Archive for the Biographical Category

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Viva Elsewhere…

Posted in Biographical, Education with tags , , on December 18, 2013 by telescoper

I just came back from a meeting of the Heads of  the science Schools here at the University of Sussex where, among other things, we discussed PhD completion rates across the University. I sat there smugly because ours in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences are pretty good. The meeting started at 10am which also happens to have been the starting time for a PhD examination in at Cardiff University involving my (former) student Ian Harrison. I would have liked to have been there, but unfortunately I have several appointments today in Sussex so couldn’t make it.

It’s not normal practice for the supervisor of a PhD to be present at the examination of the candidate. The rules allow for it – usually at the request of the student – but the supervisor must remain silent unless and until invited to comment by the examiners. I think it’s a very bad idea for both student and supervisor, and the one example that I can recall of a supervisor attending the PhD examination of his student was a very uncomfortable experience.

I always feel nervous when a student of mine is having their viva voce examination, probably because I’m a bit protective and such an occasion always brings back painful memories of the similar ordeal I went through twenty-odd years ago. Although I have every confidence in Ian, I can’t help  sitting in my office wondering how it is going. However, this is something a PhD candidate has to go through on their own, a sort of rite of passage during which the supervisor has to stand aside and let them stand up for their own work. Usually, of course, I would be there for the event (if not actually present in the examination room), but now I’m a considerable distance away it feels a bit strange.

I’ve actually blogged about a paper of Ian’s already. He finished his thesis well within the usual three-year limit and has moved to the Midlands (Manchester, to be precise) to take up a postdoctoral research position there.  He’s not technically allowed to call himself Doctor Harrison yet, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. In the words of Miss Jean Brodie, my students are, without doubt, la crème de la crème.

It’s now 11.45. Fingers crossed for some news soon…

UPDATE: 13.00. Still no news…

UPDATE: 13.07. Congratulations, Dr Harrison!

 

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A picture from the past!

Posted in Biographical with tags , on December 12, 2013 by telescoper

Well, here’s a blast from the past! This is the School Photograph for the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Sussex, vintage 1989. The School was called MAPS in those days; over the years we’ve lost an A and are now called MPS. Anyway, see if you can spot yours truly in this picture; you can click on the picture to make it larger. I did my PhD (actually DPhil) there from 1985-88 and then stayed on for a two-year postdoctoral position until 1990; so if you can spot me that’s what I looked like as a PDRA!

2000px-MAPS_photo_1989_BW

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Haikus for the Day

Posted in Biographical, Poetry on December 6, 2013 by telescoper

Invited guest of
the Japanese Embassy
in Piccadilly

“A Symposium”
they call this. Lectures followed
by wine (hopefully)..

Astronomy and
Space Science unite nations.
One cosmos for all!

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Service Complet

Posted in Biographical, Science Politics with tags , on December 3, 2013 by telescoper

Just time for a quick post from the London to Brighton train, having spent the day at my last ever “Plenary” meeting of the Astronomy Grants Panel of the Science and Technology Facilities Council which was held at the Institute of Physics. This meeting marks the end of the annual grants round; in January there’ll be a meeting to kick off next year’s business.

I’ve been on this panel for four years now, so I think I’ve done my bit. Time for some new blood to replace those of us who have been stood down.

Anyway I just want to say a big public thank you to the STFC staff, especially Kim, Diane, and Colin for doing their best to keep the panel members in order, as well as to Theory sub-Panel Chair Tom and overall Chair Andy who are also stepping down.

Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof. I refer to the day, not the AGP, because it began with a major wobbly in Victoria station on the way to the IOP but ended with a couple of pints and a nice chinwag in the pub round the corner..

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Doctor Who at 50

Posted in Biographical, Music, Television, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on November 23, 2013 by telescoper

Today is the official 50th birthday celebration of Doctor Who and, since The Doctor and myself are of the same vintage, I thought I’d repeat an old post about the show. I just listened to the original theme music again before posting this and I still think it sounds amazingly fresh.

–0–

As a Professor of Astrophysics I am often asked “Why on Earth did you decide to make a career out of such a crazy subject?”

I guess many astronomers, physicists and other scientists have to answer this sort of question. For many of them there is probably a romantic reason, such as seeing the rings of Saturn or the majesty of the Milky Way on a dark night. Others will probably have been inspired by TV documentary series such as The Sky at Night, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos or even Horizon which, believe it or not, actually used to be quite good but which is nowadays uniformly dire. Or it could have been something a bit more mundane but no less stimulating such as a very good science teacher at school.

When I’m asked this question I’d love to be able to put my hand on my heart and give an answer of that sort but the truth is really quite a long way from those possibilities. The thing that probably did more than anything else to get me interested in science was a Science Fiction TV series or rather not exactly the series but the opening titles.

The first episode of Doctor Who was broadcast in the year of my birth, so I don’t remember it at all, but I do remember the astonishing effect the credits had on my imagination when I saw later episodes as a small child. Here is the  opening title sequence as it appeared in the very first series featuring William Hartnell as the first Doctor.

To a younger audience it probably all seems quite tame, but I think there’s a haunting, unearthly beauty to the shapes conjured up by Bernard Lodge. Having virtually no budget for graphics, he experimented in a darkened studio with an old-fashioned TV camera and a piece of black card with Doctor Who written on it in white. He created the spooky kaleidoscopic patterns you see by simply pointing the camera so it could see into its own monitor, thus producing a sort of electronic hall of mirrors.

What is so fascinating to me is how a relatively simple underlying concept could produce a rich assortment of patterns, particularly how they seem to take on an almost organic aspect as they merge and transform. I’ve continued to be struck by the idea that complexity could be produced by relatively simple natural laws which is one of the essential features of astrophysics and cosmology. As a practical demonstration of the universality of physics this sequence takes some beating.

As well as these strange and wonderful images, the titles also featured a pioneering piece of electronic music. Officially the composer was Ron Grainer, but he wasn’t very interested in the commission and simply scribbled the theme down and left it to the BBC to turn it into something useable. In stepped the wonderful Delia Derbyshire, unsung heroine of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who, with only the crudest electronic equipment available, turned it into a little masterpiece. Ethereal yet propulsive, the original theme from Doctor Who is definitely one of my absolute favourite pieces of music and I’m glad to see that Delia Derbyshire is now receiving the acclaim she deserves from serious music critics.

It’s ironic that until earlier this year I used to live  in Cardiff, where the newer episodes of Doctor Who and its spin-off, the anagrammatic Torchwood, are made. One of the great things about the early episodes of Doctor Who was that the technology simply didn’t exist to do very good special effects. The scripts were consequently very careful to let the viewers’ imagination do all the work. That’s what made it so good. I’m pleased that the more recent incarnations of this show also don’t go overboard on the visuals. Perhaps that’s a conscious attempt to appeal to people who saw the old ones as well as those too young to have done so. It’s just a pity the modern opening title music is so bad…

Anyway, I still love Doctor Who after all these years. It must sound daft to say that it inspired me to take up astrophysics, but it’s truer than any other explanation I can think of. Of course the career path is slightly different from a Timelord, but only slightly.

At any rate I think The Doctor is overdue for promotion. How about Professor Who?

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I Am – by John Clare

Posted in Biographical, Poetry on November 4, 2013 by telescoper

Yesterday’s edition of Words and Music, entitled Village Minstrel, was inspired by the poems of John Clare, so I couldn’t resist a quick post to encourage people who missed the programme to listen to it online. It’s not just about Clare’s poetry, and the choice of music inspired by it, but also gives a vivid insight into the harshness of country life in the early 19th Century and the brutality of a legal system that could sentence a man to death for the theft of half a crown.

John Clare’s biography is very unusual for a 19th Century poet, in that he was not from a wealthy background, was largely self-educated, and had no private income. In later life he suffered from a depressive illness, endured a number of nervous breakdowns and was, at various times, confined to an asylum. Not highly regarded in his lifetime, his reputation was revived in the 20th Century and he is now considered to be one of the finest poets of his generation.

This, probably his most famous poem, was written by Clare in 1844 or 1845, while he was confined in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. In a style highly reminiscent of Byron, it speaks most movingly of the sense of alienation his illness has brought upon him and how he yearns for peace and solitude. I think I know what he means.

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
And e’en the dearest–that I loved the best–
Are strange–nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil’d or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below–above the vaulted sky.

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The Gathering Storm

Posted in Biographical, History with tags , , , on October 27, 2013 by telescoper

Twenty-six years ago I was living in Brighton as a graduate student at the University of Sussex. On October 16th 1987 (a Friday) I woke up to find the electricity had been cut off. Without breakfast, I left the house come up to campus, only t to find the street lined with fallen trees, smashed cars and houses with broken windows. This was the Great Storm of 1987 which, according to weather forecaster Michael Fish, was “not a hurricane” and I had slept through the whole thing…

I didn’t make it up to campus that Friday. The trains weren’t running because there was no electricity, power lines having been brought down by the storm, and even if there had been electricity the trains couldn’t have run because the tracks were blocked by fallen trees. When I did make it up to campus several days later the trees on the hills either side of the campus had been combed flat. It took years for them to recover. I hope they don’t suffer the same fate this time.

Here’s the infamous weather forecast broadcast on the Thursday evening

Another storm is forecast to arrive tomorrow; here is the Shipping Forecast for sea area Wight which, includes the town of Brighton and areas to the West.

gale_warning

The adjacent sea area, Dover, to the East is just as bad. Evidently it’s not a good day to be messing about in boats. This lunchtime I took a walk along the beach at Brighton to see how bad it was. The wind direction was  from the southwest and I estimated it was about force 7, based on the fact that it nearly blew me over when I turned into it. Not quite a gale, but getting there. A violent storm force 11 is bad enough, but there is a chance of hurricane force 12. That could cause damage on the scale of 1987. I’m now looking very nervously at the scaffolding covering several buildings in my street..

Here are some pictures I took with my phone looking towards the Marina.

IMG-20131027-00193 IMG-20131027-00194 IMG-20131027-00195

And here, in the opposite direction,  is Brighton Pier. There was so much salt spray from the breaking waves that I found hard to keep the lens clear, but the Pier was still open for the usual amusements…

IMG-20131027-00196

These are just the preliminaries, though. The bulk of the storm is yet to hit us. Something tells me we’re in for a stormy night!

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RAS Council

Posted in Biographical, Science Politics with tags on October 11, 2013 by telescoper

Up in London once more, this time in Burlington House, Piccadilly, for my first meeting as a duly elected Member of the Royal Astronomical Society Council. I’ll update on any non-confidential news later on if there is any and if I get time, but we’re about to start so that’s it for now…

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Ignorance + Fear = Prejudice

Posted in Biographical with tags , , on September 26, 2013 by telescoper

george-mental-patient-1-522x293

The charming costume displayed above was advertised by Asda as part of their Halloween “Fancy Dress” range, along with this explanatory text:

Every one (sic) will be running away from you in fear in this mental patient fancy dress costume.

In fact in response to a deluge of critical comments, Asda has now withdrawn the offensive article but one still wonders who could have thought this was a good idea in the first place.

Years ago when I lived in London I served on the Governing Body of a residential home in Hackney for people with a range of mental health issues. Doing this opened my eyes to the level of prejudice that exists about mental health. I remember one example very vividly. After months of training to try to help one of the residents live a little more independently, she finally plucked up courage to take a trip on the bus. She bought her ticket and sat upstairs. Unfortunately, she got a bit confused and missed her stop. She then started to panic and burst into tears. The reaction of the people on the bus was at first to ignore her distress and then when got worse to forcible restrain her. The bus was stopped and eventually the police were called. She was eventually found by staff from the home in a police cell in a state of complete disarray. Months of good work had been undone.

So why had the other passengers behaved in such a way? I think the answer to that is that many people are very frightened by mental illness because they don’t understand it. Fear is often born of ignorance in other situations too, but it’s particularly striking in public settings, such as on a bus or train. In modern life we have to cope with complete strangers in many places and I think we rely on behavioural conventions to deal with the proximity of other individuals that we might otherwise suppose to be hostile. When people start violating these conventions – as one may do if suffering a mental illness – then we often respond in a way that reflects our prejudice that they might be dangerous, even though that is extremely unlikely. It’s the sane that we have to fear most.

That was way back in the 1980s. We like to think that times have changed in so many respects, but the appearance of that Asda `Mental Patient’ demonstrates that our attitudes towards mental illness are firmly rooted in the days when thousands were kept at a safe distance by being incarcerated in lunatic asylums. The stereotypical straitjacket `costume’ panders to ignorance, promotes fear, and encourages prejudice. It is truly offensive. It is Time to Change our attitudes.

For the record, here’s a picture of me taken late last summer in my own Mental Patient Costume:

me

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Another Equinox

Posted in Biographical, Education on September 22, 2013 by telescoper

Well, that’s the end of Freshers Week at the University of Sussex. Hopefully new and returning students are settling into their courses now. Today is also the Autumnal Equinox, which gives me the excuse to post an edited and updated version of an item from the corresponding day five years ago. Although I’ve since moved from Cardiff to Brighton, not much has changed except me being five years older. Even the weather is similar:

The weather is unsettling. It’s warm, but somehow the warmth doesn’t quite fill the air; somewhere inside it there’s a chill that reminds you that autumn is not far away.

I find this kind of weather a bit spooky because it always takes me back to the time when I left home to go to University, as thousands of fledgling students are about to do this year in their turn. I did it 31 years ago, getting on a train at Newcastle Central station with my bags of books and clothes. I said goodbye to my parents there. There was never any question of them taking me in the car all the way to Cambridge. It wasn’t practical and I wouldn’t have wanted them to do it anyway. After changing from the Inter City at Peterborough onto a local train, we trundled through the flatness of East Anglia until it reached Cambridge. The weather, at least in my memory, was exactly like today.

I don’t remember much about the actual journey, but I must have felt a mixture of fear and excitement. Nobody in my family had ever been to University before, let alone to Cambridge. Come to think of it, nobody from my family has done so since either.

I was a bit worried about whether the course I would take in Natural Sciences would turn out to be difficult, but I think my main concern was how I would fit in generally.

I had been working between leaving school and starting my undergraduate course, so I had some money in the bank and I was also to receive a full grant. I wasn’t really worried about cash. But I hadn’t come from a posh family and didn’t really know the form. I didn’t have much experience of life outside the North East either. I’d been to London only once before going to Cambridge, and had never been abroad.

I didn’t have any posh clothes, a deficiency I thought would mark me as an outsider. I had always been grateful for having to wear a school uniform (which was bought with vouchers from the Council) because it meant that I dressed the same as the other kids at School, most of whom came from much wealthier families. But this turned out not to matter at all. Regardless of their family background, students were generally a mixture of shabby and fashionable, like they are today. Physics students in particular didn’t even bother with the fashionable bit. Although I didn’t have a proper dinner jacket for the Matriculation Dinner, held for all the new undergraduates, nobody said anything about my dark suit which I was told would be acceptable as long as it was a “lounge suit”. Whatever that is.

Taking a taxi from the station, I finally arrived at Magdalene College. I waited outside, a bundle of nerves, before entering the Porter’s Lodge and starting my life as a student. My name was found and ticked off and a key issued for my room in the Lutyen’s building. It turned out to be a large room, with a kind of screen that could be pulled across to divide the room into two, although I never actually used this contraption. There was a single bed and a kind of cupboard containing a sink and a mirror in the bit that could be hidden by the screen. The rest of the room contained a sofa, a table, a desk, and various chairs, all of them quite old but solidly made. Outside my  room, on the landing, was the gyp room, a kind of small kitchen, where I was to make countless cups of tea over the following months, although I never actually cooked anything there.

I struggled in with my bags and sat on the bed. It wasn’t at all like I had imagined. I realised that no amount of imagining would ever really have prepared me for what was going to happen at University.

I  stared at my luggage. I suddenly felt like I had landed on a strange island where I didn’t know anyone, and couldn’t remember why I had gone there or what I was supposed to be doing.

After 31 years you get used to that feeling.

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