people who gave their lives during the Second World War. Those were the photographs they were carrying.
There has been a sizable Russian community in Cardiff for many years, large enough to sustain a Russian Orthodox Church and various community organizations throughout the city. More than a few of the academic staff of Cardiff University are of Russian origin. Yesterday’s march was a timely reminder not only of the horrors endured by so many on the Eastern front but also of the fact that Cardiff is a wonderfully cosmopolitan city.
Two spherically symmetric stars A and B of equal mass M and radius r have centres separated by a distance 6r. Ignoring any effects due to the orbital motion of the stars, determine a formula (in terms of G, M and r) for the minimum velocity with which material can be ejected from the surface of A so as to be captured by B.
Answers through the comments box please. First correct answer receives 7 points.
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In the Dark 