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 (except for this year when it was moved at the behest of some old Queen).
Although I’m only at beginners’ level in Irish, the phrase Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh gives me a chance to bore you about it. It’s actually quite a straightforward phrase until you reach the last word: “Lá” means “day” and “Saoire” means “leave” or “vacation” so “Lá Saoire” means “holiday”; “i” is a prepositional pronoun meaning “in” and “mí” means “month”. So far so good.
The word for June however is Meitheamh (at least when it is in the nominative singular case). As an Indo-European language, Irish is distantly related to Latin which has six grammatical cases for nouns (actually seven if you count the rarely used locative case). Irish has only four cases – there’s no ablative and, curiously, no real distinction between nominative and accusative (though there is for some pronouns). That leaves nominative, dative, genitive, and vocative. The dative case– used after simple prepositions – is only rarely distinct from the nominative so basically the ones you have to learn are the genitive and the vocative.
Whereas in Latin cases are indicated by changes to the end of noun, in Irish they involve initial mutations. In the example of “mí Mheitheamh” meaning “month of June”, requiring the genitive form of “June”, the initial consonant “M” undergoes lenition (softening) to sound more like a “v”. In old Irish texts this would be indicated by a dot over the M but in modern orthography it is indicated by writing an “h” after the consonant. This is called a séimhiú (pronounced “shay-voo” ). Note the softened m in the middle of that word too but it’s not a mutation – it’s just part of the regular spelling of the word, as is the -mh at the end of Meitheamh. There’s also a softened “t” in the middle of Meitheamh which makes it vrtually disappear in pronunciation. Meitheamh is thus pronounced something like “Meh-hiv” whereas “Mheitheamh” is something like “Veh-hiv”.
Anyway, here’s a picture of Maynooth University Library Cat.
Last week I was chatting to one of my colleagues about old films, particularly those made in the immediate post-war years by Ealing Studios. Nowadays this film production company is most strongly associated with superb comedy films, including such classics as Passport to Pimlico, Whisky Galore, The Ladykillers and The Lavender Hill Mob among many more. But there was more to Ealing Studios than the Ealing Comedies. During the war the company was involved in making propaganda films to help with the war effort, most of which are now forgettable but at least one, Went the Day Well, about people in an English village attempting to resist ruthless German paratroopers, is genuine shocking to this day because of its unusually frank depiction (for the time) of brutality and violence in a normally tranquil and familiar setting. The image of Thora Hird taking on the invaders with a Lee Enfield rifle is one that stays in my mind.
Horror films were banned during the War but in 1945 Ealing Studios released one which was to become enormous influential in the genre and which holds up extremely well to this day. As a matter of fact, I watched it again, for the umpteenth time, last night.
I’ve actually blogged about a bit of this film before. There is a sequence (to me by far the scariest in the film) about a ventriloquist (played by Michael Redgrave) who is gradually possessed by his evil dummy which came up in a post I did about Automatonophobia many moons ago.
Anyway, you only have to watch Dead of Night to watch it to appreciate why it its held in such high regard by critics to this day. Indeed you can see ideas in it which have been repeated in a host of subsequent (and usually inferior) horror flicks. I’m not going to spoil it by saying too much about the plot. I would say though that it’s basically a portmanteau film, i.e. a series of essentially separate stories (to the extent of having a different director for each such segment) embedded within an overall narrative. It also involves an intriguing plot device similar to those situations in which you are dreaming, but in the dream you wake up and don’t know whether you’re actually awake or still dreaming.
In this film the architect Walter Craig arrives at a country cottage, is greeted by his host Elliot Foley who has invited him to discuss possible renovations of the property. He is shown into a room with several other guests. Despite apparently never having been to the property before it seems strangely familiar and despite never having met the guests before he says he has seen them all in a recurring dream. One by one the guests recount strange stories. When they’ve all had their turn the film reaches a suitably nightmarish ending but Craig then wakes up in bed at home and realizes it was all a dream. Then the phone rings and it’s Elliot Foley inviting him to his country cottage to discuss possible renovations. The film ends with Craig arriving at the cottage just as he did at the start of the film.
Here is the trailer:
It’s the “dream-within-a-dream” structure (presumably repeated forever) – what physicists would call a self-similar hierarchy – of the overall framework of this movie that gives it its particular interest from the point of view of this blog, because it played an important role in the evolution of theoretical cosmology. One evening in 1946 the mathematicians and astrophysicts Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi and Tommy Gold went to see Dead of Night in Cambridge. Discussing the film afterwards they came up with the idea of the steady state cosmology, the first scientific papers about which were published in 1948. For the best part of two decades this theory was a rival to the now-favoured “Big Bang” (a term coined by Fred Hoyle which was intended to be a derogatory description of the opposing theory).
In the Big Bang theory there is a single “creation event”, so this particular picture of the Universe has a definite beginning, and from that point the arrow of time endows it with a linear narrative. In the steady state theory, matter is created continuously in small bits (via a hypothetical field called the C-field) so the Universe has no beginning and its time evolution not unlike that of the film.
Modern cosmologists sometimes dismiss the steady state cosmology as a bit of an aberration, a distraction from the One True Big Bang but it was undeniably a beautiful theory. The problem was that so many of its proponents refused to accept the evidence that they were wrong. Supporters of disfavoured theories rarely change their minds, in fact. The better theory wins out because younger folk tend to support it, while the recalcitrant old guard defending theirs in spite of the odds eventually die out.
And another thing. If Fred Hoyle had thought of it he might have called the field responsible for creating matter a scalar field, rather than the C-field, and it would now be much more widely recognized that he (unwittingly) invented many elements of modern inflationary cosmology. In fact, in some versions of inflation the Universe as a whole is very similar to the steady state model, only the continuous creation is not of individual particles or atoms, but of entire Big-Bang “bubbles” that can grow to the size of our observable Universe. So maybe the whole idea was actually right after all..
As my only contribution to the ongoing Platinum Jubilee celebrations, here’s a classic record that’s almost as old as Queen Elizabeth II and is by a prominent member of the Jazz nobility, the Duke of Ellington.
As far as I know this is the first recording of Jubilee Stomp, made in early 1928, though the band made several other versions. At the time this one was made, Duke Ellington’s Orchestra had just started as the house band at the famous Cotton Club in Harlem which soon established the venue as the hottest nightspot in New York. That almost didn’t happen: the residency was initially offered to King Oliver, but he wanted too much money and so it passed to the second choice, Duke Ellington. The rest, as they say, his history.
Anyway, this is a digitally remastered version of the original Okeh recording, which brings out the best of the Ellington Band of that time, especially the great Wellman Braud who introduced the style of walking bass that quickly established itself as a mainstay of every rhythm section.
This version of Ellington’s Orchestra was actually only a ten-piece band, but it was packed with great soloists and you’ll hear superb growl trumpet from James “Bubber” Miley, clarinet from Barney Bigard, and trombone from Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton, among others. There’s also a nice example of the piano style of the young Duke Ellington himself. Enjoy!
Posted in Biographical on June 4, 2022 by telescoper
Time passes.
Today, as I find myself another year older, I was thinking back over what things of a personal nature have happened in the last ten years. In that time I moved from Cardiff to Sussex and back to Cardiff and then here to Maynooth.
When I was chatting to John Ellis over lunch at the ITP meeting last week he said to me “You move around quite a lot, don’t you?”. I replied “Yes, that has been remarked upon”. He seemed to think that was funny.
I don’t think I’ll be moving jobs again. Sometime in the next ten years I’ll be retiring, hopefully sooner rather than later. At any rate in less than three months I’ll be stepping down as Head of Department, hopefully spending more time on teaching and research and less on pointless bullshit.
Another notable thing that happened in the last decade was that I had a nervous breakdown. I spent a few weeks in a psychiatric institution but recovered well enough to return to work quite quickly. Fortunately, and contrary to my pessimistic expectations, and despite the stresses caused by the pandemic, I have suffered no significant recurrences and am now not even taking any medication (unless you count wine). So that’s all good.
The last ten years also saw my Mam cruelly taken by dementia; she passed away in 2019. Now all my grandparents and both my parents have gone.
The other thing I realised today is that I am now older than my late collaborator and colleague Francesco Lucchin, with whom I wrote a cosmology text book, was when he passed away twenty years ago, in 2002.
Time passes.
Anyway, I’ve done very little today except relax, read and listen to music and to complete the self-indulgence I’m now going to cook dinner and drink some wine while I watch some football on the telly.
David Matravers, pictured on his 80th birthday in December 2017 (Picture Credit: ICG)
I was very sad this morning to hear via George Ellis of the death at the age of 84 of David Matravers. A South African by borth, David moved to (then) Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1990, just before it became the University of Portsmouth, where he set up a group in cosmology and relativity with the Mathematics Department. Though initially small, that group grew steadily branching out into other areas, including observational cosmology, and became, in 2002, the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation which is recognized throughout the world as a centre of excellence in research. I see it did particularly well in the recent Research Excellence Framework, for example.
NOTE: I am grateful to David Wands for pointing out that David Matravers wasn’t the first Director of the ICG as I said in an earlier version of this post: that was Roy Maartens. David Matravers actually retired just as the ICG was being set upbut played a huge role in its creation.
David Matravers is rightly regarded as its founding father of research in cosmology and gravitation at Portsmouth. He therefore leaves a wonderful legacy not only in the ICG itself but in the many alumni who have passed through it at various stages of their careers and are now carrying on their work all around the globe.
During the 1990s I saw David Matravers quite regularly as he visited Queen Mary & Westfield College where I was working at the time to attend our relativity seminars and talk to the relativity group. He was a very cheerful and engaging chap who was always keen to encourage early career researchers. I was in that category at the time and, although I never worked directly with David, he was always very kind and supportive to me. What struck me in particular about him were his enthusiasm and determination, which is no doubt why he was so successful at building up the ICG from scratch. He will be greatly missed.
My condolences to his friends, colleagues and family.
We’ve at last managed to finish marking and collating examination scripts, coursework and project reports of various types and the provisional results are all uploaded to the system. I have to say that marking examinations on paper is much less of a chore than doing digital submissions online, though it is still not exactly a simple task and I’m glad it’s over for another year.
Tomorrow morning we’ll have a relatively informal “Pre-Board” meeting to go double-check the results and discuss any isues arising before the full Departmental Examination Board which takes place next week. That’s just for the Department of Theoretical Physics but we also do teaching for the Department of Engineering and there are Pre-Boards and Full Boards for those too.
In between now and the Full Boards we have a Bank Holiday weekend. Not the extravaganza going on over the Irish Sea concerning the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, just the regular Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh we have every year. In any case, there’s more than one old Queen having a celebration this weekend. A nice thing about living in Ireland is that my birthday is always in close proximity to a national holiday.
But I digress.
The Departmental Examination Boards do not quite mark the end of the examinations business for the academic year, as we have the Final Final Examination Board after all the Departmental ones. That is when marks from all Departments come together to determine the final results for students who are taking degrees in combinations of subjects. The Department of Theoretical Physics has quite a number of students doing Joint Honours with Mathematics, for example, and we don’t won’t know their final results until we see how their Mathematics has gone. It does add an extra level to the process, but I think that’s a price worth paying for the flexibility we offer to students through joint programmes.
This final Examination Board takes place on 22nd June and students will get their marks a couple of days later on 24th June. We have an official Consultation Day (28th June) the following week during which students can get feedback on their examinations as well as discussing options for choices to be made ahead of next year. Even that won’t be the end, because some students will be taking repeat examinations in August, but at least it signals a gap in the assessment cycle during which we can hopefully think of other things for a while.
This year has been challenging, to say the least. There was a piece in the Irish Times recently discussing concerns about lack of student engagement, poor lecture attendance and high dropout rates for students in Irish universities. I discussed some of the reasons for this here. Obviously, until our results are finalized I can’t say anything specific about the impact of all these difficulties on our students, but the post-Covid turmoil undoubtedly has had a significant impact on many students and a severe impact on some. It remains to be seen precisely what the scale of the problem is and what we can do to mitigate it.
The general turbulence in the wake of the pandemic, which is unavoidable, has been exacerbated in my Department by serious staffing issues resulting from deliberate management decisions. This combination has created a perfect storm which in my view could easily have been avoided. I shall refrain from commenting further, except to say that it will take some time to sort out and we’ll probably have similar – though hopefully less severe – issues next year.
One of the difficulties faced by students this summer is that they would not have done traditional written examinations for two years before this May’s set. The online timed assessments we deployed during the pandemic were of “open-book” style but the unseen written papers on campus are not. The challenge posed by these two types of examination are different, and it remains to be seen how well the students – especially those in Years 1 and 2 – have coped with the abrupt switch. Those who get disappointing results will have the opportunity to take repeat examinations (on campus) and those who disengaged entirely will have the chance to repeat the year in full if they so desire, so all is not lost!
Another sign of our gradual emergence from the pandemic is that our Examination Board meeting next week will be attended in person by the External Examiner. She wasn’t able to get here last year owing to illness so it will be nice to have her present at the Exam Boards and, hopefully, at dinner afterwards.
It’s 1st June 2022, which means that it’s the first day of Pride Month 2022. This year there’s actually going to be an in-person Pride Festival with a March and Parade in Dublin of which I’m planning to attend at least part, even if I am obviously too old for that sort of thing.
Anyway, I thought I’d flag this occasion with a selection of banners. Here is the traditional rainbow flag:
Here is the banner from Dublin Pride’s website, more accurately emphasizing the full spectrum of diversity covered by the term LGBTQIA+ than the original rainbow flag.
And here is the Pride Progress flag, hoisted today outside the John Hume Building on Maynooth University campus where it will remain for the rest of the month.
With its origins as a commemoration of the Stonewall Riots of 1969, Pride remains both a celebration and protest. It’s more necessary than ever now because of the sustained abuse being aimed at trans people from all quarters, including those in political power and those sad losers who have nothing better to do that spend all day tweeting their bigotry on social media. Bigots will always be bigots, but the lowest of the low are those that masquerade as some sort of progressive while spouting their hate and prejudice.
Anyway, as well as a celebration and a protest, Pride is an opportunity for us all to show solidarity against those who seek to divide us.
Though many LGBTQIA+ people in many countries – even those that claim to be more liberal – still face discrimination, hostility and violence, Pride Month always reminds me of how far we’ve come in the past 50 years ago. Recently my own celebration of Pride is very subdued as it tends to makes me feel old and irrelevant as well as worried that we might be headed back to the bigotry and intolerance of the past; the rights we have won could so easily be taken away.
As I get older, I find I have become more and more protective towards younger LGBT+ people. I don’t want them to have to put up with the crap that I did when I was their age.
I would like to wish all LGBTQIA+ people around the world, but especially staff and students at Maynooth University, a very enjoyable and inspiring Pride 2022!
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In the Dark 