Quick update from the Euclid Consortium confirming that the launch will take place on Saturday 1st July 2023, at 1612 Irish Time (GMT+1):
If for some reason (such as weather) the launch cannot take place at 11.12 precisely it will be delayed for 24 hours and then launched the next day, 2nd July, at the same time. I’m told that thunderstorms are quite common at Cape Canaveral at this time of year so there may well be such a delay.
P.S. When the Euclid mission was accepted by ESA, over a decade ago, the launch date was envisaged to be in 2020, so it is about three years late.
I made it to the conference venue (CPH Conference) for this year’s Euclid Consortium Meeting, which is 5 minutes walk from my hotel.
One thing that confused me when I looked at the programme last night was that all the rooms in the conference centre are named after locations in and around the city, e.g. Kastrup, Amager, Vesterbro, etc. For a while I thought the delegates would be running around Copenhagen to find their parallel sessions! Then I realized these were just names of meeting rooms…
The full programme doesn’t start until tomorrow but today I attended a couple of sessions aimed at early career researchers, not because I identify myself as such but because I wanted to listen to questions they asked and the advice given to them, much of which was very sound.
I’m looking forward to tomorrow, especially the plenaries, but first: dinner.
Posted in Uncategorized on June 18, 2023 by telescoper
It’s Sunday morning, I’ve just had breakfast, and shortly I’ll be throwing a few things into a bag and heading off to Dublin Airport on the Hopper Bus which is back running after being suspended for a considerable time owing to the pandemic. It’s by far the most convenient way to get to the Airport from Maynooth. I’m all checked in and ready to go, although my flight is not until this evening and it takes less than an hour to get to the airport. You can put this down to nerves!
I realized last night that this will be the first trip I’ve taken outside the UK/Ireland Common Travel Area since I went to the Euclid Consortium Meeting in Helsinki in June 2019, just over four year ago. I was made Head of Department in 2019 and the pandemic descended on us in March 2020, so I couldn’t have travelled even if I’d had the time (which I didn’t).
After such a big gap I’m very out of practice with all this travelling malarkey so am actually quite nervous, which is ridiculous, especially since I’m going to a familiar destination, Copenhagen, and will only be there for a few days. I had a short panic this morning because I’d forgotten where I’d put my passport after all this time. On the other hand, it’s good to be getting back into the swing of things with a little trip before a much bigger one later in the year.
Anyway, the reason for this trip is this year’s Euclid Consortium Meeting which will be the last before Euclid is launched next month. It promises to be a very exciting event which I can enjoy without the tension of having to do a talk.
There’s a good chance that the actual launch date for Euclid will be announced during this meeting. At the moment, all we know is that it’s between July 1st and July 15th. The announcement of the date will be made 10 days in advance so if it’s early in that two-week window, we will be told next week.
UPDATE: I took an earlier Airport Hopper than I really needed to, in case of traffic delays and/or queues at security, but the bus arrived dead on time at Maynooth and slightly ahead of schedule at the Airport. Then it only took 15 minutes to get through security. Then I found it my flight was delayed on its inbound journey so I ended up having to wait about three hours. I arrived in Copenhagen about an hour later than I’d expected but that’s not too bad really. I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t get full value from my EU passport at arrivals, however, as the “All Passports” booths were a lot less busy than the EU/EEA/ETC ones so I went through one of them as I would have done if I’d been travelling on my British passport. Anyway, the public transport here is very good so I got to my hotel not far from the Central Railway Station very easily. Now I just have to settle in and find out where I have to be tomorrow and when I need to get there!
You may recall that a couple of weeks ago, on the occasion of my birthday, I started a fundraiser for Pieta, which is a charity working to prevent suicide and self-harm. Well, the fundraiser is now closed and I’m very glad to say that the official fundraiser on Facebook reached my target. I know that quite a few more people gave directly to Pieta without going through Facebook so the amount of money raised overall comfortably exceeded the goal. Thank you so much to everyone who made a contribution. I really do appreciate it.
Thinking about Stevie Smith after yesterday’s post I thought I’d post something by her. She liked to put funny little sketches or doodles with some of her more whimsical poems, some of which are very short like this one, which brought a smile to my face so I thought I’d share it.
I’ve been writing far too many R.I.P. posts recently, but I had to say something to mark the passing of Glenda Jackson who has died at the age of 87. Glenda Jackson had an illustrious acting career during which she won many awards (including two Oscars) and then turned her hand to politics; she was a Labour Member of Parliament from 1992 to 2015.
Glenda Jackson in Stevie (1978)
The role in which I remember Glenda Jackson best was in the film Stevie (1978) in which she played the poet Stevie Smith, whose poetry I have admired greatly for its dark yet whimsical tone since I was introduced to it while at school. The originality of her voice is the reason I’ve posted some of her poems on this blog from time to time.
Stevie Smith, who died in 1971, made a number of radio broadcasts and, without really trying to impersonate her, I think Glenda Jackson captured perfectly her quirky mixture of wit and melancholia. It was a marvelous performance in what I think is a neglected film masterpiece.
Just a short post passing on the information that we have a fixed-term job available in the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth University. You can find further details here.
The position is for 10 months, starting in September 2023, and is to provide teaching cover for Professor Peter Coles (Who He? Ed.) who will be on sabbatical leave next academic year.
I know it is a relatively short appointment, but it seems to me that it would provide a good opportunity for an early-career academic, perhaps someone straight out of a PhD, to gain some teaching experience.
The deadline for applications is 23.30 on Sunday July 9th and you should apply through the jobs portal here.
Please feel free to pass this on to anyone who may be interested!
P.S. I’m not involved in the recruitment process, just passing this on for information.
It was with a sense of shock that I heard this afternoon of the death of the age of 68 of cosmologist Nick Kaiser. It seems like only yesterday that we were celebrating the award of the Gruber Prize to Nick, but that was back in 2019. In a field filled with very clever people, Nick was one of the cleverest and also one of the nicest.
I have never worked directly with Nick Kaiser but he had an enormous influence on me, especially early on in my career. When I was doing my PhD, Nick was based in Cambridge and if I remember correctly he was the first person ever to ask me a question during a conference talk when I gave one there in 1987. Nick was never shy about making such interventions, sometimes somewhat mischievously. At first he terrified me because I didn’t know him except by scientific reputation, and didn’t realize what a nice guy he was. His question was actually very helpful, as it allowed me explain something that I’d skipped because I was under time pressure. His response to my explanation was very complimentary and supportive, which encouraged me a lot, and we chatted for quite a while after the session (in a pub). He was very friendly and approachable, and very far from the intimidating character I’d expected. Anyway, his 1984 paper on cluster correlations was the direct motivation for my very first publication (in 1986).
I mentioned yesterday that many of the papers published by the Open Journal of Astrophysics over the last few years have been in the field of weak gravitational lensing. It is safe to say that is a field that was basically created by Nick; see the paper by Kaiser & Squires (1993) that kicked it all off. You could also say the same about the use of redshift-space distortions, concerning which he wrote a seminal paper in 1987. These are two techniques that will be applied in the analysis of data from the Euclid spacecraft, to be launched next month.
These are just a few of things that Nick did. He did many others, always original and always interesting. In recognition of his achievements he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2008, won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2017, the Daniel Chalonge and Hector de Vega Medals in 2018, and the Gruber Prize for Astronomy in 2019.
It’s hard to characterize someone of such intellectual breadth, but it always seemed to me that his approach was driven by a very deep physical insight. He was often able to identify what were the fundamental aspects of apparently complicated phenomena and build simple models that captured most of the physics. Using this approach he could penetrate the thickets in which others might get lost. He was perfectly capable of undertaking more complicated calculations to elaborate the details, but he always started by focussing on the basics.
I met Nick many times here and there, usually at conferences. He was always enthusiastic and energetic and entertaining, and was great company to talk to over a drink or several. You always had a good laugh talking to Nick, but you always learnt something too. His son studied in Cardiff some years ago, while I was working there, and Nick sometimes came to visit on the pretext of giving a seminar. I remember once he almost missed his own talk because we were sitting in a pub chatting.
Nick spent recent years in Paris; I remember his presence when I did an online colloquium for the Daniel Chalonge – Hector de Vega School in 2021. He certainly seemed in fine health and good spirits then. Indeed, he gave a talk in the same series that year which you can download here.
Nick’s untimely death is particularly shocking because he was ultra-fit. I think he got hooked on ultra-endurance events while living in Hawaii, as the first Ironman events were held there. Mere marathons were not enough for him. I think I last saw him in person in 2016 during a meeting in Italy. While most of us laboured on the “easy” hiking trails, Nick found them uninteresting and went running off looking for greater challenges.
It still hasn’t really sunk in that Nick has gone. I know I’m not the only one who feels that way. I think the sense of loss will pervade the cosmological community for a considerable time. I send deepest condolences to his family, friends, colleagues and co-workers. He’ll be hugely missed by a huge number of people.
I was just thinking this morning that it’s been a while since I posted anything in my Bad Statistics folder when suddenly I come across this gem from a paper in Nature Astronomy entitled Could quantum gravity slow down neutrinos?
The paper itself is behind a paywall (though a preprint version is on the arXiv here). The results in the paper were deemed so important that Nature Astronomy tweeted about them, including this remarkable graph:
Understandably there has been quite a lot of reaction from scientists on Twitter to this plot, questioning how the blue line is obtained from the dots (as only one point to the right appears to be responsible for the trend), remarking on the complete absence of any error bars on either axis for any of the points, and above all wondering how this managed to get past a referee, never mind one for a “prestigious” journal such as Nature Astronomy. It wouldn’t have passed muster as an undergraduate exercise.
Of course this is how a proper astronomer would do it:
Joking aside, if you look at the paper (or the preprint if you can’t afford it) you will see another graph, which shows two other points at higher energy (red triangles):
The extra two points don’t have any error-bars either, and according to the preprint these appear to be unconfirmed candidate GRB events.
The abstract of the paper is:
In addition to its implications for astrophysics, the hunt for neutrinos originating from gamma-ray bursts could also be significant in quantum-gravity research, as they are excellent probes of the microscopic fabric of spacetime. Some previous studies based on neutrinos observed by the IceCube observatory found intriguing preliminary evidence that some of them might be gamma-ray burst neutrinos whose travel times are affected by quantum properties of spacetime that would slow down some of the neutrinos while speeding up others. The IceCube collaboration recently significantly revised the estimates of the direction of observation of their neutrinos, and we here investigate how the corrected directional information affects the results of the previous quantum-spacetime-inspired analyses. We find that there is now little evidence for neutrinos being sped up by quantum spacetime properties, whereas the evidence for neutrinos being slowed down by quantum spacetime is even stronger than previously determined. Our most conservative estimates find a false-alarm probability of less than 1% for these ‘slow neutrinos’, providing motivation for future studies on larger data samples.
I agree with the last sentence where it says larger data samples are needed in future, but also I’d suggest higher standards of data analysis are also called for. Not to mention refereeing. After all, it’s the quality of the reviewing that you pay for, isn’t it?
P.S. For those of you wondering, this paper would not have been published by the Open Journal of Astrophysics even if passed review, as it is not on the astro-ph section of arXiv (it’s on gr-qc).
Following the recent spell of very warm weather in Maynooth, and perhaps encouraged by heavy overnight rain, the Japanese Honeysuckle (Lonicera Japonica) in my garden has now started to bloom. Each flower only lasts a few days – starting white, turning yellow, then gold, then dying – but new ones keep coming, so for a while you can see all the different stages of evolution. In among the white and yellow tones there are many buds that are yet to open. The colours of the flowers are not the best part of a honeysuckle, though: that’s the richly perfumed aroma they give off, especially in the evening. As Tennyson put it “the woodbine* spices are wafted abroad…”. The weather isn’t always warm enough to sit out in the garden when mine flowers, but it is now and it’s very lovely.
*woodbine is another name for honeysuckle, in case you didn’t know…
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In the Dark 