After yesterday’s holiday it was back to teaching full-time this morning with the first lecture of my module on Particle Physics. I just about managed to get everything ready in time for the teaching session at 1pm which, because it was an introductory lecture with lots of pictures, I decided to do via powerpoint rather than my usual chalk-and-talk. That didn’t get off to a very good start because the podium PC in my room had decided to do a Windows update just before I started and I had to wait for that to finish before I could show my slides. I suppose that happened because this was the first day of teaching after a lengthy break so nobody had used the room recently.
Most of the lecture was devoted to introducing natural units, which I intend to use throughout the module, like I have on previous occasions I have taught this sort of material for reasons I explained here. The last time I taught particle physics was some 15 years ago, so I had to update some things, especially the picture of the components of the standard model to include the Higgs. After extensive research (by which I mean looking at wikipedia) I found the above; the Higgs is on the right. Unfortunately the particle masses – which reveal themselves if you click on the image above – are not given in natural units, but have pesky factors of c-squared in them. You can’t have everything.
The bit I’m looking forward to most is doing the Dirac Equation which, years ago when I was at Sussex, was once the subject of a cake:
That particular cake was a lemon drizzle cake which unfortunately is not one of the flavours represented in the standard model.
I saw in the news today that Cardiff University has announced a series of mergers, closures and widepsread job cuts in order to deal with a financial deficit. If I understand the announcement correctly, the intention is to terminate the equivalent of 400 full-time academic posts, which is over 10% of the academic staff complement. No doubt there will also be job losses among the important professional services and support staff. There is plenty of doubt, however, as to whether they will extend to members of the Senior Management Team who made today’s announcement and who should really be the ones held to account.
Cardiff is by no means the only UK university being decimated in this way. It is just the latest in a long list. The crisis in UK higher education has been brewing since Brexit, and the subsequent reduction in overseas students needed to balance the books in the absence of significant ncreases in tuition fees for UK students. A burst of inflation post-Covid and, more recently, increased National Insurance contributions have taken many institutions to the brink of solvency. That’s the official line. You can add, unofficially, poor decision-making at senior management level, in many cases pursuing expensive and over-ambitious vanity projects that have ultimately proved unaffordable but impossible to cancel.
One has to remember that when university managers make decisions on closing down units, it’s not often on the basis that those units are losing money. For a start, universities operate according to complicated and arbitrary financial models small adjustments to which can easily move a department from black to red or vice versa. Moreover, over half the income of a university is not spent on the front-line activities of teaching and research: a huge slice is absorbed by the central administration to fund “strategic” investments (i.e. risky projects) and of course to pay vast salaries to the VC, PVCs and other assorted cronies. Departments therefore tend to be judged not on whether they can cover their own costs but whether they return a surplus to The Centre.
(Incidentally, while the UK Higher Education sector is in turmoil, there is no sign of vice-chancellor pay packages being cut. Quite the opposite, in fact.)
I’d be the first to admit that running a large university is a difficult job. Even in the lower levels of management as Head of School at Sussex, I agonized over many decisions. During that time I came to the conclusion that being a successful manager of something is very stressful if you actually care about it. This is why so many of the people who prosper in senior university management circles are not people who care at all about what makes a university what it is. They just see everything as a sterile combination of metrics and spreadsheets and boxes to be ticked. This, not the funding shortfall per se, is why universities are experiencing an “existential crisis”.
Anyway, among the specific proposals at Cardiff are the closures of courses and whole Departments in Ancient History, Modern Languages, Music, Nursing and Religion & Theology. Job cuts (or, as the announcement puts it, “reductions in staff FTE”) will affect (among others) the Schools of Biosciences, Chemistry, Computer Sciences, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine. The list of Schools to face job losses look to me to be mainly those who had relied strongly on overseas students as a source of revenue, a source which must have dried up.
Another proposal (one of four mergers of Schools) involves the creation of a new School of Natural Sciences formed by merging Chemistry, Earth Sciences and “Physics”. The latter should be “Physics & Astronomy“, not “Physics”. I hope that carelessness is not typical of the forthcoming process. Physics & Astronomy is not earmarked for losses of academic jobs, but the merger is almost certainly intended to allow cuts in support staff. As per the above paragraph, Chemistry staff will be cut, so the new School of Natural Sciences will not be off to a happy start.
I worked at Cardiff University for many years, and am in regular touch with a number of friends and former colleagues still there, so this news is very distressing. All I can do is offer a message of solidarity and encourage everyone who is not in a Union to join immediately! I have a terrible feeling that today’s announcement is only the start.
I’m taking the liberty of reblogging this post from an experienced university teacher of chemistry and physics outlining some of the dangers posed by the encroachment of Artificial Intelligence into science education. It’s quite a long piece, but well worth reading in its entirety
I’ve been at home marking examinations almost all day and have decided to knock off until tomorrow when hopefully I can finish the job. I say almost all day because I took a break this afternoon to back to campus to collect some papers that I didn’t get yesterday because they were from students sitting the examination for various reasons in alternative venues on campus rather than the main examination room.
What I do with examination scripts is mark one question at a time rather than one script at a time. What I mean by that is that I go through every script marking all the attempts at Question 1, then I start again and do all the Questions 2, etc. I find that this is much quicker and more efficient than marking all the questions in each script then moving onto the next script. The reason for this is that I can upload into my mind the model answer for Question 1 so that it stays there while I mark dozens of attempts at it so I don’t have to keep referring to the marking scheme. Other advantages are that it’s easier to be consistent in giving partial credit when you’re doing the same question over and over again, and that also you spot what the common mistakes are more easily.
It’s a fairly monotonous job and I find my concentration starts to wander if I try to do too many in one go. Fortunately the exam papers are organized in batches (separated by elastic bands as in the photograph) so I usuallly take a break – as a sort of self-reward- after each batch to break things up. Each batch usually takes a couple of hours or so, so the breaks often end up as times to have lunch and tea. In terms of the timing it’s rather like a game of cricket, actually.
Today I corrected Question 1 in two batches before lunch, then another between lunch and tea. At that point I took a walk into town to do a few errands and then collected the remaining scripts from campus, which I have now just finished correcting. Some people will accuse me of being lazy, taking breaks like this, but I think it’s more efficient to do it this way. Trying to mark examinations for hours on end inevitably leads to more errors, so in the long run it takes longer to complete the job. Slow and steady does it.
I remember using a similar approach when I wrote my thesis many years ago. That’s a much bigger job, of course, but I found what worked for me was to plan out each chapter in terms of sections of roughly equal length, write each in turn and take a break when I’d finished it. Writing a thesis of around 200 pages may seem a daunting task, but if you split it into 1000-word chunks spread over three months or so it’s quite manageable – and you can plan to take time out for relaxtion along the way to avoid getting too burned out by the process.
Anyway, I’ve now finished all the attempts at Question 1 in this examination, including those in the extra scripts I picked up today. Question 1 consists of a set of short problems and is altogether worth 50% of the examination mark, so I’m actually abouty halfway through the marking. There three questions left, each longer than the pieces of Question 1 and worth 25% of the overall mark. Students are supposed to answer two. I’ll start on Question 2 in the morning and hopefully by this time tomorrow evening I will have marked all three, and that will be that. Until the next one…
Lecturers at Maynooth University are supposed to be available on the telephone to deal with queries from students concerning their examinations. This morning I was “on call” for the first time in 2025 and indeed the first time since 2023. Since I live in Maynooth I decided to come into campus in case of a query so I could go to the examination hall to deal with it if required. In the event, however, the examination passed off without incident and nobody called.
I wasn’t twiddling my thumbs all morning though. It seemed a good opportunity to go through the accumulated coursework for this module applying various exemptions for medical or other reasons so that when I’ve marked the scripts I can immediately combine the results with the CA component.
So here I am again, with a stack of an examination scripts to mark. The picture shows about 50 papers, part of the collection from my module on Differential Equations and Transform Methods. I want to get them out of the way as quickly as possible as I have another paper coming up next week and have a lot of other things to do before term starts at the beginning of February. I plan to spend the next couple of days correcting these, adding up the marks, combining those with the coursework, and preparing everything for upload to the system. I want to get this task out of the way as quickly as possible as I have another paper coming up next week and have a lot of other things to do before term starts at the beginning of February.
The January examination period starts tomorrow (10th January), so I thought I’d do a quick post on the topic of examinations. First of all let me wish the very best of luck everyone at Maynooth or elsewhere taking examinations in the next few weeks. I hope at least that the exam halls are nice and warm!
As the first examination for which I have responsibility is not until Monday 13th – unlucky for some! – I’ll have to wait to find out how any of my students have done but let me take this opportunity to pass on a few quick tips.
Try to get a good night’s sleep before the examination and arrive in plenty of time before the start. This is especially important when there’s bad weather that may disrupt travel. It is your responsibility to get to the examination on time!
Read the entire paper before starting to answer any questions. In particular, make sure you are aware of any supplementary information, formulae, etc, given in the rubric or at the end.
Start off by tackling the question you are most confident about answering, even if it’s not Question 1. This will help settle any nerves.
Don’t rush! Students often lose marks by making careless errors. Check all your numerical results on your calculator at least twice and – PLEASE – remember to put the units!
Don’t panic! You’re not expected to answer everything perfectly. A first-class mark is anything over 70%, so don’t worry if there are bits you can’t do. If you get stuck on a part of a question, don’t waste too much time on it (especially if it’s just a few marks). Just leave it and move on. You can always come back to it later.
Readers of this blog are welcome to add other tips through the comments box below!
As the Christmas holiday draws to a close and I begin thinking about the possibility that sooner or later, in due course, at some point in the future, in the fullness of time, all things considered, when all is said and done, in the end, I will have to start teaching again. Thinking about this is preferable to thinking about the stack of exam marking that I will have to contend with shortly.
One of the modules I am down to teach in the Spring Semester is particle physics, a subject I haven’t taught for well over a decade, so I have been looking through a box of old notes on the subject. Doing so I remembered that I had to explain neutrino oscillations, a process in which neutrinos (which have three distinct flavour states, associated with the electron, mu and tau leptons) can change flavour as they propagate. It’s quite a weird thing to spring on students who previously thought that lepton number was always conserved so I decided to start with an analogy based on more familiar physics.
A charged fermion such as an electron (or in fact anything that has a magnetic moment, which would include, e.g. the neutron) has spin and, according to standard quantum mechanics, the component of this in any direction can can be described in terms of two basis states, say “up” for the +z-direction and “down” for the opposite (-z) represented schematically like this:
In this example, as long as the particle is travelling through empty space, the probability of finding it with spin “up” is 50%, as is the probability of finding it in the spin “down” state, the probabilities defined by the square of the amplitudes. Once a measurement is made, however, the state collapses into a definite “up” or “down” wherein it remains until something else is done to it. In such a situation one of the coefficients goes to zero and the other is unity.
If, on the other hand, the particle is travelling through a region where there is a magnetic field the “spin-up” and “spin-down” states can acquire different energies owing to the interaction between the magnetic moment of the particle and the magnetic field. This is important because it means the bits of the wave function describing the up and down states evolve at different rates, and this has measurable consequences: measurements made at different positions yield different probabilities of finding the spin pointing in different directions. In effect, the spin vector of the particle performs a sort of oscillation, similar to the classical phenomenon called precession.
The mathematical description of neutrino oscillations is very similar to this, except it’s not the spin part of the wavefunction being affected by an external field that breaks the symmetry between “up” and “down”. Instead the flavour part of the wavefunction is “precessing” because the flavour states don’t coincide with the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian that describes the neutrinoes. For this to happen, however, different neutrino types must have intrinsically different energies (which, in turn, means that the neutrinos must have different masses), in quite a similar way similar to the spin-precession example.
Although this isn’t a perfect analogy I thought it was a good way of getting across the basic idea. Unfortunately, however, when I subsequently asked an examination question about neutrino oscillations I got a significant number of answers that said “neutrino oscillations happen when a neutrino travels through a magnetic field….”.
Sigh.
Neutrinos have no magnetic moment so don’t interact with magnetic fields, you see…
Anyhow, I’m sure there’s more than one reader out there who has had a similar experience with an analogy that wasn’t perhaps as instructive as hoped. Feel free to share through the comments box…
Today I completed the lectures for one of my modules, the one on Differential Equations and Transform Methods for Engineering students, and gave the penultimate lecture for Differential Equations and Complex Analysis for final-year Mathematical Physics students. Both were revision lectures. As campus has been very quiet for the last few days I didn’t expect many (if any) students to show up for either of these classes, but some did, although numbers were a long way down on the start of the year.
Campus is always quiet this close to the holiday, but this time there has been a bug going around which has led to a few more absences than usual among students. Some staff have been affected too. I had a mild dose of whatever it was earlier in the week but got over it relatively quickly.
Tomorrow, the last day of Semester 1, I have my last lecture of this term, followed by a couple of final-year project presentations. Then that’s it until 2025. I am already thinking about what to do tomorrow evening to mark the end of term. I haven’t reached any definite conclusions yet, but it will almost certainly involve wine. Then I suppose I’ll have to start my Christmas shopping which will include buying more wine.
I am a bit flush this week because I’ve finally received rebates of overpayment from OVO Energy and Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water relating to my former house in Cardiff. I sold this property months ago, after much tedious to-ing and fro-ing, but getting money back from utility companies is like getting blood out of a stone. OVO Energy were particularly bad, violating their statutory obligations. The offer3d me £60 additional payment in recognition of this but, although they eventually settled the bill, they never paid the compensation. It seems they just lied.
In contrast, and giving credit where it’s due, I am grateful to Cardiff City Council for paying back my overpaid Council Tax very promptly.
The forthcoming week is the second-to-last week of teaching term at Maynooth and, as usual at this stage of the Semester, we’re getting busier and busier.
The examinations for January have been sent off for printing and are (presumably) ready to go, so that’s one item crossed off the to-do list. I’m still behind on the coursework grading for one of my two modules, but should be able to catch up in the next few days. Other than that, I am miraculously on schedule as far as teaching is concerned. I should finish covering the respective syllabuses by Friday 13th, which means the following week will be devoted to revision. I expect attendance on campus will be fairly sparse in the last week of term, especially later on. I’ll be there until the bitter end, however, as I have a lecture scheduled on Friday 20th and have to attend final-year student presentations that afternoon. After that I will probably collapse in a state of exhaustion into the welcoming arms of the Christmas break.
While the week ahead will be fairly normal from the point of view of teaching itself, there are quite a few extra things in my calendar, as people try to get various things done before the break. Extra items for next week including a meeting about a staff recruitment (of which, hopefully, more anon) and another about the possible reorganization of teaching in the light of the merger of the Departments of Theoretical and Experimental Physics. Rationalization of teaching could lead to an improvement in the courses offered and also, by removing duplication, reduce our very heavy teaching workloads. Whether it will actually be possible to achieve either or both of these aims remains to be seen. In any case I’m not sure if any significant changes to teaching will be implemented before I retire, but I’ll probably go along to the meeting anyway in case there’s anything I can contribute.
I’ve also agreed to give a talk on Wednesday to the student Pride Society which I am looking forward to, although such events invariably make me feel very old!
As it happens, Friday 13th December is the date for the first Christmas dinner of the newly formed Department of Physics; previously, the Departments of Theoretical Physics and Experimental Physics held separate celebrations. It will be a much bigger group this time and, it being on a Friday evening we’ll have the weekend to recover before the last week of term.
Anyway, although it’s a Sunday I’ll be working all afternoon as I have a task to finish that is due tomorrow so I had better sign off. When I was younger I used to look forward to Christmas as a time for feasts and parties and socialising. Now that I’m older I look forward to it more than anything as a time for the sense of relaxation that comes from the lack of deadlines.
Maynooth University Library, home of the famous cat
As the count continues in the General Election in Ireland, the result of which seems likely to be the same old government, I am reminded that today is 1st December 2024, which means that it’s seven years to the day since I started work at Maynooth University. Despite the frustrations I’m still happy I made the move all that time ago.
One big change that has happened over the last year is that the Department of Theoretical Physics that I joined in 2017 no longer exists. It has now been subsumed into a new Department of Physics alongside the old Department of Experimental Physics. This is something that should have happened years ago, and should also have been handled in a better way. As it is, The Merger really just involved merging the two budgets with little thought given to how the new Department would function. As a result it still operates largely as two separate sub-Departments. Any benefits of the reorganization have therefore yet to accrue. The good side of this is that Senior Management seems to have lost interest in pushing us around, and it’s now up to the new Department to self-organize. I suppose in due course there will be changes, but in due course I will have retired.
When I wrote last year on the occasion of the sixth year of my appointment at Maynooth, I complained that the University had still not fulfilled the terms of my employment contract. With The Merger, members of the former Department of Theoretical Physics now have access to the technical support previously enjoyed by the Department of Experimental Physics so I suppose that particular ticket is closed. This blatant disregard for written contractual terms demonstrates, however, why I have so little trust in the University management. In that vein, it still concerns me that my contract says that I am employed by the Department of Theoretical Physics. Legally, does it matter that I am employed to work in an entity that doesn’t exist?
The thing I’m probably most proud of over the past seven years is, with the huge help of staff at Maynooth University Library, getting the Open Journal of Astrophysics off the ground and attracting some excellent papers. This year has seen yet more significant growth, with submissions and publications more than doubling this year, after an increase of a factor of three the year before. We’re still smaller than many of the mainstream astrophysics journals, but we’re still growing.
Anyway, I continue to enjoy the teaching, though doing two new modules in a term, plus an undergraduate project, plus supervising three PhD students, is quite a lot of work for an old man. That reminds me I have some correcting to do…
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In the Dark 