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Blydhen Nowydh Da!

Posted in Biographical, Education, Music, Politics, Science Politics, Sport with tags , , on January 1, 2011 by telescoper

I hope the blogosphere hasn’t got too bad a hangover this morning. I don’t, although I did have a nice lie in until about 11am when the lure of the Guardian prize crossword drew me out of bed and down to the newsagents. Luckily, I remembered to get dressed first. The crossword turned out to be quite a nice one to start the year with, by the perennial Araucaria, but it didn’t take all that long to do so I’ve got time to do a bit of shopping and a go on my exercise bike. Yes, that’s my New Year’s resolution. More shopping.

I know 2010 was a tough year for many people for many different reasons. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly been brilliant for me either, but I am looking forward to 2011 whatever it might bring. The first results from Planck will be released very soon (on 11th January, in fact), which will give me something exciting to blog about. More generally, the recent financial settlement for STFC was not as poor as many of us expected so the future doesn’t look quite as grim for UK astronomy as we feared.

There are exciting developments in store for the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University, where I work, with (hopefully) a number of new staff members joining us soon. Later on in the year we’ll be rolling out a completely redsigned set of physics courses which we’ve been working on for over a year. In addition we’ll be starting to work more closely with Swansea University in order to provide a broader range of advanced options for physics students at both institutions.

Of course behind all this there’s still considerable uncertainty about the funding situation for universities which are facing big cuts in government grants and having to increase tuition fees charged to students. Whether and to what extent this will deter students from going to university remains to be seen. The financial pressure will certainly lead to mergers and possibly to closures across the UK over the next few years, although only time will tell how many.

On the cultural side there’s a large number of concerts at St David’s Hall and a full season of Opera at WNO to look forward to, including a performance of Cosi fan Tutte on my birthday. Cardiff plays host to the First Test match between England and Sri Lanka at the end of May, and a one-day international against India in September. I might even get myself a membership of Glamorgan Cricket Club, something I’ve toyed with doing for a couple of years now. There’s also a good chance that Cardiff City F.C. might get themselves promoted to the Premiership, something that would be great for the city of Cardiff. It wouldn’t be beyond them to fall at the last fence, as they have a habit of doing..

May 2011 will also see the Welsh Assembly elections, and there will be a referendum on further law-making powers for the WAG on 3rd March.

On the wider political scene the question is whether the governing coalition’s cuts will force the economy back into recession or not. I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that many ordinary working people are going to lose their jobs and many less advantaged members of society will have their benefits cut. Meanwhile the people who took us to the brink of economic ruin will no doubt carry on getting their bonuses.

In spite of all that, let me end by wishing you peace and prosperity for the New Year and beyond. And if that’s not possible, just remember Nil Illegitimi Carborundum.

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Wales set for university mergers

Posted in Education, Finance with tags , , , , , , on December 22, 2010 by telescoper

Just another quick post to pass on the news just out that the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) has announced that the number of universities in Wales must reduce by a half over the next two years.

I’ve argued already on this blog that there are too many small separate higher education institutions in Wales and that’s a view which is probably held by many across the sector. Mergers and/or closures have seemed to me to be inevitable for some time given the general climate of austerity and the consequent chill winds blowing through the groves of academe. According to HEFCW, the plan is that by 2013 no “region” of Wales will have any more than two universities although I’m not sure what counts as a region.

Until recently there were four different “universities” with campuses in Cardiff: Cardiff University (where I work); the University of Glamorgan (which has a presence in Cardiff, but which has its main campus in Pontypridd); the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (RWCMD); and the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff (UWIC).

In fact RWCMD was absorbed by the University of Glamorgan a short time ago, but still uses its old name as part of the merged institution.
Apparently one more merger will be necessary to satisfy HEFCW’s requirement, which I guess will involve UWIC also being absorbed by the University of Glamorgan. If that does happen, I hope HEFCW will keep a close eye on matters of governance. The UoG doesn’t seem to me to have a very strong track-record with respect to resafeguarding standards of academic practice.

Depending on how “region” is interpreted, there might even be pressure to include the University of Wales, Newport in an even bigger new South East Wales institution presumably headed by the University of Glamorgan.

Elsewhere in Wales the merger process is already underway. Last week, Swansea Metropolitan and the University of Wales Trinity St David announced plans to create a united institution. Going back one stage, the University of Wales Trinity St David was itself formed through the merger earlier this year of Wales’ oldest education institutions, Trinity University College, Carmarthen and the University of Wales Lampeter. Although these have merged it appears they will carry on using their existing names, which may cause some confusion but we’ll have to see how it goes.

It’s important to note that universities are officially independent bodies, so HEFCW (through which public funding is channeled to them) can’t really just tell them to merge. However, many of the smaller institutions are so dependent on state funding that they basically have to do what HEFCW tells them or face financial oblivion. Of course it will require Vice-chancellors to agree, and since presumably half of them will cease to be VCs, there will be some reluctance. Turkeys tend not to vote for Christmas. However, HEFCW has promised that “core funding will be deployed in ways which lend force to the achievement of that target”. In other words, they’ll be calling on the odd VC to make them an offer they can’t refuse…


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Spare me the Passive Voice!

Posted in Education with tags , , , , , on December 16, 2010 by telescoper

I’ve felt a mini-rant brewing for a few days now, as I’ve been reading through some of the interim reports my project students have written. I usually quite enjoy reading these, in fact. They’re not too long and I’m usually pretty impressed with how the students have set about the sometimes tricky things I’ve asked them to do. One pair, for example, is reanalysing the measurements made at the 1919 Eclipse expedition that I blogged about here, which is not only interesting from a historical point of view but which also poses an interesting challenge for budding data analysts.

So it’s not the fact that I have to read these things that annoys me, but the strange way students write them, i.e. almost entirely in the passive voice, e.g. “The experiment was calibrated using a phlogiston normalisation widget…”.

I accept that people disagree about whether the passive voice is good style or not. Some journals actively encourage the passive voice while others go the opposite way entirely . I’m not completely opposed to it, in fact, but I think it’s only useful either when the recipient of the action described in the sentence is more important than the agent, or when the agent is unknown or irrelevant. There’s nothing wrong with “My car has been stolen” (passive voice) since you would not be expected to know who stole it. On the other hand “My Hamster has been eaten by Freddy Starr” would not make a very good headline.

The point is that the construction of a statement in the passive voice in English is essentially periphrastic in that it almost inevitably involves some form of circumlocution – either using more words than necessary to express the meaning or being deliberately evasive by introducing ambiguity. Both of these failings should be avoided in scientific writing.

Apparently our laboratory instructors tell students to write their reports in the passive voice as a matter of course. I think this is just wrong. In a laboratory report the student should describe what he or she did. Saying what “was done” often leaves the statement open to the interpretation that somebody else did it. The whole point of a laboratory report is surely for the students to describe their own actions. “We calibrated the experiment..” is definitely to be preferred to the form I gave above.

Sometimes it is appropriate to use the passive voice because it is the correct grammatical construction in the circumstances. Sometimes also the text just seems to work better that way too. But having to read an entire document written in the passive voice drives me to distraction. It’s clumsy and dull.

In scientific papers, things are a little bit different but I still think using the active voice makes them easier to read and less likely to be ambiguous. In the introduction to a journal paper it’s quite acceptable to discuss the background to your work in the passive voice, e.g. “it is now generally accepted that…” but when describing what you and your co-authors have done it’s much better to use the active voice. “We observed ABC1234 using the Unfeasibly Large Telescope..” is, to my mind, much better than “Observations of ABC1234 were made using..”.

Reading back over this post I notice that I have jumped fairly freely between active and passive voice, thus demonstrating that I don’t have a dogmatic objection to its use. What I’m arguing is that it shouldn’t be the default, that’s all.

My guess is that a majority of experimental scientists won’t agree with this opinion, but a majority of astronomers and theoreticians will.

This guess will now be tested using a poll…


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Take a note from me…

Posted in Education with tags , , , , on December 14, 2010 by telescoper

Having just given a lecture on probability and statistics to our first-year postgraduate students I thought I’d indulge in a bit of reflective practice (as the jargon goes) and make a few quick comments on teaching to see if I can generate some reaction. Part of the reason for doing this is that while I was munching my coffee and drinking my toast this morning – I’m never very coordinated first thing – I noticed an interesting post by a student on a blog  that somehow wound up referring some traffic to one of my old posts about lecture notes.

I won’t repeat the entire content of my earlier discussion, but one of the main points I made was about how inefficient many students are at taking notes during lectures, so much so that the effort of copying things onto paper must surely prevent them absorbing the intellectual content of the lecture.

I dealt with this problem when I was an undergraduate by learning to write very quickly without looking at the paper as I did so. That way I didn’t waste time moving my head to and fro between paper and screen or blackboard. Of course, the notes I produced using this method weren’t exactly aesthetically pleasing, but my handwriting is awful at the best of times so that didn’t make much difference to me. I always wrote my notes up more neatly after the lecture anyway. But the great advantage was that I could write down everything in real time without this interfering with my ability to listen to what the lecturer was saying.

An alternative to this approach is to learn shorthand, or invent your own form of abbreviated language. This approach is, however, unlikely to help you take down mathematical equations quickly…

My experience nowadays is that students aren’t used to taking notes like this, so they struggle to cope with the old-fashioned chalk-and-talk style of teaching that some lecturers still prefer. That’s probably because they get much less practice at school than my generation. Most of my school education was done via the blackboard..

Nowadays,  most lecturers use more “modern” methods than this. Many lecture using powerpoint, and often they give copies of the slides to students. Others give out complete sets of printed notes before, during, or after lectures. That’s all very well, I think, but what are the students supposed to be doing during the lecture if you do that? Listen, of course, but if there is to be a long-term benefit they should take notes too.

Even if I hand out copies of slides or other notes, I always encourage my students to make their own independent set of notes, as complete as possible. I don’t mean copying down what they see on the screen and what they may have on paper already, but trying to write down what I say as I say it. I don’t think many take that advice, which means much of the spoken illustrations and explanations I give don’t find their way into any long term record of the lecture.

And if the lecturer just reads out the printed notes, adding nothing by way of illustration or explanation, then the audience is bound to get bored very quickly.

My argument, then, is that regardless of what technology the lecturer uses, whether he/she gives out printed notes or not, then if the students can’t take notes accurately and efficiently then lecturing is a complete waste of time.

I like lecturing, because I like talking about physics and astronomy, but as I’ve got older I’ve become less convinced that lectures play a useful role in actually teaching anything. I think we should use lectures more sparingly, relying more on problem-based learning to instil proper understanding. When we do give lectures, they should focus much more on stimulating interest by being entertaining and thought-provoking. They should not be for the routine transmission of information, which is far too often the default.

Next year we’ll rolling out a new set of courses here in the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University. The express intent of this is to pare down the amount of material lectured to create more space for other types of activity, especially more exercise classes for problem-based learning. The only way to really learn physics is by doing it.

I’m not saying we should scrap lectures altogether. At the very least they have the advantage of giving the students a shared experience, which is good for networking and building a group identity. Some students probably get a lot out of lectures anyway, perhaps more than I did when I was their age. But different people benefit from different styles of teaching, so we need to move away from lecturing as the default option.

I don’t think I ever learned very much about physics from lectures, but I’m nevertheless glad I learned out how to take notes the way I did because I find it useful in all kinds of situations. Note-taking is a transferable skill, but it’s also a dying art.


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Why should Wales subsidise English universities?

Posted in Education, Finance, Politics with tags , , , , on December 5, 2010 by telescoper

As the argument about increased tuition fees for English universities  intensifies in the run-up to Thursday’s debate in the House of Commons,  the Welsh Assembly Government last week announced that fees for students in Wales would rise to a basic level of £6000 per year, with a possible increase to £9000 “in certain circumstances”.

I’m a bit surprised that the WAG made this announcement in advance of the vote in Westminster, as it seems to me to be by no means certain that England will introduce the post-Browne system that Wales is copying. If the increased fee measure for England doesn’t get through Parliament then Welsh universities will find themselves out on a limb.

More generally, I find it extremely disappointing that there seems to be absolutely no independent thinking going on in Wales about Higher Education funding. The responsibility for this is devolved to the WAG, but time and time again it simply copies what the English are doing. What’s the point of having devolution if you haven’t got politicians willing and able to be different from the Westminster crowd?

One thing that Welsh Assembly Minister Leighton Andrews did announce that isn’t the case in England is that students domiciled in Wales would be protected from any tuition fee rise by a new system of grants, meaning that the Welsh Assembly will pick up the tab for Welsh students. They will still have to pay the existing fee level of £3290 per annum, but the WAG will pay the extra (between about £3K and £6K). This is good news for the students of course, but the grants will be available to Welsh students not just for Welsh universities but wherever they choose to study. Since about 16,000 Welsh students are currently at university in England, this means that the WAG is handing over a great big chunk (at least 16,000 × £3000 = £48 million) of its hard-earned budget straight back to England. It’s a very strange thing to do when the WAG is constantly complaining that the Barnett formula doesn’t give them enough money in the first place.

What’s more, the Welsh Assembly grants for Welsh students will be paid for by top-slicing the teaching grants that HECFW makes to Welsh universities. So further funding cuts for universities in Wales are going to be imposed precisely in order to subsidise English universities. This is hardly in the spirit of devolution either!

English students wanting to study in Wales will have to pay full whack, but will be paying to attend universities whose overall level of state funding is even lower than in England (at least for STEM subjects whose subsidy is protected in England). Currently about 25,000 English students study in Wales compared with the 16,000 Welsh students who study in England. If the new measures go ahead I can see fewer English students coming to Wales, and more Welsh students going to England. This will have deeply damaging consequences for the Welsh Higher Education system.

It’s very surprising that the Welsh Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, who form part of the governing coalition in the Welsh Assembly, have gone along with this strange move. It’s good for Welsh students, but not good for Welsh universities. I would have thought that the best plan for Welsh students would be to keep up the bursaries but apply them only for study in Wales. That way both students and institutions will benefit and the Welsh Assembly’s budget will actually be spent in Wales, which is surely what is supposed to happen…

POSTCRIPT: Leighton Andrews’ speech to the Welsh Assembly can be seen here.


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A Gloom of Uninspired Research

Posted in Education, Poetry, Politics, Science Politics with tags , , , , , , , on November 26, 2010 by telescoper

I don’t mind admitting that I’m a bit down today. Being stuck at home with a fever and sore throat, and with mounting backlog of things to do isn’t helping my mood. On top of that I’ve got a general sense of depression about the future.

On the one hand there’s the prospect of huge increases in tuition fees for students, the motivation for many demonstrations all around the country (including an occupation here at Cardiff). I have to admit I’m firmly on the side of the students. It seems to me that what is happening is that whereas we used to finance our national gluttony by borrowing on over-valued property prices, we’ve now decided to borrow instead from the young, forcing them to pay for what we got for free instead of paying for it ourselves; it’s no wonder they’re angry. Call me old-fashioned, but I think universities should be funded out of general taxation. How many universities, and what courses, are different questions and I suspect I differ from the younger generation on the answers.

The other depressing thing relates to the other side of academic life, research. The tide of managerialism looks like sweeping away every last vestige of true originality in scientific research, in a drive for greater “efficiency”. I’ve already blogged about how the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is introducing a new system for grants which will make it impossible for individual researchers with good ideas to get money to start new research projects. Now it seems the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is going to go down the same road. It looks likely that in future only large-scale, low-risk research done in big consortia will be funded. Bandwagons are in; creativity is out.

Improving “efficiency” sounds like a good idea, but efficiency of what? These plans may reduce the cost of administering research grants, but they won’t do anything to increase the rate of scientific progress. Still, scientific progress can’t be entered easily on a spreadsheet so I suppose in this day and age that means it doesn’t matter.

I found the following in a story in this weeks Times Higher,

A spokeswoman for the Science and Technology Facilities Council also cited stability and flexibility as the main rationales for merging its grants programmes into one “consolidated grant”, a move announced earlier this month.

It looks like STFC has seconded someone from the  Ministry of Truth. The change to STFC’s grant system is in fact driven by two factors. One is to save money, which is what they’ve been told to do so no criticism there. The other is that the costly fiasco that is the new RCUK Shared Services Centre was so badly conceived that it has a grant system that is unable to adminster 5-year rolling grants of the type we have been used to having in astronomy. On top of that, research grants will last only 3 years (as opposed to the previous 5-year duration). There’s a typically Orwellian inversion  going on in our spokesperson’s comment: for “stability and flexibility”, read “instability and inflexibility”.

We’re not children. We all know that times are tough, but we could do with a bit less spin and a bit more honesty from the people ruining running British science. Still, I’m sure the resident spin doctors at STFC are “efficient”, and these days that’s all that matters.

The following excerpt from Wordsworth’s The Excursion pretty much sums it up.

Life’s autumn past, I stand on winter’s verge;
And daily lose what I desire to keep:
Yet rather would I instantly decline
To the traditionary sympathies
Of a most rustic ignorance, and take
A fearful apprehension from the owl
Or death-watch: and as readily rejoice,
If two auspicious magpies crossed my way;–
To this would rather bend than see and hear
The repetitions wearisome of sense,
Where soul is dead, and feeling hath no place;
Where knowledge, ill begun in cold remark
On outward things, with formal inference ends;
Or, if the mind turn inward, she recoils
At once–or, not recoiling, is perplexed–
Lost in a gloom of uninspired research;
Meanwhile, the heart within the heart, the seat
Where peace and happy consciousness should dwell,
On its own axis restlessly revolving,
Seeks, yet can nowhere find, the light of truth.


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Uncertain Universities…

Posted in Education, Politics with tags , , , , on November 24, 2010 by telescoper

Interesting snippets of Higher Education news today from the BBC website.

It seems that the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HECFW) has voiced concerns about the sustainability of no less than five Welsh universities. Although it hasn’t named them, I think it’s likely to be those most dependent on state funding which is pretty certain to shrink drastically over the next few years. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to identify the five most likely to fold. This news has emerged as a result of a request by the BBC under the Freedom of Information Act.

This comes as no surprise to me, actually. It’s clear that, for its size and population,  Wales has too many separate institutions currently regarded as “universities”. A sustainable system would have less than half the number than we have now, but managing the change to a more rational structure is bound to be a difficult process, especially if it is allowed to happen by organized neglect (which seems to be the plan). Wales drastically underfunds its Higher Education sector compared to England anyway and, with what jam there is spread over far too many institutions, there’s very little by way of resources to devote to any real sort of strategic development.

Another interesting bit of information in the BBC report is that the Welsh Assembly is expected to outline its response to the Browne Review before Christmas. I was expecting the WAG to but  the introduction of any new fee system will probably have to wait until after the Welsh Assembly elections next May.

Meanwhile Cardiff University students are holding a protest against the possible introduction of fees at the very moment I am writing this, as part of a day of action across the UK. Although there are no definite plans to increase fees in Wales at the moment because the WAG has not announced its policy, I think most of us working in academia think a big increase in fees is imminent in Wales, just as it is in England (provided the necessary legislation gets through the House of Commons). It remains to be seen, however, whether Welsh universities will be allowed to charge as much as English ones, i.e. up to £9000 per annum.


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A Sign of the Times

Posted in Education, Finance with tags , , on November 18, 2010 by telescoper

Given yesterday’s announcement of cuts to the Higher Education budget in Wales, and the likely outcome in terms of increased costs to students, this picture of a sign I found the other day at the entrance to Bute Park seems particularly apt…


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Higher Education Spending in Wales

Posted in Education, Politics with tags , , , on November 17, 2010 by telescoper

Just a quick post to pass on the news that the Welsh Assembly has now published its draft budget for 2011/12 (and following years). You can find the documents related to this here, the most useful one of which is this.

I haven’t got time to comment in detail but, being a university employee, I skipped directly to the section about Higher Education and found the following:

In order to direct funding to schools and skills, the majority of budget reductions have been focused on specific budgets. Higher Education will receive a reduction over the next 3 years of £51m. This amounts to some 11.8%, compared to the severe reductions proposed in England. The planned reductions will facilitate the statutory commitment to provide financial support for Higher Education students, numbers of which have increased significantly over the past two years. This does not predetermine the Welsh Assembly Government’s response to the Browne Review. The reductions include the efficiency savings we expect to be delivered through the implementation of our Higher Education strategy, For our Future. The commitment to the development of the University of the Heads of The Valleys (UHoVI) and Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol (formerly Coleg Federal) will, however, remain a priority to
be funded from this budget.

In other words, Higher Education is to bear the brunt of protecting the budgets for Schools (which remains roughly level in cash terms) and  Further Education (which is cut by about 2%). Clearly the WAG must either think that  maintaining funding for Higher Education  is a low priority or that money saved from HE can be recouped some other way (i.e. through increasing fees or cutting student support).

An 12% cut in cash terms is much worse in real terms, of course, but the draft budget doesn’t give any details of how this is going to be broken down in terms of research and teaching allocations. Moreover, the Welsh Assembly has yet to formulate a response to the Browne Review which has resulted in proposals for tuition fees up to £9000 per annum in England. Since the Welsh Assembly elections are to be held next May, it is highly unlikely that a new tuition fee system for Wales  will be in place before then. Moreover, the fact that funding is being diverted into the new institutions described above suggests that even less money than this will be available for established universities.

We also don’t know the extent to which research will be protected. In England, a cut of 40% has been applied to teaching budgets from next year, with research funding largely preserved. It appears something similar is going to happen in Scotland, but with a much smaller overall cut to the universities budget there. Will Wales follow the same pattern, or will it sacrifice any chance of having high quality research-led universities by single-mindedly pursuing its “regional agenda”?


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After Piero

Posted in Art, Education, Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on October 31, 2010 by telescoper

I don’t often blog about things inspired from TV programmes. I don’t watch that many, and those I do see are rarely inspirational. However, last night, I caught the last of the series Renaissance Revolution, presented by Matthew Collings. It was on the subject of a major obsession of mine, the art of Piero della Francesca, and I thought it was wonderful. I regret having missed the previous programmes in the series, but I’m sure I’ll get a chance to see them sometime.

Collings focused on one particular painting by Piero, The Baptism of Christ, which hangs in the National Gallery in London, and which is illustrated below:

The political and religious backround to this painting are almost as fascinating as its composition, based on the offset superposition of a circle (representing heaven) and a square (representing the Earth). The use of perspective was very new around 1450 when this painting was finished, but that’s not the only geometrical aspect to note. There’s a striking use of symmetry (e.g. in the angles of John the Baptist’s arm and leg), and the central vertical axis defined by the dove, John’s hand and Christ’s hands.

Given the mathematical rigour of his compositional techniques, it should come as no surprise to learn that in his lifetime Piero was just as famous as a mathematician as he was as an artist. In other words he was the archetypal renaissance man. Unfortunately, most of his art doesn’t survive; the vast majority of his works were frescoes in various churches, few of which have withstood the test of time. Regrettably, little also is known about Piero the man, except that he lived into his 80s.

A while ago I mentioned another work by Piero which is the origin of my obsession with his paintings. The Flagellation of Christ is a work that has burrowed so far into my psyche that I quite often dream that I’m in the strange building depicted therein:

In fact I also use this painting in talks about science – I did so in my talk on Wednesday, in fact. The reason I use it in that context is that it is a bit like the standard model of cosmology. On one level it makes sense: the flat Euclidean geometry mapped out by the precise linear perspective allows us to understand the properties of the space extremely well, including the scale (the vanishing point indicates a front-to-back distance of about 250 ft). This is what our standard cosmology says too:- the universe also has a flat geometry. On the other hand, the more you think about the contents, the more confusing the picture gets. The main subject matter of the painting is to the left, in the background, playing an apparently minor part in the whole thing. Who are the characters surrounding the Christ figure? And who are the three figures in the foreground, dominating the whole composition, but seemingly indifferent to what is going on behind? Do they represent dark energy? Do the other characters represent the dark matter?

That’s not meant to be taken seriously, of course, and nobody actually knows what is really going on in this painting. It’s undoubtedly beautiful, but also an enigma, and that combination is what makes it a great work of art. It’s not easy to understand. It makes you wonder.That’s what science is like too. We have our theories, we have data, but there always remains a great deal we don’t understand. And sometimes the more we think about it, the more confused we get. Just as it is with that painting.

As Mark Collings put it brilliantly in the programme last night

When you’re looking at the picture, analysis isn’t exactly what is going on. You’re seeing and you’re getting pleasure from seeing. Partly the picture is telling you how pleasure is constructed, how it’s created, and partly you’re just lost in it. So when you’re lost in the light of Piero, you’re experiencing when you’ve forgotten how to experience. And you’re suddenly curious when you’ve forgotten how to be curious. And what you’re experiencing and being curious about is .. the world.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a scientist or an artist (or a poet or a philosopher or a historian or whatever). The need to be curious about the world – or some aspect of it – is surely what it’s all about. During the Renaissance it wasn’t unusual for great minds to embrace science, mathematics and art – just think of Leonardo da Vinci. However, over the centuries we’ve become increasingly specialised and compartmentalised and more focused on making money than on making ideas. We’re losing what above all else is what makes us human, our curiosity.

Our society increasingly sees education simply as a means to develop skilled workers, smart enough to do technically complicated jobs, but not clever enough to ask too many questions about the materialistic treadmill they will spend their life upon. The UK government’s plan to withdraw funding for arts and humanities departments in universities is just another step along this path.

It shouldn’t be like this. Universities should be about learning for learning’s sake; not about teaching facts or skills, but about teaching people to ask questions and figure out their own answers. In other words, they should be about curiosity.


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