Today I made a journey by train to Kingswood, a suburb of Sydney which is the location of one of the campuses of Western Sydney University (WSU). The journey of about 50 km takes about an hour on the stopping train (T1) from Sydney Central Station. I was intrigued that the final destination for the train I got was Emu Plains; I had visions of vast herds of Emus gathered there, but I had to get off the stop before the terminus so never saw them. There’s about a 20-minute walk to the campus from Kingswood Station. It was quite warm so I was grateful when one of my hosts offered me a lift back to Kingswood Station at the end of my visit.
The reason for my visit was set another seminar about Open Access Publishing in Astrophysics. Here are the slides:
Although I’ve given a talk based on more-or-less the same slides recently, it always comes out slightly different. There was a bigger audience than I expected in the room, supplemented by even more on Zoom. The topic of Open Access Publishing does seem to be pretty hot these days in Australia and there was quite a lively discussion. I have a feeling we might have a manuscript or two submitted from WSU before too long.
Kingswood is a far less affluent area than where I am staying in Ultimo, and WSU is an institution that’s very different from the University of Sydney itself, but it was good to see another side of the city, geographically as well as socially. Thank you to everyone who attended and, especially, to Luke Barnes for inviting me and for lunch and coffee!
On the train back into Sydney I noticed that trains going in the opposite direction where crammed full, with (mostly) teenage girls heading to Olympic Park for a Taylor Swift concert. My train, heading into Sydney was fairly empty by contrast and the journey back pleasant enough.
I realized this morning, with a shock, that I only have one more week in Sydney so I decided to cross off another of my things to do by taking the ferry (F1) from Circular Quay to Manly, so I could have a view of the Pacific Ocean. The most fun was on the way back, when a yacht race was under way in Sydney Harbour. Lots of small boats had come out to get a good view, many of them right in the ferry path. An officer of the Harbour Police on a jet ski was buzzing around politely inviting the offenders to get out of the way. At one point a quite large boat came right across our bow and the captain of the ferry had to sound the alarm. No harm was done, but that clown could have caused a serious accident.
Anyway, there are lots of Manly things in Manly: a Manly Wharf, Manly Beach, a Manly Bank, Manly Pharmacy and, as you can see in one picture, Manly Paradise; there’s even, as pointed out to me by Richard Easther, Manly Astrophysics. I only stayed long enough to have a Manly beer and some Manly Fish & Chips before heading back to Circular Quay.
Here are some snaps.
Anyway, here are a few little videos from my instagram page:
Last night I fulfilled a longstanding ambition of mine, to see an opera at the Sydney Opera House. It wasn’t that easy to get tickets, but last night I managed to see Opera Australia’s production of La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi.
Foyer and BarJoan Sutherland Theatre
First a couple of comments about the Sydney Opera House. It is of course a splendid building but rather complicated inside, with surprising staircases and bizarre balconies. At dinner on Thursday, one of the locals here told me it is like a “1960s vision of The Future”, which is very apt. One of the nice things is that you can take your drink outside to get a breath of fresh air and a view of the harbour, which is very nice in the dark with all the lights from the boats and surrounding houses. The Joan Sutherland Theatre – where the operas are staged – is very nice. I have to say, though, that it’s a bit smaller than I’d anticipated. The seating capacity is just over 1500, while the Wales Millennium Centre – where Welsh National Opera perform – can seat 2500 people.
I took this picture from the Harbour Ferry
Sydney Opera House from the Harbour Ferry
The Joan Sutherland Theatre is actually in the slightly smaller edifice to the left; the other side is a Concert Hall. Anyway, the place has a nice ambience and very friendly staff. They even give out free programmes!
And so to the performance. The staging in this production is relatively simple, with the opulence of the Paris settings achieved by costumes and lighting rather than by scenery. In Act II Scene 1, when Violetta and Alfredo are in the country, the back of the set is opened out to give a view of gardens and a tree. This device returns to touching effect at the end; see below. Costumes and design are pretty much 19th Century, with some (deliberate) anachronisms in dress style for humorous effect.
The Opera is in three acts, lasting about 2 hours and 30 minutes with one interval. When I heard there was only one wine break interval I wondered how they would manage it without making the performance a bit lop-sided. In fact the break came between Scenes 1 and 2 of Act II, with the first scene performed as a continuation of Act 1 and Act III following directly from Scene 2. It worked well, with changes of costume and scenery achieved onstage by the cast in view of the audience.
This production has been running since December 2023 but the principals changed earlier this month (February). We saw Sophie Salvesani as Violetta, Tomas Dalton as Alfredo Germont, and Luke Gabbedy as Giorgio Germont (Alfredo’s Father); all of them Australian born and bred. The performance was sung in Italian.
La Traviata is one of the most enduringly popular of all operas – and is one of the most frequently performed. It’s quite curious that its first performance in Venice was a complete disaster and it took several revisions before it became established as part of the operatic repertoire. A production like the one we saw last night, however, makes it abundantly clear why it is such an evergreen classic. Act I in particular is just one memorable tune after another.
The opera is based on the novel La Dame Aux Caméliaswhich later became a play with the same name. It tells the story of Violetta, a glamorous courtesan and flamboyant darling of the Paris party scene. She meets a young chap called Alfredo at a spectacular do in her house in Act I and he tells her he’s completely in love with her. She laughs him off and he departs crestfallen. When the party’s over and he’s gone, though, she finds herself thinking about him. The trouble with Violetta is that she is already seriously ill with consumption (tuberculosis) at the start. She knows that she is doomed to die and is torn between her desire to be free and her growing love for Alfredo.
Cut to Act II, Scene I, a few months later. Violetta and Alfredo are shacked up in a love nest away from Paris. While Alfredo is away paying off some of Violetta’s bills, Alfredo’s father Giorgio turns up and tries to convince Violetta to abandon her relationship with his son because its scandalous nature threatens their family’s prospects, particular his daughter’s (Alfredo’s sisters) plans to get married. Violetta eventually agrees to do a runner. Alfredo returns and meets his father who tries to convince him to return to his family in Provence. Alfredo is distraught to hear of Violetta’s departure, refuses to go with his father, and vows to find Violetta again.
Scene 2 is back in Paris, at the house of a lady called Flora. There’s a lot of singing and dancing and general riotousness.Alfredo turns up, slightly the worse for drink and proceeds to gamble (winning a huge amout of money). Violetta turns up and Alfredo insults her by throwing his winnings at her. He’s then overcome by remorse but the Baron Douphol, a wealthy friend of Violetta, is outraged and challenges Alfredo to a duel.
Act III is set a few months later in Violetta’s bedroom where she’s clearly dying. Alfredo has run off after wounding the Baron in a duel. The doctor gives Violetta just a few hours to live. Alfredo returns. The lovers forgive each other and embrace. Violetta dies.
I thought Sophie Salvesani was a very convincing and sympathetic Violetta. She has a very nice, fluid voice and engaging stage presence. Violetta is a demanding role- there are several tricky coloratura passages to cope with – but her character is quite complicated too. Although we know she’s ill right from the start she’s not by any means a passive victim. She’s a courtesan who has clearly put it about a bit, but she’s also got a strong moral sense. She’s vulnerable, but also at times very strong.
All the cast sang very well, actually. I particularly liked the baritone of Luke Gabbedy (though even with his make up he looked too young to be Alfredo’s Daddy).
The look of the opera – staging, lighting and costumes – also worked very well. The Paris parties were riots of colour and movement with just as much debauchery as desired. The start of Act III finds the same set as Act I, bare apart from a Chaise Longue, bathed in a ghostly greenish light. A particularly moving touch was right at the end when Violetta is dying. Here last lines (and the last of the Opera) are:
È strano! Cessarono gli spasimi del dolore. In me rinasce – m’agita insolito vigor! Ah! ma io ritorno a viver! Oh gioia! (Ricade sul canapè.)
How strange! The spasms of pain have ceased: A strange vigour has brought me to life! Ah! I shall live – Oh, joy! (She falls down, senseless, upon the sofa.)
Most productions I have seen follow these directions but, in this one, before delivering these lines, Violetta stands up, while the other members of the cast present on stage – Alfredo, Giorgio, the maid Annina, and the Doctor – freeze as she sings the lines in full voice. The back of the set lifts up and shows the tree we saw in Act II and Violetta walks out into the sunshine while a double takes the place of the lifeless Violetta on the sofa. The implication is that she is already dead when she sings these last lines. It’s a powerful device, and puts quite a different perspective on the ending.
Anyway, congratulations to Opera Australia on an excellent production which I enjoyed greatly.
P.S. I’ll be going again to the Sydney Opera House next week, to see their Magic Flute.
I was just thinking this afternoon that I haven’t posted recently any of the Cosmology Talks curated by Shaun Hotchkiss, then I looked and found that I had the perfect excuse for doing so. This particular talk is actually about one of the two new OJAp papers I announced in my previous post, i.e. “The IA Guide: A Breakdown of Intrinsic Alignment Formalisms” and the authors are: Claire Lamman (Harvard, USA); Eleni Tsaprazi (Stockholm, Sweden); Jingjing Shi (Tokyo, Japan); Nikolina Niko Šarčević (Newcastle, UK); Susan Pyne (UCL, UK); Elisa Legnani (Barcelona, Spain); and Tassia Ferreira (Oxford, UK).
Here is Shaun’s description of the video:
Claire Lamman, Jingjing Shi, Niko Šarčević, Susan Pyne, Elisa Legnani and Tassia Ferreira tell us about the intrinsic alignments guide they wrote (along with Eleni Tsaprazi, who couldn’t make the video recording).
They wanted to write something that wasn’t quite a review, but also wasn’t quite a set of lecture notes. Instead they aimed for what might be best framed as a “cheat sheet” for intrinsic alignments. Everything you need to know about the topic, compressed into one article. However, there’s still a lot about the topic, so the compression is still 33 pages and 10 figures big.
To construct the guide they broke the topic of intrinsic alignments into sub-fields and then asked questions like “what are the key equations for this sub-field?”, “what are the different notations people use?”, “what might be confusing to a newcomer?” They then wrote the guide to answer those questions, even including subsections with quick definitions of each common term, and short lists of common alternative notations.
It’s Saturday morning in Sydney, and time to post another update relating to the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published two more papers, taking the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 15 and the total published by OJAp up to 130. I should have posted these before leaving but it slipped my mind.
The first paper of the most recent pair – published on Thursday 22nd February – is “Modelling cross-correlations of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays and galaxies” by Federico Urban (Prague, Czech Republic), Stefano Camera (Torino, Italy) and David Alonso (Oxford, UK). It presents a discussion of the possible statistical correlations between Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic-Ray (UHECR) directions in various models and structure in the galaxy distribution and whether or not this signal could be measurable. This one is in the folder marked “High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena“.
Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:
You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.
The second paper was published on Friday 23rd February and has the title “The IA Guide: A Breakdown of Intrinsic Alignment Formalisms” and the authors are: Claire Lamman (Harvard, USA); Eleni Tsaprazi (Stockholm, Sweden); Jingjing Shi (Tokyo, Japan); Nikolina Niko Šarčević (Newcastle, UK); Susan Pyne (UCL, UK); Elisa Legnani (Barcelona, Spain); and Tassia Ferreira (Oxford, UK). This one, which is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, presents a review of Intrinsic Alignments, i.e. physical correlations involving galaxy shapes, galaxy spins, and larger scale structure, especially important for weak gravitational lensing
Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:
You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.
Today has been the hottest day of my visit to Sydney (so far). It was already 30°C by 11am, and got warmer as the day went on, reaching 35°C by 3pm, reaching a peak of almost 37°C by 4 o’clock. I was struggling a bit by then, and decided to go back to my air-conditioned apartment for a rest. I got there just before the lovely rain came; no thunder or lightning today though.
I was prepared for the high temperatures here, but at this time of year it is very humid which I find much more difficult to deal with. The hottest place I have ever been in was Aswan in Egypt, where it was 48°C in the shade, but it was very dry and I didn’t find it all that troublesome. I was careful to drink plenty of water, as I could feel myself evaporating, but other than that it wasn’t all that bad. Years ago I went to New Orleans where the temperature was barely 30°C but the humidity so oppressive I could barely function at all, even at night.
Anyway, out of curiosity, I googled the highest temperature ever recorded in Sydney, which turns out to have been recorded at Penrith with a high of 48.9 °C (120 °F) on 4 January 2020. Yikes! Coincidentally, I am going to Penrith on Monday to give a talk at Western Sydney University. The forecast for there and then is a mere 28°C…
There’s a new paper in Science featuring observations using the MIRI and NIRSpec instruments on JWST of Supernova SN1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud. I couldn’t resist doing a short post about this result, partly because the paper features Maynooth colleague Paddy Kavanagh, and partly because I’m old enough to remember when this supernova was detected, in 1987. In fact I was doing my PhD at the time. When I started lecturing a few years later I used to use it as an example of a Type II (core-collapse) supernova. At first I would say “you will remember SN1987A” then, as the years passed, I realized that students would have been quite young in 1987 so I changed this to “some of you will remember SN1987A”. Still later, I realized that none of my students had even been born in 1987 so I forgot about the remembering bit and just talked about SN1987A. As of 2024, nobody under the age of 37 was born in 1987. Tempus has a distinct tendency to Fugit.
In 1987 I was in Sussex and I remember Roger Tayler getting very excited about the detection of anti-neutrinos from SN1987A at the Kamioka Observatory in Japan. There weren’t many – 12 altogether – but he wanted to do a statistical analysis of the arrival times to see if there was any evidence that might indicate the neutrinos had mass. Being rather “old-school”, he did a Monte Carlo experiment involving drawing numbers written on bits of paper out of a cardboard box. After a brief chat I suggested I could do a much better job using a random-number generator on a computer so I wrote a bit of code and did the computation. The results showed no evidence for neutrino mass.
Anyway, this type of supernova should produce a neutron star or black hole sitting inside a ring-shaped remnant. The ring has been well studied, but in 37 years of observation the central object has not been detected. The results in the latest paper (by Fransson et al.) involve a spectroscopic study of the emission lines of ionized argon from the SN1987a remnant at sufficiently high spectral resolution to map the velocity structure. The results suggest that ionizing radiation from a neutron star is illuminating gas from the inner parts of the remnant.
I just saw a press release about new results from the Dark Energy Survey relating to measurements of baryon acoustic oscillations. These are basically the residue of the oscillations seen in the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature distribution imprinted on the galaxy distribution. They are somewhat less obvious that the primordial temperature fluctuations because the growth of structure produces a much larger background but they are measurable (and indeed are one of the things Euclid will measure).
Anyway, there is a very nice detailed description in the press release and you can find the preprint of the work in full on arXiv here, so I’ll just show the key figure:
The effective redshift of this measurement is about 0.85; in the CMB the redshift is about 1000. You can see that there is a characteristic scale but it is slightly offset from that predicted using the standard ΛCDM model based on the Planck determination of cosmological parameters. One has to be careful in interpreting this diagram because it is determined using autocorrelation functions; the errors on different bins are therefore correlated, not statistically independent. They are also, as you can see, quite large. Nonetheless, it’s a tantalizing result…
After an exciting start to the day involving a fire alarm and consequent evacuation of my hotel, I today ventured into the suburbs of Sydney via the Light Rail system (i.e. the tram) to the University of New South Wales. The tram ride took about 20 minutes from Central and, incidentally, took me right past the Sydney Cricket Ground. Anyway, the UNSW campus at Kensington is very impressive:
After a few gremlins with the WIFI connection, the talk I gave was a longer version of the one I did at the University of Sydney on Monday. In discussions with the Astrophysics group at UNSW, I found they were particularly unhappy about the decision of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society to charge a high level of APC (Article Processing Artificial Profit Charge) so is looking at alternative journals that aren’t so exploitative. A journal has no right to call itself “open access” if it excludes researchers on grounds of cost. The problem with the Open Journal of Astrophysics in this case is that they need their publications to be in “high impact journals” for research assessment purposes, and OJAp doesn’t have an “official” journal impact factor yet. The fascination of bureaucrats with the obviously flawed journal impact factor disturbs me greatly but I hope we will have one soon so we may be able to help them out before too long.
As you can see, it works pretty well for this example.
Naturally I tried out the new “beta” release of the HTML generator, which you can now find on the right-hand panel of the abstract page alongside the PDF download instead of fiddling around with the URL. Here is an example of one of our papers on which it works well:
You can see the reason for the failure, which is that the LaTex used to generate the paper contains a package the HTML generator does not know about. One of the difficulties for arXiv is that new packages are always being developed and it is hard to keep up. I’m told that on average arXiv achieves ~75% successful conversions (and 97% partial success), but the articles from January 2024 (which contain more new packages) convert with a success rate of only 62%. It’s far from perfect, but it will improve -especially if authors follow the advice on best practice produced by arXiv; I actually think authors have a responsibility to help arXiv as much as possible in this regard.
This all reminds me of past experiences I’ve had teaching theoretical physics to blind and partially-sighted students. Years ago this used to involve making Braille copies of notes, but there are now various bits of software to help such people manage LaTeX both for creating and reading documents. In particular there are programs that can read Latex documents (including formulae and equations) which means that if a lecturer can supply LaTeX source version of their notes, the student can hear them spoken out loud as well as make their own annotations/corrections. While HTML may well be better for some fields, I do wonder if physicists and other people in disciplines that make heavy use of mathematics might prefer to use the LaTeX source code which is already downloadable from arXiv?
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In the Dark 