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Value for Money?

Posted in Art, Biographical, Finance, Science Politics with tags , , , , , on February 4, 2010 by telescoper

Looking at the BBC website at lunchtime while I munched a sandwich I’d bought for £1.40, the item that really caught my eye was a story about the sale of a sculpture at Sotheby’s for £65 million. The starting price for this particular work (L’Homme qui Marche by Alberto Giacometti) was set at £12 million, but only took a few minutes for the bidding to reach its final level. An anonymous bidder now gets to keep the sculpture, which will probably now be kept in a private location, or possibly even a bank vault.

Let me make it clear at the start that I’m not going to embark on a rant about modern art in general or Giacometti in particular. A couple of years ago I went to an exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in Louisiana, just north of Copenhagen (in Denmark) and I found his strange elongated figures really fascinating. He started out making small ones that he stretched and scratched  obsessively to get the shape he wanted. Over time the figures got larger, but he didn’t make many of them. I suppose the rarity of his work has something to do with why they are so valuable, which they obviously are.

But when I say they’re fascinating, I don’t necessarily mean £65 million worth of fascinating….

The point that has always really fascinated me about this sort of thing is exactly how something can acquire such an absurdly high commercial value and what it is that makes any collector decide to pay such a huge price. A work of art obviously has some intrinsic worth, but there doesn’t seem to me to be any simple relation between aesthetic, technical or historical considerations and the market value. That’s not just the case for modern art, either. Go to the Louvre in Paris and you’ll see hordes of people clamouring around a small, drab and frankly rather uninteresting painting called the   Mona Lisa –  and ignoring the dozens of wonderful things all around them in the same room, and even in the corridor leading to it. Some process – I don’t know what – has assigned a particular status to this painting and not to others which seem to me to have at least as much value, in an artistic sense. Not that I’ve any right claim my judgement is any better than anyone else’s, of course.

A similarly mysterious process goes on with other collectible things. Take wine, for example. I like a glass of wine now and then – or rather more often than that, if truth be told. I am, however, very fortunate that I don’t have a particularly discerning palate. I can tell the difference between cheap-and-nasty stuff and pretty good stuff but, generally speaking, my taste has saturated by the time the price reaches about £25 a bottle, and often long before that. That’s great because it means I can have a perfectly enjoyable evening drinking a bottle costing £15 when if I’d been an expert I would be unsatisfied unless I spent a lot more.

Years ago I went with a friend of mine to a house clearance in rural Sussex. He was an interior designer and he liked to buy old furniture from country houses and do it up to sell on. It’s a good plan, actually – old furniture is far better made than the modern stuff. Anyway in the middle of a whole load of junk was a case of vintage wine. Not just any wine, either. It was, in fact, Chateau Petrus – one of the finest Pomerols. It wasn’t a specialist auction, however, and nobody seemed to think it had any value. Bidding was slow when it came up in front of the auctioneer so I bid for it. In the end I bought the case (12 bottles) for about £300. When I got it home I realised what I had got. It turned out £300 per bottle would have been cheap. I was scared to open any of the bottles in case the wine was off or I didn’t like it, so I put it away. I sold the case some years later for about £6500.

Having told that story though, my main point is to wonder out loud about those wines that cost thousands of pounds per bottle. There is a roaring trade in these things – even ones that are two hundred years old – but I don’t think their value has anything to do with how  they are likely to taste. In the local wine merchant – conveniently located about 20 yards from my house – price is a good indicator of taste, but the scaling doesn’t apply at the extreme end of the fine wine market. Some other process is involved.

A house also  has a value that doesn’t have anything to do with anything other than what someone will pay to buy it.  But what sets this price? The market, obviously, but that is guided and controlled by Estate Agents who influence values in strange and subtle ways.

I suppose this all just goes to show I don’t know anything about economics, a point I’m now no doubt going to reinforce.

Governments also have to decide how much to spend on different things: health, education, defence, and so on. You can argue with the way their priorities work out at any given time, but the thing that baffles me is what the process is that leads to a decision to spend X on hospitals and Y on education. How can anyone possibly decide the relative value of £1 spent on health versus £1 spent on education?

I strongly support the notion that the government should support the performing arts, such as  the Opera. But how much it should spend is an unfathomable question to me. Some will say nothing, some would say more. Who decides? Clearly someone does.

And that brings us back home to science. The ongoing ructions about the financial crisis  at the Science and Technology Facilities Council –  unfolding in front of a parliamentary select committee –  seem to me to be really about the process by which value is assigned different bits of science by the people who hold the purse strings but probably don’t know much at all about science. I place a high value on astronomical research and, within that field, on cosmology. But that’s a personal judgement. Others will disagree. We all end up working in those areas we find  more interesting than the others so we can’t really be unbiased, but I think I’m more even-handed than many when it comes to the scientific merits of other fields. Having said that, it would take a lot of doing to convince me that the scientific value for money involved in sending, say, another probe to the Moon was anything like as high as, say, exploiting the full potential of the Herschel observatory.

Worse still, all spending on  blue skies research looks like to be cut back severely at the expense of shorter-term activity that leads to immediate commercial spinoffs. Commerce clearly trumps curiosity in the value game. If the STFC debacle was – as certainly seems likely to me – the result of a deliberate high-level decision, then who was it and what were their reasons for placing so little value on the quest to understand the most fundamental properties of the Universe?

And why doesn’t science have patrons like the anonymous buyer of the Giacometti figure? £65 million would solve an awful lot of STFC’s problems, as long as we stop certain people from wasting it on silly moon missions….

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Tate Collection | Gordon’s Makes Us Drunk by Gilbert & George

Posted in Art with tags on December 11, 2009 by telescoper

I don’t know about you, but I think this is brilliant….

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more about “Tate Collection | Gordon’s Makes Us D…“, posted with vodpod

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Critical Theory

Posted in Art, Music, Science Politics with tags , , , , , on August 18, 2009 by telescoper

Critics say the stangest things.

How about this, from James William Davidson, music critic of The Times from 1846:

He has certainly written a few good songs, but what then? Has not every composer that ever composed written a few good songs? And out of the thousand and one with which he deluged the musical world, it would, indeed, be hard if some half-dozen were not tolerable. And when that is said, all is said that can justly be said of Schubert.

Or this, by Louis Spohr, written in 1860 about Beethoven’s Ninth (“Choral”) Symphony

The fourth movement is, in my opinion, so monstrous and tasteless and, in it’s grasp of Schiller’s Ode, so trivial that I cannot understand how a genius like Beethoven could have written it.

No less an authority than  Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Fifth Edition) had this to say about Rachmaninov

Technically he was highly gifted, but also severely limited. His music is well constructed and effective, but monotonous in texture, which consists in essence mainly of artificial and gushing tunes…The enormous popular success some few of Rachmaninov’s works had in his lifetime is not likely to last and musicians regarded it with much favour.

And finally, Lawrence Gillman wrote this in the New York Tribune of February 13 1924 concerning George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue:

How trite and feeble and conventional the tunes are; how sentimental and vapid the harmonic treatment, under its disguise of fussy and futile counterpoint! Weep over the lifelessness of the melody and harmony, so derivative, so stale, so inexpressive.

I think I’ve made my point. We all make errors of judgement and music critics are certainly no exception. The same no doubt goes for literary and art critics too. In fact,  I’m sure it would be quite easy to dig up laughably inappropriate comments made by reviewers across the entire spectrum of artistic endeavour. Who’s to say these comments are wrong anyway? They’re just opinions. I can’t understand anyone who thinks so little  of Schubert, but then an awful lot of people like to listen what sounds to me to be complete dross. There even appear to be some people who disagree with the opinions I expressed yesterday!

What puzzles me most about the critics is not that they make “mistakes” like these – they’re only human after all – but why they exist in the first place. It seems extraordinary to me that there is a class of people who don’t do anything creative themselves  but devote their working lives to criticising what is done by others. Who should care what they think? Everyone is entitled to an opinion, of course, but what is it about a critic that implies we should listen to their opinion more than anyone else?

(Actually, to be precise, Louis Spohr was also a composer but I defy you to recall any of his works…)

Part of the idea is that by reading the notices produced by a critic the paying public can decide whether to go to the performance, read the book or listen to the record. However, the correlation between what is critically acclaimed and what is actually good (or even popular) is tenuous at best. It seems to me that, especially nowadays with so much opinion available on the internet, word of mouth (or web) is a much better guide than what some geezer writes in The Times. Indeed, the   Opera reviews published in the papers are so frustratingly contrary to my own opinion that I don’t  bother to read them until after the performance, perhaps even after I’ve written my own little review on here.  Not that I would mind being a newspaper critic myself. The chance not only to get into the Opera for free but also to get paid for spouting on about afterwards sounds like a cushy number to me. Not that I’m likely to be asked.

In science,  we don’t have legions of professional critics, but reviews of various kinds are nevertheless essential to the way science moves forward. Applications for funding are usually reviewed by others working in the field and only those graded at the very highest level are awarded money.  The powers-that-be are increasingly trying to impose political criteria on this process, but it remains a fact that peer review is the crucial part of the process. It’s not just the input that is assessed either. Papers submitted to learned journals are reviewed by (usually anonymous)  referees, who often require substantial changes to be made the work can be accepted for publication.

We have no choice but to react to these critics if we want to function as scientists. Indeed, we probably pay much more attention to them than artists do of critics in their particular fields. That’s not to say that these referees don’t make mistakes either. I’ve certainly made bad decisions myself in that role,  although they were all made in good faith. I’ve also received comments that I thought were unfair or unjustifiable, but at least I knew they were coming from someone who was a working scientist.

I suspect that the use of peer review in assessing grant applications will remain in place for a some considerable time. I can’t think of an alternative, anyway. I’d much rather have a rich patron so I didn’t have to bother writing proposals all the time, but that’s not the way it works in either art or science these days.

However, it does seem to me that the role of referees in the publication process is bound to become redundant in the very near future. Technology now makes it easy to place electronic publications on an archive where they can be accessed freely. Good papers will attract attention anyway, just as they would if they were in refereed journals. Errors will be found. Results will be debated. Papers will be revised. The quality mark of a journal’s endorsement is no longer needed if the scientific community can form its own judgement, and neither are the monstrously expensive fees charged to institutes for journal subscriptions.

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Space Experiments

Posted in Art, Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on May 9, 2009 by telescoper

I’ve been disconnected from the blogosphere for a few days,  as one of the consequences of a very interesting trip  to Berlin from which I’ve just returned.

When I received an invitation a few months ago to give a lecture on cosmology at the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Space Experiments), I first thought that the “space experiment” concerned would be the forthcoming Planck mission, which is now firmly scheduled for launch on the afternoon of 14th May 2009. However, the institute I visited  is in fact part of the Universität der Künste Berlin (Arts University of Berlin) . It’s a new project run by Olafur Eliasson, a famous artist and a Professor at the University and I was one of a series of guests invited to talk to the students about various aspects of space and time. Olafur was one of the people behind the Experiment Marathon in Reykjavik which was almost exactly a year ago, and he’d decided to invite me to his new institute here and now as a result of my contribution there and then.

I was quite apprehensive about doing this because I’m really extremely ignorant about art, and didn’t want to appear too much of a philistine. I therefore decided to prepare a talk that was focussed strongly on the science but with just one or two references to works of art.  It turned out that the artist Matthew Ritchie was also around and keen to participate so we decided to do a joint presentation.

The eminent art historian Caroline Jones from MIT also sat in, contributing to the discussion and adding her own insights along the way

Matthew spoke first about how art can draw ideas and inspiration from scientific thought and argued that this was especially relevant today when science is so full of strange and wonderful concepts. Along the way he demonstrated an unexpectedly deep understanding of subjects such as thermodynamics, relativity and quantum theory.

I then took over and talked about cosmology, trying to focus on the interplay between theory and observation in order to convey some sort of idea of how the process of science actually works in this field.  I was particularly keen to get across the idea that we haven’t made scientific progress in cosmology by merely looking and recording. We have had needed to build theoretical frameworks to help us interpret what we see and to plan new observations.

Although we’d only discussed things for a few minutes before the event, as it turned out the two talks dovetailed rather nicely, I think.

When I was finished, Matthew finished by showing some of his own works which are complex, multi-faceted, multi-media creations evocations of and responses to ideas often, but not exclusively, arising from theoretical physics. The photograph above shows one of his installations. I haven’t seen his work up close, but it struck me as astonishingly inventive but at the same time possessing a great unity about it. His works are extremely diverse but they all seem to have a very distinctive signature all of his own.

After the talks and lots of discussion we adjourned for a nice dinner in a local bistro with some of the students who carried on asking about various bits of physics, such as the possible existence of  closed timelike curves. I was delighted by the intensity of their curiosity, which went far beyond that displayed by most physics students!

These days there seem to be quite a lot of initiatives aimed at promoting a dialogue between art and science although most of them don’t seem to be very successful. Science and art are obviously quite different types of activity. Each is also surrounded by a discursive penumbra of metaphors and simplifications that attempts to articulate what is going on inside the field to those outside. Not all artists try to explain their work in this way and neither do all scientists. Often the result is that the arts-science dialogue is simply a coming together of relatively superficial interpretations that does not really bring the core domains any closer. What is particularly impressive about Matthew Ritchie is that he does seem to have deeper insights into science than many artists and he responds to those insights in a way that is highly original.

The other thing that struck me after taking part in this event was the difference between art as a process and the products of that process in terms of “works of art”. Similar  processes are involved in making art as are needed in science, such as those involving problem-solving about how to implement an idea in a painting, sculpture or an equation. What differs is that works of art are, to a greater or lesser extent, consumable by the general public while those of science are not.

 The invitation to do this talk also gave me the chance to take a trip down the Unter den Linden of my memory. I’ve actually been to Berlin twice before. Once, about 25 years ago when I was a student, and then again in the early 90s when I attended a conference in Potsdam.

This time I stayed in a charming but rather antiquated hotel in the Prenzlauer Berg area of the city. Before 1989 this was in East Berlin, on the “wrong” side of the Berlin Wall. It had, however, escaped the total devastation that rained down on most of the rest of Berlin during the later stages of the war and it managed to retain much of its interesting architecture. After reunification it became a rather bohemian area and many artists set up studios there, which is presumably part of the reason my hosts had located there. Prenzlauer Berg had also been a major centre for Berlin’s sizeable  beer-making industry. One of the larger breweries has now been transformed into an exciting arts centre called the Kulturbrauerei and the Institut fur Raümexperimente is itself also housed in buildings that were once part of a brewery.  In fact, the whole area was built in the 19th century, itself a kind of space experiment, and still incorporates many features arising from its origins as an innovative piece of urban planning.

When I first came to the cityof Berlin in 1985 I stayed in the West – with its ostentatiously exuberant and uninhibited nightlife, West Berlin was an amazing place to visit in those days. I did, however, have a pass to travel to the East for a day. I remember walking through Checkpoint Charlie, on Friedrichstrasse, after passing through Potsdammerplatz south of the  Brandenburg Gate and looking eastwards across the strip of waste ground that had been levelled to create a killing zone for  escapees coming in the other direction. The transition from affluent and colourful West Berlin to the dreary drabness of the East was like swtiching channels to find a black-and-white movie on view. It was also frightening because everywhere you looked there were guns pointed at you, especially on the return leg from East to West. I also remember thinking how much the shoddy and unimaginative postwar architecture of East Berlin reminded me of Wolverhampton.

The drastic social and political experiment that lay behind the Berlin Wall was ultimately a failure, but its legacy will only slowly vanish. There are still signs of it even today, almost twenty years after the Wall fell in a metaphorical sense.

This time I reversed my previous path, starting out in the East and walking to the West. This time both sides were in glorious colour. In fact, it was a lovely spring morning and there were tourists everywhere.

Very little of the wall now remains. When I came in the 90s, just  a few years after the momentous events of 1989, much of it was still intact although there was a big gap in the central section. The killing zone was a strip of rubble-strewn ground which it was possible to walk over without any real hindrance.  Hitler’s bunker was located there too, although its position wasn’t advertised for fear of it becoming some kind of grisly  shrine.

At that time path of the wall through the city was easy to follow by eye as it was marked by the tall cranes involved in massive construction projects aimed at removing the scar that the wall had carved across the face of the city.

Returning now to the same location, I found new buildings covering almost all of the old cold war stuff but, in between the offices and administrative buildings, there is also a sombre and very moving Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Checkpoint Charlie has gone too, of course, but its site is also marked by a museum. Elsewhere in the city only one or two pieces of the wall remain, the biggest one in Bernauer Strasse, not far from my hotel.

It was fascinating to see the how the city slowly is renewing itself. There is still a huge amount of building going on but it’s a wonderful city to move around and it’s very green. The wide boulevards give a tremendous sense of space which contrasts enormously with the creeping claustrophobia of London.

Back from Berlin on Friday lunchtime I had time to pop into the RAS meeting and dine again at the RAS Club before returning on the late train back to Cardiff, bringing closure to a little space-like curve of my own. 

A short trip, but  fascinating and very enjoyable.

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Jorunn Monrad

Posted in Art with tags , on April 23, 2009 by telescoper

Off the Wall is a small contemporary art gallery in Llandaff, about 15 minutes walk from my home in Pontcanna, Cardiff.  I went there this evening to a private view of some works by Norwegian artist Jorunn Monrad, who lives and works in Milan.

The artist herself was there and I got the chance to talk to her over a glass or two of pink champagne after looking at the paintings.

The works on view in her exhibition were all made this year, and they were produced with a technique developed in the Middle Ages that involves egg and casein tempera. The paintings are brilliantly coloured abstract works that involve structures built up  from representations of tiny proto-animals, meticulously painted all over the linen background so that they build up to larger structures. The dramatic colour palette produces interesting visual effects, at times  revealing and at times obscuring patterns present in the paint. The intricate detail and luminous colouring makes for a vivid but sometimes perplexing whole.

Here is an example (although the digital image doesn’t really do justice to the original).

dicembre2008verdevermilion

To quote her own description

My works are rooted in an imagery from my childhood: the snakes of the wooden sculptures of Viking and mediaeval Norwegian art, the forms that were created by nature, like branches, cloudsm forms of branches. The fables, the mysterious nature has also played a part. I have also done research on phenomena that are triggered by the imagery, one may say biological, on which precisely the visions of forms that repeat themselves during falling asleep and waking up can create this kind of visual effects.

From this I have obtained a kind of module, that is a kind of biomorphic form, rather than one specific animal or other, that is merely the building brick of of the structure, but that is multiplied in forms that are vertiginous and sometime perhaps unsettling. The idea is to create a dreamy, moving atmosphere that is nevertheless very different from the effects of op art, in short a less clashing, more “natural” effect.

The effects she achieves are, in some sense, a variation on those I blogged about previously but with elements that are entirely original.

If you’re in Cardiff this small exhibition is well worth seeing. Her paintings are for sale too, with a surprisingly modest price tag. I’m seriously thinking of investing in one myself, in fact.

The exhibition continues at Off the Wall, The Old Probate Registry, Llandaff until 30th May 2009.

PS. In response to the specific request below from Tom Shanks, who is never shy of making an exhibition of himself,  I’ve added this picture of his famous travelling installation:

dscf0001

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Perception, Piero and Pollock

Posted in Art, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on April 15, 2009 by telescoper

For some unknown reason I’ve just received an invitation to a private view at a small art gallery that’s about ten minutes’ walk from my house. Cocktails included. I shall definitely go and will blog about it next week. I’m looking forward to it already.

This invitation put me in an artistic frame of mind so, to follow up my post on randomness (and the corresponding parallel version on cosmic variance), I thought I’d develop some thoughts about the nature of perception and the perception of nature.

This famous painting is The Flagellation of Christ, by Piero della Francesca. I actually saw it many years ago on one of my many trips to Italy; it’s in an art gallery in Urbino. The first thing that strikes you when you see it is actually that the painting is surprisingly small (about 60cm by 80cm). However, that superficial reaction aside, the painting draws you into it in a way which few other works of art can. The composition is complicated and mathematically precise, but the use of linear perspective is sufficiently straightforward that your eye can quickly understand the geometry of the space depicted and locate the figures and actions within it. The Christ figure is clearly in the room to the left rear and the scene is then easily recognized as part of the story leading up to the crucifixion.

That’s what your eye always seems to do first when presented with a figurative representation: sort out what’s going on and fill in any details it can from memory and other knowledge.

But once you have made sense of the overall form, your brain immediately bombards you with questions. Who are the three characters in the right foreground? Why aren’t they paying attention to what’s going on indoors? Who is the figure with his back to us? Why is the principal subject so far in the background? Why does everyone look so detached? Why is the light coming from two different directions (from the left for the three men in the foreground but from the right for those in the interior)? Why is it all staged in such a peculiar way? And so on.

These unresolved questions lead you to question whether this is the straightforward depiction first sight led you to think it was. It’s clearly much more than that. Deeply symbolic, even cryptic, it’s effect on the viewer is eery and disconcerting. It has a dream-like quality. The individual elements of the painting add up to something, but the full meaning remains elusive. You feel there must be something you’re missing, but can’t find it.

This is such an enigmatic picture that it has sparked some extremely controversial interpretations, some of which are described in an article in the scientific journal Nature. I’m not going to pretend to know enough to comment on the theories, escept to say that some of them at least must be wrong. They are, however, natural consequences of our brain’s need to impose order on what it sees. The greatest artists know this, of course. Although it sometimes seems like they might be playing tricks on us just for fun, part of what makes art great is the way it gets inside the process of perception.

Here’s another example from quite a different artist.

This one is called Lavender Mist. It’s one of the “action paintings” made by the influential American artist Jackson Pollock. This, and many of the other paintings of its type, also get inside your head in quite a disconcerting way but it’s quite a different effect to that achieved by Piero della Francesca.

This is an abstract painting, but that doesn’t stop your eyes seeking within it some sort of point of reference to make geometrical sense of it. There’s no perspective to draw you into it so you look for clues to the depth in the layers of paint. Standing in front of one of these very large works – I find they don’t work at all in reduced form like on the screen in front of you now – you find your eyes constantly shifting around, following lines here and there, trying to find recognizable shapes and to understand what is there in terms of other things you have experienced either in the painting itself or elsewhere. Any order you can find, however, soon becomes lost. Small-scale patterns dissolve away into sea of apparent confusion. Your brain tries harder, but is doomed. One of the biggest problems is that your eyes keep focussing and unfocussing to look for depth and structure. It’s almost impossible to stop yourself doing it. You end up dizzy.

I don’t know how Pollock came to understand exactly how to make his compositions maximally disorienting, but he seems to have done so. Perhaps he had a deep instinctive understanding of how the eye copes with the interaction of structures on different physical scales. I find you can see this to some extent even in the small version of the picture on this page. Deliberately blurring your vision makes different elements stand out and then retreat, particularly the large darkish streak that lies to the left of centre at a slight angle to the vertical.

This artist has also been the subject of interest by mathematicians and physicists because his work seems to display some of the characteristic properties of fractal sets. I remember going to a very interesting talk a few years ago by Richard Taylor of the University of Oregon who claimed that fractal dimensions could be used to authenticate (or otherwise) genuine works by Pollock as he seemed to have his own unique signature.

I suppose what I’m trying to suggest is that there’s a deeper connection than you might think between the appreciation of art and the quest for scientific understanding.

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Dublin Back

Posted in Art, Books, Talks and Reviews, Crosswords, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on March 28, 2009 by telescoper

I’m just back from a flying visit to Dublin, where I gave a talk yesterday at a meeting of the Astronomical Science Group of Ireland (ASGI), an organization which promotes scientific collaborations between individuals and institutions on both sides of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Eire. The venue for the twice-yearly meetings moves around both countries, but this time it was held in the splendid environment of Trinity College, Dublin.

It turned out to be an easy trip from Cardiff to Dublin and my first opportunity to try out Cardiff’s fine little airport. A small airline called Air Arann operates the route to Dublin from there, and it all went to schedule despite the plane having to struggle against a 70 mph head wind across the Irish sea. For our small propeller-driven plane, that made a signficant difference to the flying time.

Arriving in Dublin on Thursday I had time to have a nice dinner before settling in to my hotel in the Temple Bar region of the city. There’s a huge concentration of bars and nightclubs there and it’s a traditional area for Stag and Hen Parties. There was plenty of evidence of drunken debauchery going on into the early hours of the morning, which remind me of the way the Irish rugby fans carried on last weekend in Cardiff.

Anyway, the meeting itself was interesting with a wide range of talks most of which were given by PhD students. I enjoy meetings where the younger scientists are encouraged to speak; too many conferences involve the same people giving the same talk time after time. Solar Physics was particularly  well represented, and I learned quite a bit about about things that are far from my own province. 

There isn’t much actual cosmology done in Ireland (North or South) so my brief as invited speaker was to give an overview of the current state of the field for astronomers who are not  experts in cosmological matters. I therefore gave a summary of the concordance model which I’ve blogged about before and then made some comments about things that might point to a more complete theory of the Universe. I also mentioned some of the anomalies in the cosmic microwave background that I’ve also blogged about on here.

I usually use this piece of Hieronymus Bosch The Last Judgement to illustrate my feelings about the concordance model:

das_letzte_gericht

 

 
The top part represents the concordance cosmology. It clearly features an eminent cosmologist surrounded by postdoctoral researchers. Everything appears to be in heavenly harmony, surrounded by a radiant glow of self-satisfaction. The trumpets represent various forms of exaggerated press coverage.

But if you step back from it, and get the whole thing in a proper perspective, you realise that there’s an awful lot going on underneath that’s not so pleasant or easy to interptet. I don’t know what’s going down below there although the unfortunate figures slaving away in miserable conditions and suffering unimaginable torments are obviously supposed to represent graduate students.

The main point is that the concordance model is based on rather strange foundations: nobody understands what the dark matter and dark energy are, for example. Even more fundamentally, the whole thing is based on a shotgun marriage between general relativity and quantum field theory which is doomed to fail somewhere along the line.

Far from being a final theory of the Universe I think we should treat our standard model as a working hypothesis and actively look for departures from it. I’m not at all against the model. As models go, it’s very successful. It’s a good one, but it’s still just a model.

That reminds me of the school report I got after my first year at the Royal Grammar School. The summary at the bottom described me as a “model student”. I was so thrilled I went and looked up the word model in a dictionary and found it said “a small imitation of the real thing.”

Anyway, the talk went down pretty well (I think) and after a quick glass of Guinness (which definitely went down well) I was back to Dublin airport and home to Cardiff soon after that: Cardiff airport to my house was less than twenty minutes. I greatly enjoyed my short visit and was delighted to be asked to do a couple of seminars back there in the near future.

I was in a  good mood when I got home, which got even better when I found out that I won the latest Crossword competition in the Times Literary Supplement. And the prize isn’t even a dictionary. It’s cash!

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