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Nobel Prize for Physics Speculation

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on October 4, 2021 by telescoper

Just  to mention that tomorrow morning (October 5th 2021) will see the announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics. I must remember to make sure my phone is fully charged…

I do, of course, already have a Nobel Prize Medal of my own already, dating from 2006, when I was lucky enough to attend the prize-giving ceremony and banquet.

I was, however, a guest of the Nobel Foundation rather than a prizewinner, so my medal is made of chocolate rather than gold. I think after 15 years the chocolate is now inedible, but it serves as a souvenir of a very nice weekend in Stockholm!

I have a spectacular bad track record at predicting the Physics Nobel Prize winner. Most pundits have, actually. I certainly didn’t see the last two coming. I couldn’t resist having a go again however.

It’s been a good few years for cosmology and astrophysics, with Jim Peebles (2019), Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez & Reinhard Genzel (2020) following on from Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish (2017) for the detection of gravitational waves.  Although I said so last year only to be proved wrong, I think it’s very unlikely that it will be in this area again. I have no idea who will win but if I had to take a punt I would suggest  Alain Aspect, Anton Zeilinger and John Clauser for their Bell’s inequality experiments and contributions to the understanding of quantum phenomena, including entanglement. I’m probably wrong though.

Feel free to make your predictions through the comments box below.

To find out you’ll have to wait for the announcement, around about 10.45 (UK/Irish time) tomorrow morning. I’ll update tomorrow when the wavefunction has collapsed.

Anyway, for the record, I’ll reiterate my opinion that while the Nobel Prize is flawed in many ways, particularly because it no longer really reflects how physics research is done, it does at least have the effect of getting people talking about physics. Surely that at least is a good thing?

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, I was wrong again. The 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics goes to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann (1/4 each) and Giorgio Parisi (1/2). Manabe and Hasselmann were cited for their work in “the physical modeling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”. The second half of the prize was awarded to Parisi for “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.” Congratulations to them all!

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Astrophysics Job Opportunity in Cork

Posted in The Universe and Stuff on October 2, 2021 by telescoper

Just time today to pass on the news that the University of Cork is advertising a Professorship “with a specialism in astrophysics, gravitational physics or cosmology”. More details can be found here.

I’m posting this information here to encourage cosmologists and gravitational physicists to apply because I would love to see the community in these areas grown in Ireland. It’s nice to see the University of Cork investing in astrophysics too. I had a quick look at their Physics department webpage and it seems their main interest at the moment is in radio astronomy and Active Galactic Nuclei so presumably they are looking for something to complement this activity. There is a follow-up position in theoretical astrophysics in the pipeline too.

P.S. I’ve never been to Cork, actually, but I’ve heard very good things about the city and it’s high on my list of places to visit when travel becomes more feasible than it is at the moment.

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , on September 30, 2021 by telescoper

Time to announce another publication in the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one is the twelfth paper in Volume 4 (2021) and the 43rd in all.

The latest publication is entitled  Bridging the Gap Between Simply Parametrized and Free-Form Pixelated Models of Galaxy Lenses: The Case of WFI 2033-4723 Quad and is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies. The authors are Bernardo Barrera (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico), Liliya Williams (University of Minnesota, USA), Jonathan P. Coles* (Technical University of Munich, Germany) and Philipp Denzel (University of Zurich, Switzerland).

*No relation.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:

You can click on the image to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the arXiv version of the paper here.

The teaser image doesn’t show up very well on the overlay so here it is in all its glory:

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , on September 28, 2021 by telescoper

Time to announce another publication in the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one is the eleventh paper in Volume 4 (2021) and the 42nd in all.

The latest publication is entitled Squeezing the Axion – it’s about inflationary scalar field perturbations using the squeezed state formalism – and is by

Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:

You can click on the image to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the arXiv version of the paper here. This one is also in the folder marked Cosmology and Non-Galactic Astrophysics.  

P.S. I hope to publish another paper tomorrow…

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Astrophysics & Cosmology Masterclass at Maynooth!

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on September 28, 2021 by telescoper

Regular readers of the blog – both of them – may remember that, after a couple of postponements due to Covid-19,  we presented a Masterclass in Astrophysics & Cosmology in Maynooth on March 25th 2021. Well, owing to popular demand we’ve decided to do a re-run of the event on Friday 12th November 2021 ahead of next year’s CAO cycle.

This 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 updated official poster and the programme:

I’ll be talking about cosmology early on, while John Regan will talk about black holes. After the coffee break one of our PhD 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 study!

(And at 12 noon I don’t turn into a pumpkin but do have to run off to give a lecture on vector calculus..)

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Welcome to the First Year

Posted in Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on September 27, 2021 by telescoper

Well this morning I had my first lecture to the new first-year students on their first day of teaching at Maynooth University. It went fairly well, and my improvised attempts to record the lecture for the students were reasonably successful too.

When I started at about 11.05am I was a little disappointed that I only had around two-thirds of the number I expected, but I assumed that was that students had difficulty locating the venue, Physics Hall. Not unreasonably quite a few new students assume that this is in the Science Building on the North Campus where the Physics staff are based. In fact Physics Hall is on the much more scenic South Campus, which is quite a distance from the Science Building which usually means that some newbies arrive late as a result of going to the wrong venue.

Incidentally, here is a view of Physics Hall from the front taken in 2012 at a Mathematics Lecture by Tim Gowers. The hall hasn’t changed much since then!

I like this room because (a) it has good blackboards at the front and (b) although a reasonable size there is not a huge distance from the lecturer to the back of the audience so everyone can see and hear the lecturer, and can be heard by the lecturer if they ask something.

Anyway, the first lecture was very introductory so late students weren’t going to miss anything earth-shattering, and in any case I was recording it, so I started on time. After talking for over half an hour someone – a theoretical physics PhD student – came in to the hall and explained that about half the class had been standing outside thinking I hadn’t turned up because the door was closed. Why they didn’t try the handle and have a look inside I don’t know! When the latecomers had all filed in and found a seat I had roughly the number I had initially expected so all was well. I explained to them that they shouldn’t stand on ceremony next time.

It did occur to me that this year’s new students have a pretty good reason for not knowing where anything is on campus is that for many of them today is the first day they’ve ever been herein Maynooth. Open days last year were all virtual, for example. It must feel very strange to commit to a four-year degree at a University you’ve never even visited before, but that’s what this cohort of students have been forced to do.

One of the things I tend to do in the first lecture is to explain that I do like to have interaction in my lectures and it was nice to find that quite a few people did answer when I asked questions. Lectures are so dull if it’s just an old fart blathering on for 50 minutes. The capacity of Physics Hall is about 90, which is not huge, but interaction is possible in much bigger rooms if you work to create the right atmosphere.

Giving students the encouragement to get involved is also helpful to the lecturer, as students will then be more willing to point out errors on the blackboard (which, of course, I put in deliberately to see if they’re paying attention). After today I have a pretty good feeling about this new class and I’m looking forward to seeing them for Lecture 2 tomorrow.

Oh, and the instruction that masks are mandatory in lectures was observed impeccably by the students.

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Back to the First Year

Posted in Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff on September 26, 2021 by telescoper

It’s a rainy Sunday evening and I’ve spent most of the day sorting out material for my first year module on Mechanics and Special Relativity. I’m looking forward to teaching a full class again. I like a big room and I particular like Physics Hall. The first lecture will be very introductory. I’ll be introducing the students to this character who appears a number of times in the Lecture Notes in various settings:

I’ll also be explaining how the subject of Mechanics began in the 17th Century when Sir Isaac Newton fell out of a tree and landed on an apple. Newton was of course building on previous work by Galileo and his colleagues Figaro and Magnifico, including the famous experiment in which he dropped a cannonball off a tower onto a pizza.

I’ve been looking through the enrolment figures for this year which look quite encouraging. The number of first-year students taking my module is up about 38% on last year, though last year was down on the year before. The other good news is that the number of new students on Theoretical Physics & Mathematics (who do not take the module I mentioned above) is more than double last year’s intake and higher than it has been in living memory. All this would be even better news if it weren’t for the workload issues arising from our being so short-staffed. I was hoping that we’d emerge from the pandemic in a better shape than we are now, having to rely on three one-year temporary lecturers (one of whom still hasn’t arrived in Ireland).

Talking of the pandemic, there’s no clear evidence yet of an increase in Covid-19 cases associated with a return to third-level education.

Our returning students in Maynooth started last week but other colleges in Ireland began earlier. I don’t know whether we can expect an upturn in infections resulting from this, but whether or not it will eventually happen I think it’s too early to see it just now. I remember last year when we started on-campus lectures only to switch abruptly to online teaching. I hope that doesn’t happen again. But it might.

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Vera Rubin Observatory Update

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on September 23, 2021 by telescoper

I couldn’t resist sharing this video showing the state of play with the Vera Rubin Observatory, currently under construction on Cerro Pachón in Chile. This is a huge survey telescope with an 8.4m mirror and enormous camera to match, the main task for which will be a ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) which has the same initials as the former name of the telescope (the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope). That’s obviously so they carry on using the LSST name for their website and elsewhere.

Anyway, the mount assembly has now been installed and tested (in both altitude and azimuth) so you can now get good idea of what the telescope will look like when it’s completed. It’s an amazing piece of engineering, particularly when you see such a huge piece of kit so finely balanced that it can be moved by hand…

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , on September 23, 2021 by telescoper

Time to announce another publication in the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one is the tenth paper in Volume 4 (2021) and the 41st in all. We actually published this one a couple of days ago but I’ve been so busy with start-of-term shenanigans that I didn’t get time to announce it until this morning.

The latest publication is entitled Consequences of constant elevation scans for instrumental systematics in Cosmic Microwave Background Experiments. The authors are Daniel B. Thomas & Nialh McCallum of Queen Mary, University of London, and Michael Brown of the University of Manchester.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:

You can click on the image to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the arXiv version of the paper here. This one is also in the folder marked Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, though it is obviously of relevance to Cosmology and Non-Galactic Astrophysics too.

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The Autumnal Equinox 2021

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on September 22, 2021 by telescoper

So here we are then. The Autumnal Equinox (in the Northern hemisphere) takes place this evening (Wednesday 22nd September)  at 20.21 Irish Time (19.21 UT).

Although  the term `equinox’  refers to a situation in which day and night are of equal length, which implies that it’s a day rather than a specific time, the astronomical equinox is more accurately defined by a specific event, i.e. when the plane defined by Earth’s equator passes through the centre of the Sun’s disk (or, if you prefer, when the centre of the Sun passes through the plane defined by Earth’s equator). Day and night are not necessarily exactly equal on the equinox, but they’re the closest they get. From now on days in the Northern hemisphere will be shorter than nights and they’ll get shorter still until the Winter Solstice.

Many people take the autumnal equinox to be the end of summer. There is a saying around these parts, however, that `Summer is Summer to Michaelmas Day’ (September 29th), which is not until next week. I must say, though,  though it doesn’t feel very summery today.

Anyway, this is Welcome Week in Maynooth and, barring any sudden changes of plan, we’re due to start teaching first year students on Monday 27th September. Returning students commenced on Monday 20th. I gave my first lecture on Vector Calculus yesterday. That was the first in-person lecture I’ve done for over a year. It was strange because I taught the same students online last year, but obviously never actually saw or heard them, as students generally mute their video and sound when attending lectures. Today was an improvement on that but everyone in the class was wearing a mask so I still haven’t really seen them! At lest this means that all the students were observing the necessary protocol, which is a relief, and the masks didn’t interfere with them responding to questions of mine or asking questions of their own.

We are still one lecturer short as the visa office in Dublin has been sitting on the application from our new member of staff since June 23rd. On top of my own things to do I’ve been setting up lectures for him so the students can view them in the lecture hall remotely. I’m not sure how long that will go on for, although it’s out of my hands.

Other than that I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to iron out problems with the timetable – of which there are unfortunately many – as well as preparing my own lectures. I want to record my lectures from the classrooms but unfortunately the University has chosen not to install decent video equipment so I’ve had to improvise. I recorded yesterday’s lecture using a webcam attached to the stand for my tenor saxophone. It seemed to work out reasonably well.

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