So here we are once again on LGBTQ+ STEM Day!
As far as I know, there are no events planned at Maynooth to mark the occasion so for me it’s just a normal teaching day. I can nevertheless use the medium of this blog to wish all LGBTQ+ persons working in STEM subjects around the globe a very enjoyable day.
You can find out about events near you by checking here, looking for the hashtag #LGBTQSTEMDay on social media or by following the twitter account:
As next week is Science Week I thought I’d remind readers that as part of the festivities we are hosting a virtual Masterclass in Astrophysics & Cosmology in Maynoothon Wednesday 16th November 2022 .
You may remember that we have presented such events twice before. Last year’s event was a particularly big success, with over a hundred schools joining in, with probably over a thousand young people listening and asking questions.
Like last year’s event this year’s will be a half-day virtual event via Zoom. It’s meant for school students in their 5th or 6th year of the Irish system. There might be a few of them or their teachers who see this blog so I thought I’d share the news here. You can find more information, including instructions on how to book a place, here.
Here is the flyer for the event:
I’ll be talking about cosmology early on, and John Regan will talk about black holes later on. After the coffee break one of our students will talk about why they wanted to study astrophysics. Then I’ll say something about our degree programmes for those students who might be interested in studying astrophysics and/or cosmology as part of a science course. We’ll finish with questions either about the science or the studying!
Here is a more detailed programme:
Yesterday my Vector Calculus students gave me the above Hallowe’en gift, which was nice of them, although I did chastise them for missing the apostrophe. Of course Hallowe’en itself is not until Monday, but that is a Bank Holiday in Ireland and the rest of next week is Study Week so there are no lectures or tutorials.
Hallowe’en is, in pagan terminology, Samhain. This, a cross-quarter day – roughly halfway between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice, represents the start of winter (“the dark half of the year“) in the Celtic calendar. Samhain is actually November 1st but in Celtic tradition the day begins and ends at sunset, so the celebrations begin on the evening of 31st.
Incidentally, Samhain is pronounced something like “sawin”. The h after the m denotes lenition of the consonant (which in older forms of Irish would have been denoted by a dot on top of the m) so when followed by a broad vowel the m is pronounced like the English “w”; when followed by a slender vowel or none “mh” is pronounced “v” or in other words like the German “w” (which makes it easier to remember). I only mention this because I will be resuming my Irish language education after the break with classes every week for the rest of the academic year. Hopefully I’ll make some progress.
This term has been very tiring so far. I have to teach a very big first-year class this year which meant adding another tutorial group. Although I stepped down as Head of Department at the end of August the powers that be delayed appointing a replacement until well into term which caused a lot of unnecessary stress for everyone. Once we got under way, though, everything has settled down reasonably well.
One thing I was a bit worried about this term was that the resumption of in-person teaching would lead to a surge in Covid-19 cases, not only in Maynooth but across the country. However there isn’t any evidence of significant increases in the latest figures (updated weekly nowadays, on Wednesdays):
Some students have come down with Covid-19 of course but not in the numbers I had feared. Also despite accommodation shortages and other difficulties, attendance at lectures and tutorials has so far held up well.
I like having the study break. I’ve never previously worked at an institution that has such a thing, but I think 12 weeks of non-stop teaching would be extremely exhausting. Anyway, after the break we have a further six weeks of teaching until December 16th, which is the official end of term, but for now I have Monday off completely and the rest of the week without teaching duties. That’s not to say I’ll be on holiday though. I have a number of tasks to catch up on, including setting examination papers for January…
Not long ago I posted an item about the Summer Programme for Undergraduate Research (SPUR) at Maynooth University. This past summer I had two undergraduate students doing research projects with me funded under this scheme. They were both involved with making Monte Carlo simulations of galaxy clustering and using them to test various statistical analysis tools. The Department of Theoretical Physics actually had five students on three different projects, which is quite a lot for a small Department. The University as a whole had 57 SPUR students so we had almost ten percent of the total!
Well, earlier this week there was a Research Symposium at which all the summer’s research undergraduates presented posters on their work, with prizes being awarded for the best. I couldn’t attend the Symposium because of other commitments but I was delighted to find out that both my students won prizes – that’s two out of the five awarded. Here are the pictures of them being presented with their awards at the ceremony yesterday, flanked by the Vice-for Research and Innovation, Brian Donnellan and the President, Eeva Leinonen.
The awards ceremony was held in the foyer of the new TSI building yesterday afternoon, which wasn’t an ideal choice because the acoustic is very poor and lots of students were making their way to and from lectures. I didn’t hear a word of the speeches, actually. Nevertheless it was nice to see Pawel (top prize in the Science and Engineering category) and Lisa (audience choice prize winner) collect their awards. It was a pleasure to work with both of them this summer!
Incidentally, the SPUR students are paid for the projects, which last for (usually) six weeks but can be extended. I wish we could offer these projects to every student who wanted one, actually, but we just can’t afford to do that. I don’t agree with unpaid internships as these can only be taken up by students who have access to enough income to cover living expenses over the summer, so are discriminatory. We select students based on an application form and their academic performance.
Earlier today I found myself on the South Campus of Maynooth University where I encountered Maynooth University Library Cat looking not entirely gruntled. Behind bars like that I thought he looked like he was in the doghouse!
Anyway, this meeting reminded me of some important campus cat news from earlier in the week. On Tuesday afternoon I was just about to start my usual 3pm lecture on Vector Calculus and Fourier Series in Hall H on the North Campus. It was quite warm that day and all the windows on the side of the room (which is on the ground floor) were open. As soon as I started talking about line integrals I was interrupted by a plaintive mewing from outside which turned out to come from a small white cat who made its way outside to the rearmost window, climbed in and took a seat in the back row. It was quite disconcerting to see its little head looking at me, and its appearance put me right off my stride for a bit, but fortunately it didn’t ask any difficult questions and eventually dozed off.
I’ve never seen this cat before but apparently it has been hanging around near the Phoenix restaurant, where presumably it is being fed. It has no collar and, as far as I know, no name. We have recently experienced another visitation by rodents in the Science Building and wonder if it could be persuaded to investigate on our behalf?
So now we have a black cat on the South Campus and a white cat on the North Campus, polar opposites. Perhaps one is the anti-cat of the other? I do hope they don’t annihilate each other if they ever meet!
Regular readers of the blog – both of them – may remember that we have twice previously presented a Masterclass in Astrophysics & Cosmology in Maynooth. Well, owing to popular demand, we’ve decided to do a re-run of the event on Wednesday 16th November 2022 during this year’s Science Week. Last year’s event was a big success, with over a hundred schools joining in, with probably over a thousand young people listening and asking questions.
Like last year’s event this year’s will be a half-day virtual event via Zoom. It’s meant for school students in their 5th or 6th year of the Irish system. There might be a few of them or their teachers who see this blog so I thought I’d share the news here. You can find more information, including instructions on how to book a place, here.
Here is the flyer for the event:
I’ll be talking about cosmology early on, and John Regan will talk about black holes later on. After the coffee break one of our students will talk about why they wanted to study astrophysics. Then I’ll say something about our degree programmes for those students who might be interested in studying astrophysics and/or cosmology as part of a science course. We’ll finish with questions either about the science or the studying!
Here is a more detailed programme:
Fortunately this year I don’t need to dash away at noon to do a lecture!
Autumn is definitely here. It’s very nice to live in a tree-lined street but the consequence of that at this time of year is that there are leaves everywhere. They don’t call it “fall” for nothing. Actually I let the leaves lie until they compost down on the actual garden but unfortunately the side of my house is a bit of wind trap and they tend to accumulate there in large quantities. When they do start to break down it makes a slippery hazard for anyone visiting, especially if it rains.
So this lunchtime I cleared away most of the leaves from the path leading up to my front door, in which task I was joined by a little robin who was no doubt hoping I would disturb some bugs or at any rate something edible when I swept up the leaves. I’m not sure this is the same robin that came in my house earlier this year, but it wasn’t afraid to come very close.
Reading a little about robins I discovered that many don’t live to reach their first birthday, but those that do have a good chance of living quite a while longer. The record is 19 years! Today’s robin could be the same one I’ve seen before, but I can’t be certain.
That reminded me that it was about time to start putting the bird feeders out again so I went out and bought some seed and peanuts and fat balls, although I think I’ll keep those for when it’s a bit colder.
At some point soon I’ll have to get the ladders out and trim back the ivy which is once again reaching the top of the wall. That will have to wait a few days, though, as my garden refuse bin is now full and won’t be empty again until Wednesday.
A few people have asked me why I needed such extravagant equipment (ping-pong balls, a torch and a metre-ruler) in my lecture on Thursday night.
I did only use one ping pong ball in the talk but I found the local budget shop Eurosaver only sells them in packs of twelve (for the princely sum of €3) so I now have plenty of spares. The metre ruler was borrowed from the Department of Experimental Physics (who have expertise using sophisticated measurement devices) and returned on Friday morning. The torch was procured from Tesco along with two batteries.
One of the things I wanted to do in my lecture was to explain some of the difficulties about measuring cosmological distances. I started by holding up a ping pong ball (radius 2cm) and asking if the ping pong ball were the Sun (radius 7 × 108 m), on the same scale how far away would be the nearest other star (Proxima Centauri)?
To cut a long story short – and you can do the arithmetic yourself – the answer surprises most people who haven’t seen this demonstration before. It’s not the back of the lecture theatre, nor is it the town centre, nor the next town. It’s 1200 km away. That’s as far from Maynooth as, say, Geneva, or Copenhagen. The distances between stars is huge, even in the relatively dense part of a Galaxy, such as where the Sun is situated. The Universe is very big and very empty, even in the places that look crowded.
The torch and the metre rule were used to demonstrate two ways of possibly measuring astronomically large distances. I had a student stand up at the back of the theatre holding the metre rule. I explained that I could measure the distance to the student using geometry by measuring the angle subtended by the ruler if I knew its length (which I do). This is the principle behind the angular diameter distance; the metre rule is called a “standard rod”.
The torch is used to illustrate the luminosity distance. If I knew its power output I could measure the intensity of light using a lightmeter and infer the distance from that using the fact that it follows an inverse-square law. The torch is thus a “standard candle”.
Of course in cosmology we don’t have perfectly standard rods or candles but we can apply the principle of the angular diameter distance to features in the galaxy distribution or the cosmic microwave background or gravitational lenses and supernovae can provide us with accurate luminosity distances.
There are additional complications. Objects at large distances are receding with the Hubble expansion so light from them is redshifted, affecting their apparent luminosity. Einstein’s theory of general relativity allows for the possibility that light rays don’t travel in straight lines either (because space is curved), affecting the angular diameters. That means the two methods don’t necessarily give the same distance unless these factors are taken into account.
Last night I participated in an event at Maynooth for Space Week which I think went very well. We had a big audience so the decision to move to a bigger lecture theatre was a good one. Nobody took count but I think we had as many as 400 people of all ages, including some very young kids, some students and a variety of others.
I was the last one up to speak and took a few pictures at the three talks before mine but obviously couldn’t take a picture of mine so I’ve included a pic of some of the hi-tech equipment I used for a couple of demonstrations:
If anyone wants to see the pictures I showed you can find them here:
There was an official photographer there last night so I’ll upload any pictures I come across in due course. Watch this space.
UPDATE: Here’s a picture of the four speakers
Anyway, thank you to everyone for coming last night and especially to all the people who helped organize and run the event, including our student volunteers. We’re planning to do similar event for space week next year and hopefully this will become a regular feature in the calendar.
A couple of weeks ago I announced that we’re holding a Space Week event here at Maynooth University called Exploring the Cosmos. Well, the inexorable march of time means that event is actually tomorrow so I’m posting this as a last chance for you to register, which you can do here.
The demand for tickets so far has been a bit overwhelming. So much so, in fact, that we’ve moved to a bigger room, organized microphones, and enlisted various people to help, e.g. to guide people into the venue. Fortunately all I have to do is give the last talk and then go to the pub.
In the Dark 