I just received the following message from WordPress.com reminding me that today is the 16th anniversary of my registration with them, which is when I took my first step into the blogosphere. That was way back on 15th September 2008…
I actually wrote my first post on the day I registered but, unfortunately, I didn’t really know what I was doing on my first day at blogging – no change there, then – and I didn’t actually manage to figure out how to publish this earth-shattering piece. It was only after I’d written my second post that I realized that the first one wasn’t actually visible to the general public because I hadn’t pressed the right buttons, so the two appear in the wrong order in my archive. Such was the inauspicious beginning of this “shitty WordPress blog”!
Since then I have published 6,974 blog posts posts which have altogether received over 5.5M page views. That doesn’t include the 2000+ subscribers who receive posts by email. The largest number of hits I have received in a single day is still 8,864 (in 2014, at the peak of the BICEP2 controversy). The most popular post in the last year was this one.
It was just over a year ago that I last went to the National Concert Hall in Dublin. That occasion was the opening of a new season of concerts for 2023-4 by the National Symphony Orchestra. After a year away on sabbatical, last night I went to the season opening of the next year of concerts by the National Symphony Orchestra, this time under the direction of Mihhail Gerts. I’m hoping to see more of the forthcoming season than I did the last!
The programme for the concert is shown in the picture. The first half was dominated by legendary mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly, resplendent in a turquoise frock, who sang six songs by Alma Mahler (born Alma Schindler) who was of course the wife of Gustav Mahler whose 1st Symphony we heard in the second half. Gustav famously (and reprehensibly) told Alma that she had to give up composing music when they married (which they did in 1902). Until then she had written not only songs but also piano music. Few of her compositions survive, however. Apparently she destroyed many of the manuscripts herself in later life. Of the fifty or so songs she is thought to have written, only 17 (including the 6 we heard last night) still exist on paper. She at least responded by outliving him by more than 50 years: Gustav died in 1911 and Alma Mahler passed away in 1964.
It’s very unfair to compare Alma Mahler’s settings with those of Gustav Mahler, who was a master of the orchestral song cycle. The compositions we heard all all quite short, three or four minutes, and are definitely influenced by Wagner. The first song, for example, deploys the famous Tristan Chord and there are passages that are clearly influenced by the Wesendonck Lieder. None of the manuscripts are dated, but in terms of style they do sound like late Romantic works from around 1900 when she was very young. Overall these works not at the same level of achievement of either Richard Wagner or Gustav Mahler but, with Sarah Connolly in fine voice, there was much to enjoy. I had never heard any of these songs before this evening, and it left me wondering what Alma Mahler might have achieved musically had she continued to compose. We’ll never know.
Before these songs we heard the concert overture In Nature’s Realm by Antonín Dvořák. This is also a piece that feels very late-19th Century (it was composed in 1891). It’s a sort of homage to the beauty of the composer’s native Bohemia with distinct echoes of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, I thought.
After the interval wine break we returned for the second half which consisted of (Gustav) Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major. This is a very familiar concert work nowadays, but it’s worth remembering that it didn’t exactly set the world on fire when it was first performed in 1889 and Mahler revised it extensively before it arrived at the form now usually performed. Like all Mahler symphonies it covers a vast territory. One of the most famous Mahler quotations is “the symphony is a world”, but in the case of his own symphonies each movement is a world. The first movement begins in hesitant and fragmentary fashion before bursting into life with a metaphorical evocation of daybreak. The second movement is earthier and more forceful, quoting from folk songs and country dances. The third is my favourite, with its humorously up-beat references to Klezmer music before ending in a kind of funeral march. The final movement is tempestuous at first, then calm, then erupts into a glorious finale.
Last night’s performance was broadcast live on RTÉ Lyric FM but what radio listeners won’t have got was the thrilling sight of a symphony orchestra in full flood. At the end of the last movement, members of brass section stood up to give extra power to the climactic resolution of the piece. Mahler does “loud” very well indeed, but I was impressed by the spectacle too: the lights gleaming off the array of trombones and horns as they blasted out the final phrases (in another context I would call them “riffs”). Great stuff, and very well received by the audience.
P.S. On the way into Dublin to see last night’s concert I realized that the Irish Rail timetable had changed while I was away so, instead of terminating at Connolly (the station, not the mezzo-soprano), the train I was on went all the way through to Pearse, thereby saving me a bit of time walking. It only takes about 20 minutes (for me) to walk from Pearse to the NCH, in case you’re wondering, and I do like a bit of a walk to stretch my legs before sitting down for a couple of hours at a concert.
I thought I’d share with readers – at least those off campus, as access to this blog remains banned by Maynooth University – the view from the window of my new office:
Well, what did you expect to see from a Maynooth University office window? Sydney Opera House perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across …
I’m well and truly back from sabbatical: I spent most of Friday filling in forms.
It is now just two weeks before teaching resumes after the summer break. To add even more excitement to this, the building housing the rooms in which half of my scheduled lectures (and many of those of my colleagues) are to take place is still a construction site. The work was supposed to be completed by September 1st. Will the rooms be ready by September 23rd? I have no idea. What will we do if they’re not? I have no idea. We’ll just have to wait and see.
I still have the blackboard in my study that I used to give remote lectures during pandemic times. I wonder if I’ll be using it again? I thought this time round we would have a relatively smooth introduction to term, as opposed to the mad scramble caused in previous years by delayed Leaving Certificate results, but…
Among the new arrivals will be a cohort of students on our MSc in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics. I understand we have approximately 9 students which is not a bad start for a new postgraduate course. That means we’ll have to think up some projects for them to do. I might do that this afternoon, in fact.
Anyway, this coming week we have the first Departmental Meeting of the (new) Department of Physics. Hopefully we might find out how the merger is actually meant to work in practice. The day after that we meet the new (Interim) Dean of the Faculty of Science & Engineering. Incidentally the President of Maynooth University made this appointment in a way that is in direct conflict with the Statutes of the University. That’s par for the course at Maynooth these days, I’m afraid, as is the censorship of this blog.
This time next week we’ll be looking ahead to Welcome Week when the new students arrive and have a chance to look around and choose their modules. The local Facebook page is alive with messages from desperate students and their parents looking for accommodation in or near Maynooth. The University likes to boast about how many more students it will have this year, but not a thought is given to where they will live. The strain of having to travel long distances to campus, combined with the high cost of living necessitating many students to take on more-or-less full time employment, looks likely to ensure that drop-out rates climb still further.
I was away yesterday dealing with some personal matters and on the way home I was so bored that I took a rare glance at my LinkedIn feed and found this, which unfortunately refuses to be embedded properly.
Anyway, it reminded me that it was 50 years ago this week that I went through a similar induction process at the Royal Grammar School Newcastle and was about to begin my Secondary Education along with my classmates in 1E, one of whom I wrote about here. We didn’t have “Year 3”, “Year 7” and “Year 11” in those days; we were just called “First Years”, which I guess is Year 7 in today’s currency. The Hall hasn’t changed much since my day. Although it looked enormous then, to a little boy, to an adult it looks very small to accommodate over a thousand pupils. At the morning School Assemblies many of us had to stand around the edges.
Meanwhile, back in the present week, Maynooth University is hosting events at which degrees are conferred. The cohort of undergraduate students graduating at this week’s ceremonies are those that took their final examinations in May/June this year (while I was away on sabbatical) so I didn’t teach any of them this year. I will, however, be seeing some again as they return for postgraduate degrees.
In a couple of weeks we will be having induction events for the new intake of students at Maynooth University. Most of our students are on 4-year programmes, so it well be September 2028 that the latest crop have their conferring ceremonies. If all goes to plan I shall have retired by then.
My first official day back at work after a year-long sabbatical coincides with the first official day of a new Department of Physics at Maynooth University:
I knew this was happening, of course, and it should have happened years ago. Having two separate Physics Departments at Maynooth was not just an oddity. It required the relatively small number of academic staff across the Departments to undertake a huge amount of duplication in teaching thereby wasting resources and increasing workloads. Even combined together, the total complement of 15 academic staff means that we’re still a very small Department.
There are, therefore, potential benefits in this merger but they will take time to accrue. At the moment it only exists on paper, and staff in the two ex-Departments will have to work out what to do next in terms of coordinating teaching and research. In my opinion this all should have been planned and agreed before going ahead, but here we are. We just have to make the best of the situation presented to us by The Management.
For the time being the New Department is just the two Old Departments in a single wrapper. We were already located side-by-side in the same building, the Science Building so there are no large-scale relocations of staff, at least not yet. All existing courses remain the same as before, too. That’s just as well, really, as we start teaching in three weeks!
That’s not to say that nothing has changed. The number of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers in the Department of Theoretical Physics has been growing and there was consequently a drastic shortage of office space. My return from sabbatical has involved me being granted an elevated status in the new Department: I’ve been moved upstairs out of the old Theoretical Physics Department to an office in the old Experimental Physics Department.
Here’s a question, though. My contract of employment says that I am employed in the Department of Theoretical Physics. Since that Department no longer exists, do I need a new contract or have I been made redundant?
I was obliged to take a taxi home from last week’s appointment. Taxi drivers don’t always make the best company, but this time I was lucky. The driver was a nice friendly chap with an infectious laugh, and when I had settled into my seat he asked me if he wanted him to turn the music down. I said no, it was fine. It wasn’t loud anyway. After a little while I realized that I really liked the music (which I hadn’t heard before) so I asked him to turn it up a bit. He smiled into the mirror, turned up the volume, and thereafter started humming and singing along. I made a note of the name of the band and the record in the hope that I could find it on YouTube, which I did.
Here we are then. This is Juju Music by Nigerian musician King Sunny Adé and his African Beats. Apparently it’s quite a famous record – it was released way back in 1982. I love the complex polyrhythms so typical of African music, and there’s some fine guitar playing on it too. I’ve been listening to it off and on over the whole weekend, so I thought I’d share it here. Enjoy!
Today is 31st August 2024, which is officially the last day of my year-long sabbatical – even if tomorrow is a Sunday, so I won’t be actually returning full-time to the office until Monday 2nd September. After that I have three whole weeks to prepare the new modules I’ll be teaching in the Autumn Semester. I suppose at some point I’ll have to write a report about what I did on my sabbatical, at least from the point of view of work. I’ll keep the rest to myself!
I was planning to cook myself dinner and a few glasses of wine this evening to mark the end of my year of travels. I’ll still be doing that but in the last few days I have been given something else to think about.
About 50 years ago, in September 1974, I was preparing for my first days at the Royal Grammar School (RGS) in Newcastle. I didn’t know anyone else there and had no idea what to expect. I’d won a scholarship under the Direct Grant system so my parents didn’t have to pay fees, which was just as well because they wouldn’t have been able to. The RGS was an all-boys school in those days and most of the boys were from much wealthier backgrounds than I was and their parents paid fees. Many had also been to the RGS Junior School (also fee-paying) whereas I had gone to a state school, so when I arrived for my first day there were quite a few that already knew each other and were much better prepared academically than I was.
The upshot of this was that I found it very difficult there for the first few weeks, both socially and academically. I just wasn’t used to the intensity of the teaching style, the extensive homework, and the fact that I had to try to make friends from scratch.
In the first year the teaching was arranged in “Houses” and the boys in each House had to wear a tie of a specific colour with their (blue) blazer. I was in Eldon House so wore a green tie and my first form was called 1E. Everyone took the same subjects in first and second form.
Among the friends I made in the first year was a boy who had been to the RGS Junior School where he had acquired the nickname “Titch” because of his diminutive stature; his real name was Alan Michael Hawdon although he never used Alan. When he wasn’t “Titch” he was Michael. I found it a bit awkward calling him “Titch” because I was scarcely any taller than he was, but he didn’t mind it at all. Despite not being very tall, he excelled at all sporting events, especially running and gymnastics. He was also very kind, friendly and gregarious. Although I wasn’t anything like as sporty as him, we became good friends. In fact he was the only boy whose home (in Tynemouth) I visited in the first year at RGS. I can’t remember what the occasion was, but we spent an enjoyable day at the coast. I also remember going to the annual school camp in Ryedale and spending quite a lot of time with Titch then. I also remember asking if I could take a picture of him with the old Box Brownie my dad had lent me. He agreed.
The system at RGS was that, after the second year, i.e. after 2E, classes began to diversify and there was some choice of subjects. Forms were no longer composed of students from the same House (though we continued to wear the house tie). When I returned to RGS to start the third year, I was in the “Three Languages” form as I had decided to do German (though I dropped it after one year to concentrate on sciences). I was dismayed to find that Titch was in a different form; since I no longer had any classes with him we drifted apart, though we remained on friendly terms until A-levels and departure for University in 1981 after which I lost contact entirely. All I knew until recently was that he got a Royal Navy Scholarship to do Mechanical Engineering at Nottingham University as a precursor for joining the Navy.
So why am I telling you all this?
Last week I heard that Michael Hawdon (aka “Titch”) passed away in December 2022. That news came as a shock because he was the fittest and healthiest lad in the class of ’81 and I would have given long odds against him dying at the age of just 59. The picture of him on the left was taken in 1979; the wonky tie was always a trademark.
I gather that, in 1982, before going to university, he had been enlisted to go to the Falklands. However, the ship he was on suffered a mechanical failure and he never got there; the war ended in June 1982 and he went to Nottingham in October that year. After that, he travelled extensively, including spending some time living in New Zealand.
Forty years had passed since we both left RGS and went our very different ways until, in 2021, out of the blue, he sent me an email (signed “Titch”). It seems he had come across my name in connection with some work he had been doing at the UK Space Agency and decided to look me up. He was probably bored during the Covid-19 lockdown but I was very happy that he remembered me at all. Whatever the reason, I was delighted. We exchanged a considerable number of messages sharing memories of RGS days. Then he stopped replying. I don’t know whether he was ill or merely busy, but just a year later he passed away.
I was only 11 when I met Michael Hawdon and so immature that I didn’t know what was going on in my own emotions, but looking back I can see now that I definitely had a crush on him. Maybe it was more than that. I never told him, of course. It wouldn’t have been appreciated let alone reciprocated. I was in any case more than happy just to be able to call him a friend.
I mentioned the photograph of Titch I took in Ryedale just to say that I carried that around with my in my blazer pocket for at least a year. I spent an hour or so today looking for it, but unfortunately it seems I must have lost it. I wish I had been able to find the words to thank him for his friendship all those years ago. The best I can do now is to drink to his memory.
For some we loved, the loveliest and the best That from his Vintage rolling Time hath prest, Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before, And one by one crept silently to rest
I was reminded just now that 30 years ago today, on 25th August 1994, this review article by myself and George Ellis was published in Nature (volume 370, pp. 609–615).
Sorry for the somewhat scrappy scanned copy. The article is still behind a paywall. No open access for the open Universe!
Can this really have been 30 years ago?
Anyway, that was the day I officially became labelled a “crank”, by some, although others thought we were pushing at an open door. We were arguing against the then-standard cosmological model (based on the Einstein – de Sitter model), but the weight of evidence was already starting to shift. Although we didn’t predict the arrival of dark energy, the arguments we presented about the density of matter did turn out to be correct. A lot has changed since 1994, but we continue to live in a Universe with a density of matter much lower than the critical density and our best estimate of what that density is was spot on.
Looking back on this, I think valuable lessons would be learned if someone had the time and energy to go through precisely why so many papers at that time were consistent with a higher-density Universe that we have now settled on. Confirmation bias undoubtedly played a role, and who is to say that it isn’t relevant to this day?
It’s almost a year since I deactivated my Twitter account. Or should I call it X? Anyway, it doesn’t matter because I don’t use it any more. Over the past few weeks it seems quite a few more – especially in the UK – have had enough of the antics of Elon Musk (aka Space Karen), especially with his attempts to fan the flames of the recent Farage riots by spreading misinformation. The first thing I noticed was that my BlueSky account was suddenly getting quite a lot of new followers. I now have about 850, still a long way short of the over 7000 I used to have on Twitter, but the level of engagement is far higher. That’s because the algorithm Space Karen introduced on X makes it difficult for your own followers. let alone anyone else, to see your tweets. The one disadvantage of BlueSky is that it doesn’t have an API that allows me to post directly from this blog when I publish a post, so I have to copy the URL by hand.
I also have an account on Mastodon where I have over 1200 followers and similarly good engagement. When I first started there a couple of years ago it didn’t have a WordPress API but it does now, so everything I write here gets posted automatically on my feed. Not only that, this blog is now also now fully federated which means that there is an autonomous feed for the blog posts. Not just a link to each post, as the API produces, but the whole post. This is a nice feature because if I change a post on this WordPress platform it automatically gets changed on the Mastodon feed.
I also have a Facebook Page on which these
And now there’s Threads, which is like a version of Twitter bolted onto Instagram. When this first came out last year it wasn’t available in the EU for data protection issues so I didn’t bother with it. I only just found out at the weekend that has been available since December 2023 but I wasn’t paying much attention to social media then so didn’t catch the news. Anyway, since I already have a (very quiet) Instagram account so I set up a Threads account which you can find here if you like that sort of thing. My first impressions of Threads are not very favourable, but let’s see how it goes. At least it’s not as bad as Twitter. I still think it is indefensible that my employer, along with most other universities, has decided to maintain a presence on that site.
The views presented here are personal and not necessarily those of my employer (or anyone else for that matter).
Feel free to comment on any of the posts on this blog but comments may be moderated; anonymous comments and any considered by me to be vexatious and/or abusive and/or defamatory will not be accepted. I do not necessarily endorse, support, sanction, encourage, verify or agree with the opinions or statements of any information or other content in the comments on this site and do not in any way guarantee their accuracy or reliability.
In the Dark 