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Back for the Last Four Weeks…

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on April 13, 2026 by telescoper

So the Easter break is over and I was back to campus today armed with a very long to-do list. I’m pleased to say I’ve ticked all the items off except the last, which was to prepare my lecture for 9am tomorrow. I’ll do that after supper.

I was very tired this morning after doing a bit of gallivanting for a couple of days. Am I too old to be carrying on like that? Yes. Do I intend to stop? No. Although I had a lot to do I didn’t have any lectures or tutorials so I was able to knuckle down and get on with things, interrupted only by an obligatory telecon.

We have four weeks left until the end of lectures for Semester 2. To be precise it’s four weeks minus one Bank Holiday (on Monday 4th May) which makes it 3.8 (working) weeks, but I don’t have lectures on Mondays so this isn’t very relevant to me. My Particle Physics module will continue in the same vein until the end of teaching but Computational Physics changes after this week, with lectures and formal lab sessions ending allowing the students time to do their mini-projects (which they have already started). They will still have access to the labs and be able to consult the demonstrators for help on their projects, though they can work at home (or somewhere else) instead if they prefer.

Other signs of the approaching end of term is that the May Examination timetable has been published, the required papers are being printed, schedules of student presentations are being circulated, and arrangements being made to mark projects.

When teaching is over for the academic year , and before exam marking starts, assuming a whole day of decent weather arrives, I plan to walk from Maynooth into Dublin along the Royal Canal. That’s a distance of 27 km. I do intend to walk the length of the National Famine Way later this year, but I was convinced to do one stage first to see if my knees can take it. The final leg of the Famine Way is from Maynooth to Dublin, which is convenient because if I’m forced to give up I can easily get the bus or train home, as I can if I reach the end.

Now for a quick supper, write my lecture for tomorrow morning, and have an early night!

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An independent arXiv

Posted in Finance, Maynooth, Open Access with tags , , , on April 9, 2026 by telescoper

I’m a bit late passing this news on, but a few weeks ago arXiv announced that from 1st July 2026 it will be establishing itself as an “independent nonprofit organization”. It has been hosted for many years by Cornell University. You can read here about the reasons for this and how it will work, and there is a lengthier article in Science magazine, but the quick summary is

This transition allows for faster technological development, greater organizational flexibility, expanded partnerships, and long-term financial sustainability. A platform built by scientists for scientists, the new arXiv will continue to serve researchers worldwide with the same dedication to free and open scientific discovery.

Such a move creates opportunities, but also carries risks. The sustainability of the new-look arXiv will depend on finding appropriate sources of income, for example. I wish arXiv well in this move. There’s an advertisement for the post of Chief Executive, if anyone fancies the job!

One possible future model for the Open Journal of Astrophysics is as a standalone non-profit organization of some sort, funded also by donations. Currently we are funded by the Library at Maynooth University, where I am based. Having made the decision not to charge fees of any kind, we lack any source of income other than the University. I am very grateful for that support, but we are run on a very tight budget. We keep costs to an absolute minimum, but are not free.

I have written before about what I think the future of Diamond Open Access could look like. I would like to see a range of Diamond Open Access journals offering a choice for authors and serving different sub-disciplines. Most universities nowadays have publishing operations so there could be network of federated journals, some based on arXiv and some based on other repositories and others with different models, such as SciPost. Perhaps institutions are worried about the expense but, as we have shown the actual cost, is far less than they are wasting on Article Processing Charges.

Everything is working well right now at OJAp, but it is not reasonable that the expense of running a journal that serves the global astrophysics community should fall entirely on one small University in Ireland. It won’t be sustainable in the long run, either, if we continue to grow at the present rate. Compare us with the Diamond Open Access publisher SCIPOST, which has a long list of sponsors covering its costs; we have none. My only hope at the moment of turning OJAp into an independent organization is to win the lottery!

Another thing makes me nervous. Many modern universities, which are nominally non-profit institutions, are managed by people who care far more about revenue generation than about academic scholarship and research. I worry that someone upstairs might pressurize us to introduce charges to generate income by threatening to close us down.

I know that money is very tight in astrophysics these days but if you have access to any potential sources of funding – then please consider supporting OJAp!

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Winding Down for Easter

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on April 2, 2026 by telescoper

When I was a lad, back in England, the name for the Thursday before Good Friday was Maundy Thursday. That term isn’t used here in Ireland, where it seems to be known as Holy Thursday. Anyway, Maynooth University is closed tomorrow (Good Friday) but not today (Holy Thursday). Although today is not an official holiday, some campus facilities are in fact closed – including Pugin Hall, where I often have lunch. This helped me plan my activities for the day.

My agenda for Holy Thursday included:

  • giving a 9am Computational Physics lecture;
  • grading the submissions from the last Computational Physics lab test and writing feedback;
  • meeting with my masters project student;
  • supervising a computer lab session,;
  • meeting with my undergraduate project student;
  • going home, and collapse in a state of exhaustion.

To get to the last item as quickly as possible, I decided my strategy to make use of the lack of availability of food on campus would be to work all the way through lunch to get my grading done.

On the way to campus for the first item on the agenda I noticed how quiet the town was this morning. The schools are on holiday this week and next so there was no school run. The lack of people was even more noticeable when I got to campus, with many fewer students than usual, even at 8.45am. I did consider the possibility that nobody might appear for my lecture, but in the end I had about 30% of those expected. That’s a disappointing number but I gather it’s a better attendance than some of my colleagues got today. When I finished at about 10am, I walked back to my office through a still very quiet North campus.

As usual happens in a day’s work, there were quite a few interruptions – mainly to do with postgraduate matters – but I managed to do all my corrections ahead of the lab this afternoon. I also had my two project meetings, just to keep up-to-date before the break next week. It’s a stressful time for students as we approach the end of the academic year, so I advised them to make sure they book took at least a bit of time off to regroup for the final push and the submission of their reports.

Anyway, I’ve now ticked off every item on my to-do list except the last and will shortly make my way home to complete the job.

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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Swampland Published

Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on March 31, 2026 by telescoper

Regular readers of this blog might remember that last year I did a post about a very comprehensive review article which had appeared on arXiv with the title Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Swampland: The Cosmologist’s Handbook to the string-theoretical Swampland Programme. The article is by Kay Lehnert (who happens to be my PhD student). Well, that paper was published last Saturday (28th March 2026) in the journal Fortschritte der Physik (which I translate roughly as “Advances in Physics”, but whose official English title seems to be “Progress of Physics”). Anyway, it is available (and indeed openly accessible) here. And, if you don’t believe me, here’s a grab of the front page showing the deets (as you young people say):

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Ahead of a Four-Day Week…

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Biographical, Education, mathematics, Maynooth with tags , , , , , , on March 29, 2026 by telescoper

It’s Sunday 29th March – Palm Sunday in fact – and Friday 3rd April is Good Friday, which is followed by a break of a week for Easter, so I’ve been looking at what I have to do in the four days between Monday and Thursday.

On Tuesday afternoon part of my 3rd Year Computational Physics class will be doing a supervised test in the computer lab. I (foolishly) promised to ensure they would get their grades before Easter, so I’m going to have to mark them straight away. This is a larger group than usual because some students who would normally be in the lab on Thursdays swtiched to Tuesday so they could go on a trip to Armagh. Anyway, this is the third lab test and at least I have graded the first two tests for all groups in time for the arrival of the new ones.

There will be one more of these lab tests after the Easter break but after that the students will be working full-time for 3 weeks or so on mini-projects. That is the part they usually enjoy most and I’m very happy to see that some have already started work.

Then, on Wednesday I have the second class test for my 4th year Particle Physics module. This is the second such test, and it will be held during a tutorial session. This is a pen-and-paper test rather than a coding test to be done in the lab. For such tests I allow students to bring whatever they like on paper but phones, laptops and tablets are banned. This is the easiest way I could think of to avoid students using AI to solve the problems. In previous years I gave take-home assignments for this module, and I still hand out exercise sheets to be gone over in tutorials, but these are for formative purposes only. The summative assessments are the class tests. There will be three of those, which means they will have to endure one more after Easter. In a normal week I would have a Particle lecture on Friday, but that won’t happen because it’s Good Friday and my lectures apparently aren’t good enough to happen on that day.

As well as the Computational Physics lab test and the Particle Physics class test, next I have two lectures, both at 9am – one on Tuesday and one on Thursday – and another lab session on Thursday which is not a test, but a practical session about solving ODEs.

Then it will be the Easter Break. After that, according to my calculations, there will be four more teaching weeks before the examination period. The last day of teaching is May 8th. Between that and the examinations there is a gap of a week during which I will have to mark all the completed Computational Physics project reports, as well as giving some revision classes if there is demand for them.

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Time for Summer?

Posted in History, Maynooth with tags , , , on March 29, 2026 by telescoper

Last night the clocks went forward an hour so we are now on Irish Summer Time (GMT+1, the same as BST). Among other things, this means that for the next seven months or so the clock on my oven will actually be set correctly…

One of the more sensible decisions made by the European Parliament some years ago was to approve a directive that will abolish `Daylight Saving Time’. I’ve long felt that the annual ritual of putting the clocks forward in the Spring and back again in the Autumn was a waste of time effort, so I’ll be glad when this silly practice is terminated. It would be better in my view to stick with a single Mean Time throughout the year. This was supposed to happen in 2021 but was delayed by the pandemic and still hasn’t happened.

The marvellous poster above is from 1916, when British Summer Time was introduced, though it ran for only about 4 months (May to September), rather than the seven we have now (March to October).

You might be surprised to learn that the practice of changing clocks backwards and forwards is only about a hundred years old. in the United Kingdom. To be honest I’m also surprised that the practice persists to this day, as I can’t see any real advantage in it. Any institution or organization that really wants to change its working hours in summer can easily do so, but the world of work is far more flexible nowadays than it was a hundred years ago and I think few would feel the need.

Anyway, while I am on about Mean Time, here is a another poster from 1916.

Until October 1916, clocks in Ireland were set to Dublin Mean Time, as defined at Dunsink Observatory, rather than Mean Time as defined at Greenwich. The adoption of GMT in Ireland was driven largely by the fact that the British authorities found that the time difference between Dublin and London had confused telegraphic communications during the Easter Rising earlier in 1916. Its imposition was therefore, at least in part, intended to bring Ireland under closer control of Britain. Needless to say, this did not go down well with Irish nationalists.

Ireland had not moved to Summer Time with Britain in May 1916 and was still on Dublin Mean Time, which was 25 minutes 21 seconds behind GMT, so the change to GMT was introduced at the same time as BST ended in the UK, hence the alteration by one hour minus 25 minutes 21 seconds, i.e. 34 minutes and 39 seconds as in the poster.

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March – William Cullen Bryant

Posted in Maynooth, Poetry with tags , , on March 27, 2026 by telescoper
Magnolia and Daffodils in St Joseph’s Square Maynooth
The stormy March is come at last, 
With wind and cloud, and changing skies, 
I hear the rushing of the blast, 
That through the snowy valley flies. 
 
Ah, passing few are they who speak, 
Wild stormy month! in praise of thee; 
Yet, though thy winds are loud and bleak, 
Thou art a welcome month to me. 
 
For thou, to northern lands, again 
The glad and glorious sun dost bring, 
And thou hast joined the gentle train 
And wear’st the gentle name of Spring. 
 
And, in thy reign of blast and storm, 
Smiles many a long, bright, sunny day, 
When the changed winds are soft and warm, 
And heaven puts on the blue of May. 
 
Then sing aloud the gushing rills 
And the full springs, from frost set free, 
That, brightly leaping down the hills, 
Are just set out to meet the sea. 
 
The year’s departing beauty hides 
Of wintry storms the sullen threat; 
But in thy sternest frown abides 
A look of kindly promise yet. 
 
Thou bring’st the hope of those calm skies, 
And that soft time of sunny showers, 
When the wide bloom, on earth that lies, 
Seems of a brighter world than ours.

by William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

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Access to Registry Data

Posted in Harassment Bullying etc, Maynooth with tags , , , on March 23, 2026 by telescoper

I was shocked to read in the news of the case of a lecturer at University College Dublin who has been charged with offences relating to unlawfully access of students’ personal information and use of that information to harass students. According to news reports, over 100 students were affected by these actions.

The case is still before the courts so it would not be appropriate to comment any further on it, but I hope it sets alarm bells ringing in universities everywhere about access to student information. University registry systems store personal data on each student, from home addresses and telephone numbers to photographs and confidential medical records. It has always worried me that a determined hacker could have access to very sensitive information they could use for nefarious purposes.

Higher education institutions do take data security very seriously. In the UCD case mentioned above the person concerned is alleged to have used some sort of malware to read student passwords and access personal data that way. That in itself is a criminal offence, quite apart from what this lecturer may have done with the information subsequently.

On the other hand, it does concern me greatly how much information about students may be routinely accessible by teaching staff without needing to do anything unlawful. For example, I can see no reason for lecturers to be able to access home addresses and private telephone numbers of students. The university needs to hold that information, of course, but I can see no legitimate purpose for individual lecturers to have access to it. Access to such data should be strictly limited to departmental administrators or other carefully selected staff, for use in very specific situations (e.g. emergencies). Otherwise a student database may become a stalker’s paradise.

I hope universities in Ireland and elsewhere will be sufficiently worried about this case that they will review not only the defence of their systems against unlawful access from outside, but also their policies on who inside the institution is actually allowed access to what data and why. The more people who can obtain this data, the greater the risk to students.

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Naomh Pádraig – Séamus Murphy

Posted in Art, Maynooth with tags , , , on March 23, 2026 by telescoper

I’ve walked past this imposing head of St Patrick countless times since I arrived in Maynooth, seven and a half years ago, but it was only last week that I found out a bit about it.

The statue is called Naomh Patrick (Saint Patrick) and it was created by Irish sculptor Séamus Murphy. It is on public view in St Patrick’s House, Maynooth, just inside the main entrance. It is made of polished limestone and was first unveiled in 1949. Here is an old newspaper article in which the photograph on the right shows the artist beside the sculpture…

(The picture on the left seems to show the artist, on the far left, dozing off during a speech…)

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From the Study Break…

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

So now after a half-term mid-semester study break, including one day of actual holiday, that was both pleasant and eventful it will soon be time to return to the fray, at least for 9 working days. A full week of lectures, labs and tutorials starts tomorrow but the following week end a day early, on Thursday 2nd April, because 3rd April is Good Friday. Campus is closed then, as it is on Easter Monday and there are no lectures for the rest of that week. I’ll miss a lecture on Good Friday. I’m sure the students will be distraught, but that’s the way of things.

Anyway, with the Eastertide coming in and yesterday being World Poetry Day I thought I’d share a couple of pictures (taken two days apart) of the Japanese cherry trree in my back garden along with this haiku on a theme by A.E. Housman:

Loveliest of trees?
Not yet, but soon there will be
Bloom along the bough...

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