Tidying a few things up ahead of the start of term I discovered this old clipping, yellowed with age, and decided to scan it before it disintegrates entirely:
It is from the (then) Manchester Guardian which is now known as the Grauniad. The article is dated 1st October 1921, which implies that the talk must have been on the afternoon of Friday 30th September 1921. However, the University of Manchester website states that the talk was on June 9th 1921. During his visit, Einstein was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Science by the University of Manchester, which is recorded here as having been presented on June 8th, so it appears the Guardian piece was published some time after the event. As usual, Einstein gave his lecture – to a packed house – entirely in German, as he did when he lectured in Nottingham almost a decade later.
Einstein was already famous by 1921 – largely thanks to the 1919 Eclipse results (see, e.g., here) – but it was still before he won his Nobel Prize (in 1922).
Anyway, the text down the right-hand side of the Guardian piece can be found here; it’s well worth reading!
About a month ago I posted an item about the National Famine Way, at the end of which I signalled my future intention to walk the 165 km 6-day route from Strokestown to Dublin. I was subsequently contacted by a number of people warning me that I might not be up to it. They didn’t put me off, but I have come up with a plan. This week – on Wednesday in fact – I will have the injections I get every six months or so to control the arthritis in my knees. Thus fortified, I intend next week to do a trial run walk consisting of the last stage of the Famine Way, from Maynooth to Dublin, along the Royal Canal. That’s about 27km and will take most of a day. I’ll stop on the way for lunch and when I get to the end I can get the train back to Maynooth. And if I run walk into difficulties I can stop at one of the intermediate stations and return from there; the canal runs right alongside the railway line for most of the way. If all goes to plan I’ll take time off next year to do the whole trip from Strokestown.
Meanwhile here’s a picture of one the poignant bronze sculptures of children’s shoes placed along the way. This one is at Maynooth harbour; there are 8 others on the way to Dublin.
To learn more about these shoes, see here, and here’s a video telling the story
With just two weeks to go before we resume teaching at Maynooth University, I find that next week I have no fewer than three medical appointments next week, on different days and in different locations. All of them are (or should be) routine, and none are particularly serious. Much as I dislike hospitals, etc, it will be good to get these bits of scheduled maintenance out of the way before the start of term.
On the other hand, they mean that I have to miss what looks like a very nice meeting in Italy in honour of Sabino Matarrese. I was invited, and initially accepted, but had to cancel. I hope that it goes well!
For old time’s sake I thought I’d post this picture of a youthful Sabino from years ago; he’s in the middle of the row nearest the camera; I’m at the end in the yellow shirt.
Anyway, last Friday our first cohort of MSc students in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics received their final results. This course lasts a calendar year so the results come out later than for the undergraduate courses. Congratulations to them all, but especially to Enda who completed a project under my supervision that we hope to turn into a paper before long.
Some familiar faces will no longer be around, but soon we will be joined by some new ones. Tomorrow, registration opens up for incoming first-year students at Maynooth and later in the week for returning second-, third-, and fourth-year students. By this time next week we’ll have a much better idea how many students there will be in our classes for the new academic year.
On Friday (12th September) I’ll be off to the National Concert Hall for the 2025/6 Season Opener with the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin, another indication that Autumn Semester is nigh.
Yesterday the official Presidential Election Order was tabled which means that an election for the office of President of Ireland (Uachtarán na hÉireann) will be held in the Republic on Friday 24th October 2025. The incumbent Michael D. Higgins will have served his second 7-year term by November and since by the Constitution nobody can hold the office more than twice, we will have a new President of the Republic.
The Irish media have been trying to make news about the presidential election all summer, which has been pointless and tedious to put up as no candidates had even been nominated then. Actually nobody has yet either, as nominations don’t officially open until tomorrow; they close on September 25th. Still, at least the process has started.
In order to progress to the election, a candidate has to receive the support of at least 20 members of the Oireachtas or at least 4 local authorities (i.e. councils). Former or retiring Presidents can nominate themselves but this is not relevant here.
The way the election works is that voters rank all candidates. In the first round of counting, first preference votes are totted up and if one candidate has more than 50% he/she is elected. If not an Instant Runoff method is used, with votes of lower-ranked being reallocated until there’s a winner (ie until one candidate gains a majority).
I just checked the online electoral register to confirm my status:
I will wait to see who has acually been nominated before deciding who to vote for. In the last Presidential Election (2018), five candidates opposed the re-election of Michael D. Higgins, three of them businessmen best known for having appeared on the Irish version of the TV show Dragon’s Den. There’s ample evidence from elsewhere that the products of reality TV shows do not make good presidents. Neither do rapists, so let’s hope Conor McGregor does not get nominated. It is likely that there will be more than six candidates this time and the election will be more closely contested that last time. In 2018 the turnout was very low, no noubt because many people assumed – correctly – that Higgins would win. In the event he got over 56% of the first-preference vote so the transfers were irrelevant. That might not be the case this time.
The Presidency of Ireland is a ceremonial rather than an executive office, and it has little actual power associated with it. It is nevertheless important in that the President is the guardian of the Constitution as well as representing the Irish Nation as a kind of ambassador and as patron of many good causes. Surprisingly, some of the people who want to put themselves forward don’t seem to know anything about what the job entails. Hopefully, the more obvious fruitcakes who put themselves forward will fail to get nominated. I think Michael D. Higgns has carried out his duties in a very dignified and diligent way over the years, and will be a very hard act to follow. I’ve been proud to have him as my President.
It’s hard to believe that seven whole years have passed since the last election. There’s another reminder of that coming up on Friday September 12th when I will be going to the National Concert Hall for a performance by the National Symphony Orchestra that marks the opening of the 2025/6 season. On September 15th 2018 I went to the season opener for that year. That was also my first ever visit to the National Concert Hall. To mark the occasion we were in the presence of the man himself , Michael D Higgins, and his wife Sabena. The President attended as Patron of the National Symphony Orchestra. I don’t know whether he will attend on Friday 12th September, but if he does I’m sure he will get a good ovation. As well as many other things Michael D. Higgins has been a very strong advocate for the Arts in Ireland. I’m not sure his successor will live up to the standard he set.
Trying to catch up on recent developments in galaxy formation? I can heartily recommend an excellent review article on the subject by Richard Ellis which you can find on the arXiv here. The abstract reads:
I present written notes from three lectures given at the 54th Saas-Fee Advanced Course of the Swiss Society of Astrophysics and Astronomy in January 2025 entitled “Galaxies and Black Holes in the First Billion Years as seen by the JWST”. I focused my lectures on progress in studies of cosmic reionisation, the properties of galaxies in the reionisation era, topics related to the redshift frontier and the search for Population III stars. The lectures were given to graduate students in astrophysics and cover both pedagogical material as well as observational results from the first two and half years of JWST science operations. The pace of discovery with JWST is, of course, rapid and so my lectures discuss long-term goals, analysis methods and their assumptions and limitations in the hope that the underlying material will retain value in the near future. In this written version, the visual material is that presented at Saas-Fee in January 2025 but I have provided updates on progress from the literature up to August 2025. The material is aimed at early career researchers and should not be considered as a scholarly review of the entire JWST literature on high redshift galaxies.
It’s quite a long article (65 pages) but nicely written and well worth reading, as it is full of information about recent advances as well as historical insights. Talking of which, there’s a picture on page 41 taken at a meeting in Durham in 1988 called The Epoch of Galaxy Formation that I attended while I was still a graduate student:
Richard Ellis himself is in the front row, left of centre with light-coloured trousers, checked shirt and hands in pockets. I’m in the picture too, but I’ll leave it up to you to find me!
A poll was held among the delegates at that meeting about various questions to do with galaxy formation. The majority opinions revealed by these votes nearly all turned out to be utterly wrong! That’s progress, I guess…
Close Up of Highlighting Specific Word Research in a Dictionary
While I remember, and before I get caught up in start-of-term things, I thought I would pass on news that two calls administered by Research Ireland will open on September 11th. These are the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarships and the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowships. These are open to applications from candidates anywhere in the world.
You can find information about the Postgraduate Scholarships here and the Postdoctoral Fellowships here. The postdoctoral positions are for one or two years; postgraduate positions are for 2 years (Research Masters) or 4 years (PhD).
The application deadline is 23rd October 2025 and positions of both types are to start on 1st September 2026. You will need to contact possible supervisors at your planned host institute in advance of application so there isn’t much time.
Anyone interested in applying to hold one of these positions in Maynooth is welcome to contact me privately for advice or assistance. Given my rapidly approaching retirement, however, I am not able to act as nominated supervisor for postgraduate positions. I would happily support an applicant for a postdoctoral fellowship in the area of cosmology. There are of course many other potential supervisors both at Maynooth and elsewhere.
Today is the last day of August, which, according to my calculations, means that tomorrow is the first day of September. Last week the kids started to go back to school and some of course started for the first time. I think the schools vary in the timetable for new arrivals and returning students, but they’re basically all operating fully from tomorrow, Monday 1st September.
Universities start back a little later, though this also varies. In Maynooth, Orientation Week (for new students) begins on September 15th, and lectures commence for all years on September 22nd, which happens to be the day of the Autumnal Equinox. My first lecture of the new academic year is on that day. I don’t know how many students I’ll have in my class yet. It’s a 4th-year class, and those students don’t register for modules until Friday 12th September, at the end of a week that begins with new students starting to enrol on Monday 8th September.
The first week of September will therefore be a bit quieter in the University than in the local schools. Next week sees a number of conferring ceremonies at which students who completed their studies with the examinations in May will receive their degrees. That includes a number of Physics students, who will graduate on Wednesday 3rd September. Unfortunately, when I tried to register to attend the ceremony, a few weeks ago, I was unable to because it was booked up so I’ll have to send my congratulations virtually. In any case, Conferring ceremonies at Maynooth are not what they used to be. Instead of the atmospheric surroundings of the Aula Maxima, they are now held in the soulless environnment of a lecture theatre. Instead of a nice buffet reception afterwards the graduates used to get, they now get a cup of tea in a paper cup and (if they’re lucky) a very small Danish pastry. It’s quite embarrassing actually. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in future, graduands were told to being their own sandwiches and a thermos flask. Anyway, a PhD student of mine will attend a conferring ceremony at the end of October. I’ll have to ensure I register on time for that one as I will be reading out the title of her thesis. Our first cohort of MSc students will graduate then too.
I’ve received a number of bills and renewal notices of various kinds over the last few weeks, indicating the anniversary of me completing the purchase of, and moving into, my house in Maynooth. In fact it was five years ago today that I wrote a blog post occasioned by the fact that I’d collected the keys to this property, though it wasn’t until the following weekend that I actually stayed overnight here for the first time.
I was very lucky to be able to able to buy this property in what turned out to be a short window in the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions in the Summer of 2020. There were plans to return to on-campus teaching in September with drastic restrictions on the number of students in each venue. That plan was subsequently changed and then changed again to move almost all teaching back online, and then again to move again into a “Level 5” lockdown.
I was Head of Department back then. My memories of that time were immense levels of stress and frustration, constantly having to change our teaching arrangements with very little support from the University as well as shouldering a full teaching load. In order for the institution to carry on functioning, all teaching and support staff to do huge amounts of unpaid overtime while the institution built up a massive financial surplus. I could say more about the callous indifference to staff and students alike shown at that time by one particular member of The Management, but I think I had better save it for when I’ve retired.
Given the enormous workload I had then, it was to be almost another year before I had time to collect most of my belongings from my house in Cardiff and longer still before I managed to sell it and pay off the mortgage I took out to buy my house here. All this was much more complicated than I expected when I moved to Ireland!
Anyway, many of the things I’d planned to do when I moved here still aren’t done. I bought some old furniture from the previous owner with the intention of replacing it with new, for example, but I somehow never got round to that. Nor have I replaced the old windows, gutters, etc, yet…
One thing I have done is change the refuse collection. When I moved in I took over a contract with Bord na Móna (literally “The Turf Board”), a company set up in 1946 to supply peat as a form of fuel but now diversified into other activities such as collecting and disposing waste. Over the last year the service provided by this company has degenerated to the point of complete unreliability. When I looked around for a replacement I found that Bord na Móna was also significantly more expensive than its competitors. Earlier this summer, therefore, I swtiched to a company called Greyhound which so far seems much better organized and is about 2/3 the price. That meant I had two sets of wheelie bins cluttering up my garden for about two months until Bord na Móna got around to removing theirs.
Since I seem to be having a weekend dominated by feelings of nostalgia, I thought I would comment on a nice article I read yesterday about The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a cult film which got its first cinematic release fifty years ago in 1975. You can find the article here.
Here is a the original theatrical trailer:
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is redolent with nostalgia for my days in Brighton in the Eighties. For a time I lived in a shared house not far from the Duke of York’s Picture House which had fairly frequent late-night showings of Rocky Horror, but it wasn’t just a question of going to see the film. It was obligatory to dress up like the characters, join in the dancing, squirt water pistols to recreate the rain, throw rice during the wedding scene, etc.
The first time I went it took me ages to find an outfit resembling that of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the mad scientist played by Tim Curry in the film. I eventually found suitable lingerie items in shops but failed when it came to the shoes. I couldn’t find stilettos in a size 11 anywhere. That’s probably just as well as I don’t think I’d have been able to walk in them anyway. I settled for a pair of Doctor Martens boots. I had longer hair in those days so a bit of gel did the trick for that, and a friend did the make-up for me. I had to shave my legs to wear the fishnet stockings too. I rather enjoyed dressing up, going to the show and, especially, the after-party…
I never got into the habit of cross-dressing, and haven’t got the figure for it now, but I am not at all ashamed to admit that I think some guys look very hot in lipstick and lingerie.
I lived in London from late 1990 until the very end of 1998. One of my favourite places for shopping in those days was the excellent Tower Records. There were two stores then, but I only ever visited the one at Number 10 Piccadilly as it was very conveniently placed to skive off from meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society at Burlington House, which is just round the corner.
It wasn’t just the huge selection of records, tapes and CDs across all musical genres but also the extremely helpful and knowledgeable staff. I always found their advice very helpful and often left with many more things than I intended to buy when I went in.
Tower records was acquired by the Virgin Group in 2003 and the store in Piccadilly closed down completely in 2009. I haven’t been past the site recently, but I think it is vacant and awaiting redevelopment.
The reason for mentioning this is that Tower Records is alive and well and living in Dublin. There are two stores in the city but I’ve only ever been to the larger one in Dawson Street. It’s not as big as the one in Piccadilly, but it does have a very good selection of music (including a large section of classical music) and very friendly staff. It also has a wide range of hifi equipment, including turntables for those of us who have a vinyl collection. It also has an online service. The last thing I ordered from them was delivered to my house in Maynooth the next day at no charge.
It brought back a lot of memories when I first went inside as it has the same old yellow and red signage and very much the same vibe as the old London store; you can see some interior pictures here. Tower Records (Ireland) is highly recommended for those who are nostalgic for the old Tower Records (London) as well as those who just want to visit a proper, independent, music store. I hope it not only survives but prospers.
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In the Dark 