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Leaving Again

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on June 3, 2026 by telescoper

It is an important day for many young people in Ireland because the Junior Certificate and Leaving Certificate examinations both start today, so the first thing I need to do is wish everyone starting their examinations the very best of luck!

Among other things, the results of the leaving certificate examinations are important for September’s university admissions. In the system operating in England and Wales the standard qualification for entry is the GCE A-level. Most students take A-levels in three subjects, which gives them a relatively narrow focus although the range of subjects to choose from is rather large. In Ireland the standard qualification is the Leaving Certificate, which comprises a minimum of six subjects, with many students taking more than this. This gives students a broader range of knowledge at the sacrifice (perhaps) of a certain amount of depth; it has been decreed for entry into this system that an Irish Leaving Certificate subject counts as about 2/3 of an A-level subject for admissions purposes, so Irish students do the equivalent of at least four A-levels, and many do more than this. It’s also worth noting that all students have to take Mathematics at Leaving Certificate level. One can choose to do Leaving Certificate subjects at Ordinary or Higher level and there’s quite a big difference between the two, especially in Mathematics.

Overall I prefer the Leaving Certificate over the UK system of A-levels, partly the former gives the students a broader range of subjects than the latter. I would have liked to have been allowed to take at least one arts subject past O-level, for example. Another reason is that all students across the country take the same examination, so the difficulty or otherwise of the papers is a topic of national conversation. There will no doubt be many reactions in the media over the forthcoming days!

Anyway, tomorrow is a significant date for me (in more ways than one) so I’m up early this morning before heading off on a short journey to mark the occasion in style.

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Job Losses at Universities, Huge Profits at Elsevier

Posted in Education, Finance with tags , , on May 31, 2026 by telescoper

The wave of job losses at UK universities is spreading. I recently mentioned Nottingham University and just this week saw an announcement from Sussex University that 200 jobs are on the line (this in addition to 528 already lost in the past year). Higher education in the UK is shrinking.

Meanwhile, one of the leading exponents of the Academic Publishing Racket, Elsevier, announced its profits for 2025:

(Taken from here.) That profit margin is higher than all the Big Tech companies. Higher education may be shrinking but Elsevier’s profits are not.

Despite the dire financial straits of universities in the UK and elsewhere, they continue to surrender money to this parasitic industry which is draining institutions of precious resources. I’m not saying that academic journal costs are the sole reason for the current meltdown but it does say something about the lack of imagination of University leaders that they continue wasting money on the “service” provided by commercial publishers like Elsevier.

Many of us have been boycotting Elsevier as individuals for many years, but it clearly isn’t working. Perhaps now University leaders will finally realise that the status quo is unsustainable and cut their institutional ties with the publishing industry for good. It won’t solve all their financial problems, but it’s the right thing to do.

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Newtonian Mechanics is Simple…

Posted in Education, mathematics with tags , on May 29, 2026 by telescoper


People keep telling me that Newtonian Mechanics is simple. Here’s a demonstration of the apparently simple Double Pendulum that demonstrates very complicated behaviour.

P.S. I did not make the video – it can be found all over the interrnet. I am sharing it here for the education and entertainment of my readers, both of them.

P.P.S. The music is a track called “Swing Theory”…

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On My Knees

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , on May 22, 2026 by telescoper

It has taken a bit longer that I expected to get this far but I have now completed the grading of one of my modules. It wasn’t the written examination that took all the time, but the marking of the computational physics projects. This is always a slow job but for some reason it took even longer this year. Anyway, all components of the assessment for that module are now done and dusted and everything uploaded.

To add to the fun and games, last week I did the biannual trip to Naas for my anti-arthritis injections. I’ve been doing this regularly for some years now and it has become routine. When I first started I was told that there was a risk of one or both knees swelling up, but that has never happened. Until last week, that is. My right knee decided to swell up alarmingly. Although this was not really painful, I was forced to stay at home to rest and periodically apply a bag of ice. That worked well enough that I could go to last Friday’s concert (with the aid of a walking-stick) but it wasn’t until Sunday that I was properly recovered.

The alarm having passed I am now starting to feel the benefit of the jabs. I am planning sometime soon to walk from Maynooth to Dublin along the Royal Canal, that being the last leg of the National Famine Way. I want to be sure I can manage the 27km walk before attempting to do the full walk later in the summer. The weather is set fair for a few days so I might give it a go next week, assuming I manage to finish all my examining duties promptly. It’s the season finale at the National Concert Hall next Friday – followed by a long weekend break when I will be travelling a little, so I might try to do it on Thursday.

My next examination is not until Tuesday morning so, after several days of being shut away doing corrections, I can now spend a few days until the scripts are ready to collect doing numerous things that I’ve let slip while I’ve been busy. For one thing I have an inbox full of unanswered emails to attend to.

But for now I’m quite tired and in the mood only to vegetate.

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Nottingham University Management Messages

Posted in Biographical, Education, Science Politics with tags , , on May 19, 2026 by telescoper

Last week I posted about the dire situation at Nottingham University and particularly in the School of Physics & Astronomy there. I since learned that I didn’t get the nunbers quite right: it appears that there are 71 staff in the School and 56 received notices that their jobs are at risk. There are 23 Professors in the School and 20 have received letters. The intention is that about 20 jobs will be lost across all academic and technical staff.

The open letter and petition here has already garnered over 2000 signatures, but more can’t do any harm.

I’ve heard also that staff at Notitngham are about to start a Marking and Assessment Boycott in response to the plans. This seems entirely reasonable to me and I would support further industrial action too. There is more about the situation in Physics World here.

I mentioned in my previous post that

Not all those in receipt of an “at risk” letter will actually be made redundant, but the intention is clearly to scare people into leaving in order to save on redundancy payments.

No doubt some positions will be saved by retirements and voluntary severance, but cuts on the scale being planned will be difficult to achieve without a significant number of compulsory redundancies. The messaging from the University Management is not subtle.

I have no idea what the management “plan” is at Nottingham, but I suspect it goes something like this, from the current Private Eye:

The effect of all this on staff morale will be devastating, but there will also be a practical effect. The more mobile, especially those with portable individual research grants, and those not tied to laboratories, will already be looking to move elsewhere. That will no doubt include some of Nottingham’s best researchers. It won’t be easy to move elsewhere in the UK, however, as the higher education system is collapsing. Other universities will no doubt follow a similar path,

Unfortunately, the recent goings-on at the Science and Technology Facilities Council will almost certainly be taken as a cue to shed posts in PPAN areas (Particle Physics, Astronomy and Nuclear Physics), as grants in these areas are to be drastically reduced. This is a clear signal that STFC wants the PPAN community to shrink. As far as I can see, Nottingham University currently employs about eleven Academic Staff in Astronomy and a similar number in Particle Cosmology.

On a personal note, in the interest of full disclosure, I joined Nottingham University as Professor of Astrophysics in January 1999. Neither of these groups existed then and the School of Physics (as it was) was struggling in the doldrums. The incorporation of Astronomy led to the name being changed to the School of Physics & Astronomy, led to a boost in undergraduate recruitment and improved research assessment outcome. The Particle Cosmology group came a bit later. The University’s original plan for Astronomy was just one Professor and two lecturers! I pushed particularly hard for this when I was there. I left Nottingham in 2007 and watched from the outside as both groups prospered over the years, due not only to teaching and research but also to an effective outreach campaign centered around Sixty Symbols. I feel very sad to see their future so drastically threatened.

While I am on the subject of messages, the Vice-Chancellor of Nottingham University, Jane Norman, has recently announced publicly that she thinks the University might go bust by 2031 without these cuts. Now, if you were a prospective Nottingham University student, how would you respond to a statement that the University you are thinking of applying to could run out of money in five years? The VC can’t possibly imagine that recruitment will remain buoyant in this situation, can she? Her blundering attempt to justify the planned cuts brings the prospect of a death spiral at Nottingham closer.

As James Binney put it in his comment on the open letter:

If these redundancies go ahead, the best physics faculty will leave Nottingham, outstanding candidates will no longer accept offers from Nottingham and the quality of the student body will rapidly decline. It takes generations to create a world-class department, but one can be destroyed in less than a decade.

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On the Use of Generative AI

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , , , on May 18, 2026 by telescoper

We’ve reached the time of year at Maynooth when academic staff are busy grading projects of various kinds. This year we have to be much mindful of the use of Large Language Models (such as ChatGPT) in written reports as these are much more commonplace now. We anticipated this at the start of the academic year, but now we have to see whether are policies work in practice. In the case of the Computational Physics projects that I have to mark, this also extends to the use of Generative AI in writing code. The approach I take there is that I don’t place an absolute ban, but I require students to declare the use and, crucially, describe what steps they used to test and validate the output. By the time they’ve done that they might as well have written the code themselves!

As well as its effect on teaching, GenAI is having a huge impact on research. In my role as Managing Editor of the Open Journal of Astrophysics I have seen a large increase in submissions of papers in which AI plays some role. These vary from pure “slop” – nonsense papers not worthy of serious consideration – to articles that use AI tools in a perfectly reasonable way to speed up certain aspects of the analysis. I think this is the case for most scientific journals.

The approach we have adopted is similar to the policy on teaching outlined above. It is described by the following section we have added to our “For Authors” page:

Use of Generative AI. We do not operate a blanket ban on the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) or other forms of Generative AI. If you do use such tools, however, you must declare it in the acknowledgments section of your paper. Furthermore, if GenAI methods are used for any form of calculation, analysis, or data visualization you must include an account of what steps you have taken to test and validate these methods. Articles containing direct evidence of the use of GenAI, such as hallucinated references or prompts embedded in the text, will not be accepted.

Since the Open Journal of Astrophysics is an arXiv-overlay journal I should also pass on the information that arXiv is itself developing a policy on the use of LLMs. Although it has yet to appear on the arXiv website, a recent communication on social media states:

If there is incontrovertible evidence of LLM slop in a paper, this means the authors did not take the time to read the LLM output and we can’t trust anything else in the paper. Penalty is 1 year ban from arXiv followed by a requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue.

This will be tantamount to a one-year ban from publishing in OJAp, so urge authors should be be very careful in their use of such methods.

It is likely that these policies will have to be extended as the use of GenAI spreads.

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That Scottish Higher Maths Paper 1…

Posted in Education, mathematics with tags , , , on May 15, 2026 by telescoper

Talking of Examinations, I saw an article on the BBC website about a recent Higher Maths paper in Scotland which has generated complaints and a petition because it was allegedly unfair. The introduction to the petition states:

This is not a complaint that the paper was too hard. Students expect to be challenged. The problem is that the 2026 Higher Maths Paper 1 used language and phrasing that was confusing, ambiguous, and inconsistent with every past paper students had revised from. Questions were not simply difficult — they were worded in ways that made it genuinely unclear what was being asked.

Past SQA Higher Maths papers have followed a recognisable style: clear command words, standard notation, and questions that test understanding rather than the ability to decode unusual phrasing. The 2026 Paper 1 departed from this in ways that penalised well-prepared students simply because the wording did not match the conventions they had been taught to expect.

Numerous other news outlets have covered the story too. It is frustrating that most of the pieces focus on what people said about the paper but don’t actually include a link to the paper itself, making it impossible to make your own mind up.

So you can make your own mind up here is a scan of the actual paper (obtained from here):

2026_Higher_Maths_Paper_1_ScanDownload

Bear in mind that the Scottish examination system is not the same as in England & Wales – the “Highers” are not as advanced as A-levels and are more similar to the Irish Leaving Certificate.

My opinion, for what it’s worth having neither taught nor studied in the Scottish system, is that there is nothing out of the ordinary with this paper. There is a lot to do in just 75 minutes – for 12 questions that’s just over 6 minutes a question. I don’t like examinations that are speed tests.

That said, the questions look well structured and the “command words” are without exception on the list here. Some questions are easy and others harder: I think Question 12 is the most difficult, but I think that’s intentional – to stretch the stronger students. The only thing I would quibble with is the wording of 11(a) (ii):

The second sentence is redundant. How can one possibly “explain why” without giving “a reason”? The reason is basically that the quadratic remaining after you have taken out the factor (x+2) does not factorize.

I looked at the 2025 Paper 1 and it seems a similar level, though the questions are phrased in a terser fashion. Here it is for reference:

NH_Mathematics_Paper1-Non-calculator_2025Download

There may well be context that I’m missing, however, so I’d welcome comments on the diffculty and/or fairness through the box below.

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After Lectures but before Examinations

Posted in Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on May 14, 2026 by telescoper

This morning I did my last teaching session of the Academic Year 2025-6, an informal revision lecture/tutorial on Computational Physics. It was optional, for the students, as this is officially a study break, and was at 9am, and only a handful of students showed up, but I hope those that did found it useful. As is often the case with optional sessions, I think the students who came were the keenest and probably therefore those who least needed last-minute tips for the examination, but that’s always the way.

In the past such revision classes have been routine, at least for me, but for some reason the University has taken to locking most of the teaching rooms during the study break. This causes huge problems finding a space to do revision sessions. I really don’t understand this. There are constant complaints from students about the lack of study space, and the response from the University is that right before the examinations they lock dozens of empty rooms.

Anyway, the Examination Period starts tomorrow morning, Friday15th, but most of the students who turned up this morning have their first examination on Tuesday 19th May (which happens to be Computational Physics).

take the opportunity to wish all students the best for their examinations:

You shouldn’t really be relying on luck of course, so here are some tips (especially for physics students, but applicable elsewhere).

  1. Try to get a good night’s sleep before the examination and arrive in plenty of time before the start. Spending all night cramming is unlikely to help you do well.
  2. Prepare well in advance so you’re relaxed when the time comes.
  3. 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. You can always ask for log tables if there’s something you can’t remember.
  4. 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. You’re under no obligation to answer the questions in the order they are asked.
  5. Don’t rush! Students often lose marks by making careless errors. In particular, check all your working out, including numerical results obtained your calculator, at least twice
  6. Please remember the UNITS!
  7. 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.

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Jobs Under Threat at Nottingham University

Posted in Biographical, Education with tags , , on May 14, 2026 by telescoper

I saw this picture on a LinkedIn post from a former member of staff in Physics at Nottingham University:

It shows a notieboard in the foyer of the Physics Building, which houses the School of Physics & Astronomy. Earlier this week members of staff received letters informing them that their jobs are “at risk of redundancy”. As an act of solidarity the staff members concerned showed posted their letters publicly. I don’t know the names of the people who have received these letters – and if I did I wouldn’t share them here – but there are 17 letters.

UPDATE: I have since heard that 56 members of academic staff in the School – out of a total of 71 – have received these letters. The University wants to reduce the staff numbers in Physics & Astronomy by about a third.

I also know that the undergraduate course in Mathematical Physics, taught jointly with the School of Mathematics, has been suspended and will not admit any students. I taught on this course for many years when I was at Nottingham University (from 1999 to 2007).

The threat of redundancy is not specific to Physics. It seems almost 2,700 individuals across the University have received such notices and the University is attempting to cut 600 positions. Not all those in receipt of an “at risk” letter will actually be made redundant, but the intention is clearly to scare people into leaving in order to save on redundancy payments.

More details can be found here.

There is a petition against these job cuts here which I encourage you to sign.

The background to this disaster is explained here. In summary, the University’s current financial meltdown is caused by the actions of the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nottingham, Prof. Shearer West,, who presided over the hare-brained decision to purchase a large new campus. None of the “at risk” staff is at fault., but they will have to bear the burden of management ineptitude. You would think that the people responsible for this fiasco would be held to account and pay at least some of the price for their incompetence. But no. Prof. Shearer West left her post in 2024 to take up the position of Vice-Chancelor at the University of Leeds on a salary of more than £330K, leaving others to clean up the mess.

I fear more such news is coming. The UK Higher Education sector is shrinking rapidly. Nottingham University won’t be the last, and I doubt the contagion will be restricted to the UK either…

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Lectures’ End

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on May 8, 2026 by telescoper

At last we’ve made it to the end of term. This morning I delivered my last particle physics lecture. Given that it is the last day of the semester I was half-expecting no students would turn up, but in the end I had about 60% attendance. At the end of my lecture there was even a smattering of applause, which I interpreted as meaning that the students were happy that I’d finished.

I thought I would end this module with some topics that I didn’t have time to cover in any detail, but thought the students should know at least something about. These loose ends included:

  • Renormalization
  • Grand Unified Theories (GUTS)
  • Supersymmetry (SUSY)
  • Particle candidates for Dark Matter
  • Baryogenesis

I only had time for a superficial treatment of these topics, but felt the class should at least hear the words. There are some very good unanswered research questions under those headings, which I think is an appropriate way to end a final-year module, given that at least some of the class are intending to carry on to further study in physics.

This afternoon we had a colloquium by our PhD student John Ibrahim on the subject of the “Quark‑Gluon Vertex and Confinement of Quarks”. It was a nice talk but it struck me how big the gap was between what I’d been teaching at undergraduate level and the standard that a PhD student has to reach.

Today was also the deadline for Computational Physics projects. I’ll be grading them next week. Even then the term won’t quite be over – there is the small matter of exam marking to be done – but at least I’ve got no more formal teaching to do until September.

Last night on the way home I decided to buy a nice bottle of white wine and put it in the fridge so I could drink it in celebration of the end of term when I get home, with a nice fish supper.

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