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The Falling Sky

Posted in Literature with tags , on January 18, 2014 by telescoper

thCAFHTTOSMy recent travels have at last given me the chance to finish reading the novel The Falling Sky by Pippa Goldschmidt. I actually started reading this some time ago, but absent-mindedly left the book in Cardiff during one of my occasional visits back to my Welsh residence. I remembered it when I was there over the New Year break and I brought it with me to Japan. I was indisposed with a tummy bug this morning so decided not to chance a trip to Kyoto, especially as I’m flying home tomorrow, but at least I got the chance to finish reading it.

Pippa Goldschmidt is now a professional writer, but she did a PhD in Astronomy and subsequently worked for some time as an astronomical researcher in London, in Imperial College to be precise, when I was working at the (then) Queen Mary & Westfield College. I remember her well from that time, although I hadn’t see her for ages until last year when we met in Edinburgh when I was visiting for a PhD examination.

Here’s the jacket blurb for The Falling Sky, which was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize:

Jeanette is a young, solitary post-doctoral researcher who has dedicated her life to studying astronomy. Struggling to compete in a prestigious university department dominated by egos and incompetents, and caught in a cycle of brief and unsatisfying affairs, she travels to a mountaintop observatory in Chile to focus on her research. There Jeanette stumbles upon evidence that will challenge the fundamentals of the universe, drawing her into conflict with her colleagues and the scientific establishment, but also casting her back to the tragic loss that defined her childhood. As the implications of her discovery gather momentum, and her relationships spiral out of control, Jeanette’s own grip on reality is threatened, finally forcing her to confront the hidden past. This bittersweet debut novel blends black comedy, heartbreaking tragedy, and fascinatingly accessible science, in an intricate and beautiful examination of one woman’s disintegration and journey to redemption.

As the above description suggests, the plot weaves together two strands in the life and thoughts of the principal character, Jeanette. The initial reaction of most readers will be to find one strand immediately familiar and intelligible and the other obscure and difficult to understand. The first, more accessible, level of course comprises the straightforward world of cosmology and extragalactic astronomy, science politics and academic rivalry; the other concerns such unfamiliar and outlandish ideas as “emotions”, “sex” and “relationships”. Goldschmidt largely describes these latter concepts in language accessible to non-specialists such as myself, but I did tend to get lost when she touches upon female genitalia; those passages aren’t really in my comfort zone, and rather impenetrable to me for reasons that I’ve never been able to my finger on. Perhaps some form of glossary, or even a diagram, might be a useful addition to a future edition?

But, seriously, it’s really a very good novel with an interesting narrative structure involving flashbacks and other ingenious literary devices. It also offers many glimpses of a dark and rather quirky sense of humour. Amongst many other things it makes the point – that quite a few scientists themselves seem to deny – that science is something done by human beings, and the way we do our science is consequently greatly affected by our inner life (and vice-versa).

One of the games astronomers will play – and I know quite a few who have played it already – is to try to spot the real astronomers on whom some of the characters are based. I couldn’t possible comment myself, but I’ll offer the possibility below for others to offer suggestions…

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Living in the Vortices of Infinity

Posted in Biographical, Literature, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on January 16, 2014 by telescoper

As a boyhood fan of influential American horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft (known to his friends as “H.P.”), I was dismayed to discover some time ago a poem which revealed his obnoxiously racist attitudes. I always find it difficult knowing what to do when someone whose artistic work you admire turns out to have a dark side to his or her personality. It’s always hard to separate the creation from the creator. In the case of H.P. Lovecraft I’ve maintained an interest in him and his work, I suppose in an attempt to find some redeeming features.

Anyway, in Lovecraft’s Selected Letters, I came across a passage which is reminiscent of the following quotation from an interview with physicist Steven Weinberg:

I believe that there is no point in the universe that can be discovered by the methods of science. I believe that what we have found so far, an impersonal universe in which it is not particularly directed toward human beings is what we are going to continue to find. And that when we find the ultimate laws of nature they will have a chilling, cold impersonal quality about them.

I don’t think this means [however] there’s no point to life. Usually the remark is quoted just as it stands. But if anyone read the next paragraph, they would see that I went on to say that if there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. And that — in a way, although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we’re starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves. That’s not an entirely despicable role for us to play.

This is the passage in Lovecraft’s Selected Letters

As you are aware, I have never been able to soothe myself with the sugary delusions of religion; for these things stand convicted of the utmost absurdity in light of modern scientific knowledge. With Nietzsche, I have been forced to confess that mankind as a whole has no goal or purpose whatsoever, but is a mere superfluous speck in the unfathomable vortices of infinity and eternity. Accordingly, I have hardly been able to experience anything which one could call real happiness; or to take as vital an interest in human affairs as can one who still retains the hallucination of a “great purpose” in the general plan of terrestrial life. … However, I have never permitted these circumstances to react upon my daily life; for it is obvious that although I have “nothing to live for”, I certainly have just as much as any other of the insignificant bacteria called human beings. I have thus been content to observe the phenomena about me with something like objective interest, and to feel a certain tranquillity which comes from perfect acceptance of my place as an inconsequential atom. In ceasing to care about most things, I have likewise ceased to suffer in many ways. There is a real restfulness in the scientific conviction that nothing matters very much; that the only legitimate aim of humanity is to minimise acute suffering for the majority, and to derive whatever satisfaction is derivable from the exercise of the mind in the pursuit of truth (from Letter to Reinhardt Kleiner  (14 September 1919), in Selected Letters I, 1911-1924 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 86-87).

I think my own philosophy of life is some sort of juxtaposition of these two…

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Cosmological Tanka

Posted in Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on January 14, 2014 by telescoper

Most readers of this blog will be familiar with the form of Japanese poetry known as Haiku. I’ve even had a go at producing some cosmological Haiku myself. I suspect rather fewer will have come across another form known as Tanka. Being 31 syllables long rather than the 17 of Haiku, these are not quite as short but still quite a challenge to write.  They comprise 5 lines with a 5-7-5-7-7 pattern of syllables. I’m told by Japanese friends that Tanka are specifically written to celebrate a special event or to capture the mood of a particular moment. Here is an exquisite example by a famous poet called Otomo No Yakamochi:

From outside my house,
only the faint distant sound
of gentle breezes
wandering through bamboo leaves
in the long evening silence.

I’ve had a go at composing a couple of Tanka to do with specific moments in cosmology. Here’s one about the epoch of recombination:

An electron finds
a proton and marries it;
they make hydrogen.
Simultaneous weddings
free light across the cosmos.

I was talking to some students about the spherical collapse model so here’s a Tanka for that:

I was more dense than
my surroundings, expanded
more slowly, then stopped.
Now I must start to collapse;
soon I shall virialize.

Further attempts welcome through the comments box!

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Japanese Jokes

Posted in Poetry with tags , on January 8, 2014 by telescoper

In his winged collar
he flew. The nation wanted
peace. Our Perseus!

William Blake, William
Blake, William Blake, William Blake,
say it and feel new!

Love without sex is
still the most efficient form
of hell known to man.

A professional
is one who believes he has
invented breathing.

The Creation had
to find room for the exper-
imental novel.

When daffodils be-
gin to peer: watch out, para-
noia’s round the bend.

I get out of bed
and say goodbye to people
I won’t meet again.

I sit and worry
about money who very
soon will have to die.

I consider it
my duty to be old hat
so you can hate me.

I am getting fat
and unattractive but so
much nicer to know.

Somewhere at the heart
of the universe sounds the
true mystic note: Me.

by Peter Porter (1929-2010)

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To make an end is to make a beginning

Posted in Poetry with tags , , , on January 1, 2014 by telescoper

So, it’s New Year’s Day again. I’d like to take the opportunity to convey my very best wishes to everyone who follows this blog and to thank you all for showing an interest in my ramblings.

The beginning of a new year seems an appropriate time to post something from T.S. Eliot’s remarkable poetic meditation on the redemptive nature of time, Four Quartets. This is the last section, Part V, of the last of the four poems, Little Gidding.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
     Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Little Gidding, Part V, the last of the Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.

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Ring Out, Wild Bells

Posted in Poetry with tags on December 30, 2013 by telescoper

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out thy mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-92)

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Like of each thing

Posted in Literature on December 27, 2013 by telescoper

At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled mirth;
But like of each thing that in season grows.

William Shakespeare, in Love’s Labour’s Lost (Act 1, Scene 1)

 

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Winter Heavens

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on December 21, 2013 by telescoper

Sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive
Leap off the rim of earth across the dome.
It is a night to make the heavens our home
More than the nest whereto apace we strive.
Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive,
In swarms outrushing from the golden comb.
They waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam:
The living throb in me, the dead revive.
Yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath,
Life glistens on the river of the death.
It folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt,
Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs
Of radiance, the radiance enrings:
And this is the soul’s haven to have felt.

by George Meredith (1828-1909)

 

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The Gambler’s Puzzle

Posted in Cute Problems, Literature with tags , , , on December 17, 2013 by telescoper

The following is a quotation from the short novel The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

I was a gambler myself; I realized it at that moment. My arms and legs were trembling and my head throbbed. It was, of course, a rare happening for zero to come up three times out of some ten or so; but there was nothing particularly astonishing about it. I had myself seen zero turn up three times running two days before, and on that occasion one of the players, zealously recording all the coups on a piece of paper, had remarked aloud that no earlier than the previous day that same zero had come out exactly once in twenty four hours.

The probability of obtaining a zero on a (fair) Roulette wheel of the European variety is 1/37. Assuming  that such a wheel is spun exactly 370 times in a day, determine the probability of obtaining at most one zero in twenty four hours as described in the quotation. Give your answer to three significant figures.

Answers through the comments box please!

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On Monsieur’s Departure

Posted in History, Poetry with tags , on December 16, 2013 by telescoper

I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
I seem stark mute but inwardly to prate.
I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned.
Since from myself another self I turned.

My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be supprest.

Some gentler passion slide into my mind,
For I am soft and made of melting snow;
Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.
Let me or float or sink, be high or low.
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die and so forget what love ere meant.

by Elizabeth I (1533-1603)

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