Archive for the Biographical Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Welcome (and Goodbye) Week

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth on September 18, 2023 by telescoper

So Welcome Week has started in Maynooth, although I’m keeping a low profile ahead of my departure to foreign climes and haven’t seen any of the new students, who I’m assured definitely exist. I will be on campus tomorrow though as I have various things to do in my office before handing over the keys until next year. I think pint or two may well be drunk at some point this week to celebrate my departure too.

Although I’m not involved in Welcome Week activities, this week is nevertheless going to be extremely busy, and not just because of preparations for my trip to Barcelona. After a short hiatus in December, Euclid developments are well and truly back and I’ve got a stack of telecons to deal with. I had three today, and that’s just the start. I won’t get away from those while on sabbatical, of course, but at least I don’t have to organize them around teaching and other departmental activities.

I was chatting with my PhD student online this afternoon and it struck me that this will be the first time since 2020 that the Autumn Semester will start properly at Maynooth and students will get a full twelve weeks of in-person teaching with a study week. For the three previous years, teaching started late for new students because of a knock-on effect of the Leaving Certificate results being delayed by Covid-19 reasons. That meant that there was a truncated orientation process and term was a week shorter, i.e. 11 weeks instead of 12. I have been teaching first year physics students during that period, and it was quite a headache figuring out how to tweak things to make everything fit without rushing too much. Now all that is behind us, and a more relaxed start of term is possible, but it’s my successor in the role of first-year lecturer who will reap the benefit.

Teaching term starts later in Maynooth than in many other Irish universities. This year lectures commence on 25th September, a week today, by which time I’ll be in Barcelona. This has its advantages, but the disadvantage is that teaching is supposed to carry on until Friday December 22nd, just three days before Christmas…

Leave a comment »

Memories of Barcelona

Posted in Architecture, Art, Biographical with tags , , , on September 17, 2023 by telescoper

I’ve had this poster for 30 years. It’s survived several relocations and is now on my bedroom wall in Maynooth. I bought it on a holiday in Barcelona in 1993 which, coincidentally, was the centenary of the birth of Joan Miró, and the reason for a special exhibition.

Since it’s a rainy Sunday afternoon and I’m feeling a bit nostalgic with just a week to go before I go to Barcelona once more, I thought I’d rummage through some boxes of old photographs to share some pictures taken on that trip in 1993. The first one is me being a bit scared on the funicular railway. The last picture shows my holiday mate David in blue (to the centre left) looking rather fetching from the rear as he ponders the Sagrada Familia:

Back in 1993 the Sagrada Familia was basically a building site. Thirty years on, it still isn’t finished but will be completed in 2026. Possibly. So I’m told.

3 Comments »

15 Years In The Dark

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff on September 15, 2023 by telescoper

When I logged onto WordPress yesterday I received a message that it was the 15th 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 6507 blog posts posts which have received well over 5M page views. 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). Scientifically we’ve seen the discovery of the Higgs Boson and gravitational waves, both of which resulted in Nobel Prizes, as did the studies of high-redshift supernovae. The Planck mission mission was launched, did its stuff, and came to a conclusion in this time too. Most recently we have had the launch of JWST and have started to see the first science results. Euclid was launched earlier this year. Science at least has moved forward, even many other things have not.

This year saw my 60th birthday, so I’ve been blogging for about 25% of my life so far. I’ll have to keep going until I’m 90 to reach 50%…

Leave a comment »

Physics as Fun

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth on September 13, 2023 by telescoper

To add to all the excitement I’ve just had a visit from a representative of ESB Networks who installed a new “smart” meter at my house in Maynooth. That process involved cutting off the electricity for about 15 minutes, which was long enough to set off my burglar alarm. Now that’s sorted, I have to go round resetting the clocks. All of that after I wasted half an hour this morning watching my laptop do compulsory Windows updates which involved two restarts.

Anyway, despite the distractions I’ve been working busily at home and getting ready for my departure abroad. This is the first year for a while that I haven’t been involved in Welcome Week or the Student Orientation process, which are ongoing. I have, however, looked at the online registrations so far and confirmed that there will indeed be some students in Theoretical Physics for the forthcoming academic year.

Yesterday I saw this cartoon by Gary Larson so thought I’d share it here.

It reminded me of this picture I have in the past shown at Open Days

I think there are many people out there who think physics, especially theoretical physics, isn’t something to be enjoyed. I think it is, or at least that it can be. I also think the best way to succeed at physics is by enjoying it, and I hope the new and returning students at Maynooth enjoy their theoretical physics over the next year while I am slaving away on sabbatical in Barcelona…

Leave a comment »

From Einstein to Euclid: the Gallery

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on September 11, 2023 by telescoper

Last week I posted a photograph taken during my public lecture at Maynooth University. I thought I’d compound your collective misery by putting up more. I’m not sharing any pics of the audience because we didn’t ask them for permission, so you’re basically stuck with pictures of me (and one of Joost Slingerland, our Head of Department, in the first one).

Thanks to Dale for taking the pictures!

Leave a comment »

Brahms, Byrne & Berlioz at the NCH

Posted in Biographical, Music with tags , , , , on September 9, 2023 by telescoper

Last night I went to the Opening Concert of the new season by the National Symphony Orchestra at the National Concert Hall in Dublin. I’ll be away for most of the year, so I thought I’d make the most of the time I’ve got before I depart to get a fix of culture.

This year is the 75th anniversary of the founding of the National Symphony Orchestra, and the very first piece they performed at their very first concert back in 1948 was Academic Festival Overture by Johannes Brahms. I found it an especially fitting piece because this week we have been having graduation (conferring) ceremonies all week in Maynooth. It’s a familiar work, but provided an enjoyably upbeat start to the show.

The next piece was a a world premiere of a special commission for the National Symphony Orchestra. I was looking forward to this because it was to be the first time I’ve ever heard the uilleann pipes on the concert stage. The piece is a lot of fun, full of great tunes and robust humour. The uilleann pipes are a rather quiet instrument, however, and I have to say I hardly heard a note from them over the rest of the orchestra. At the end a Scottish piper walked on stage to play the bagpipes during the finale. These pipes are a much louder instrument, and even they were hard to hear with the rest of the band on full throttle.

Anyway, after the wine break, we had the Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz. I was put off this piece at school by a teacher who was obsessed with it and spent nearly a whole term banging on about how wonderful it is. While it is undoubtedly very imaginative – and very innovative for a piece written as early as 1830 – I remain unconvinced by all the hype. It’s basically a fever dream resulting from the composer’s experiments on opium and I find it rather gimmicky. Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy in a live performance of the work. Conductor Jaime Martín began the performance with a genial introduction to some of the “crazy” elements which he got the relevant musicians to play snippets representing, for example, the bubbling cauldron in the last movement which represents witches doing their stuff.

After the full performance the National Symphony Orchestra got a standing ovation. I joined in only briefly because the conductor’s introduction to the Berlioz meant that the concert was longer than I expected and I had to leave to catch my train back to Maynooth. I needn’t have worried. The train was 20 minutes late.

1 Comment »

Caption Competition!

Posted in Biographical, Talks and Reviews, The Universe and Stuff on September 8, 2023 by telescoper

Our roaming photographer took some pictures during my public talk on Wednesday night. This one seems ripe for a caption competition. Please submit your entries through the comments box below:

5 Comments »

The Universe from Einstein to Euclid

Posted in Biographical, Talks and Reviews with tags , , on September 7, 2023 by telescoper

As we head into the Day 2 of the ITP2023 I thought I’d share the slides I used for the public talk I gave last night. We had an audience of around a hundred which wasn’t bad given that it is graduation week and the undergraduates aren’t back!

Here is the abstract used to advertise the talk:

Euclid is the name of a new scientific mission from the European Space Agency, launched on July 1st, designed to explore the composition and evolution of the Universe. The Euclid mission takes its name from the ancient Greek mathematician regarded by many as the Father of geometry. Until the last century, Euclid’s theorems were assumed not just to be mathematical notions, but to describe the geometrical structure of the physical Universe. Einstein’s general theory of relativity swept that idea aside and gave us new ways of describing space, by unifying it with time, and by allowing it to be affected by matter in a manner very different from that formulated by Euclid. Over the past century, this theory has proved to be very effective at describing the properties of the Universe as observed by modern astronomical telescopes, while also suggesting the existence of dark matter and dark energy.

The Euclid telescope will create an enormous map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how galaxies and clusters of galaxies have formed over cosmic history, and how space itself is distorted by these structures.

This talk will discuss our modern ideas of space and time, how the Euclid mission will try to test whether or not they are correct and shed light on the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

And here are the slides:

Obviously I cut a number of long stories very short, which probably contributed to why I had a lot of questions from the audience at the end of the talk. I always assume that’s a basically a good sign because it shows people are interested, but it also makes me worry that I didn’t explain things very well!

We didn’t finish until past 9 o’clock and it was a very warm evening, so I was very happy to have a few pints afterwards in O’Neills…

2 Comments »

ITP 2023

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff on September 6, 2023 by telescoper

So here we are then, first day of the 2023 Irish Theoretical Physics meeting here in Maynooth. It’s a busy schedule for the three days, followed by a little meeting on Saturday to mark the retirement of Brian Dolan

It’s been a busy day for reasons other than the ITP2023 and I’ve left it a bit late to write my talk for this evening’s public lecture so I’d better get on with that this afternoon.

Updates to follow.

Leave a comment »

September Heatwave

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags on September 4, 2023 by telescoper

What a lovely day to be on sabbatical! It seems that the weather is set fair for a few more days too, which is nice. You don’t often see a satellite image with not a cloud in the sky over Ireland.

It’s cute that the Met Éireann weather map gives a red temperature warning when it’s just 23 °C.

Mind you, it has felt very warm today. So much so that I had a short nap this afternoon. I think of this as training for what I hope will be the regular siesta…

Leave a comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »