Today being Easter Sunday, I was engaging in a religious observation of an old episode of the TV detective series Columbo when the spirit moved me to post an item in my Astronomy Look-alikes folder. I wonder if unscrupulous murderer Patrick Sutton and gravitational wave expert Robert Culp might in some way be related? The attempt to grow a beard as well as a moustache isn’t fooling anyone, but I think we should be told anyway…
Easter. The grave clothes of winter
are still here, but the sepulchre
is empty. A messenger
from the tomb tells us
how a stone has been rolled
from the mind, and a tree lightens
the darkness with its blossom.
There are travellers upon the road
who have heard music blown
from a bare bough, and a child
tells us how the accident
of last year, a machine stranded
beside the way for lack
of petrol, is crowned with flowers.
by R.S. Thomas (1913-2000)
I wasn’t there in person yesterday – I haven’t been to a concert for a couple of years now – but I thought I’d share this recording of the sold-out Good Friday performance of Handel’s Messiah from the National Concert Hall in Dublin. Although nowadays associated mainly with Christmas, Messiah was intended to be performed at Easter and had its premiere 280 years ago in Dublin on Good Friday in 1742. The National Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Nicholas McGegan, with soloists including Máire Flavin (soprano) James Oxley (tenor) and Stephan Loges (bass-baritone) with the National Symphony Chorus (David Young, chorus director). Enjoy!
A descendant of Senegalese slaves, George Lewis was born in the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1900 where he learned to play the clarinet and started to play with jazz bands in the 1920s. Many musicians left New Orleans for Chicago during that period but Lewis stayed and lived on in relatively obscurity until the New Orleans “revival” began in the 1940s. After appearing on records with likes of Bunk Johnson, Lewis became a sort of Patron Saint of traditional jazz, with a style rooted in the home-town traditions of Gospel Music and Street Parades that was very different from that of the popular clarinetists of the Swing Era such as Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. Lewis was never a great player from a technical point of view, but he was an authentic emblem of early Jazz and the back-to-basics move he represented proved very popular especially in Western Europe and Lewis had a late renaissance in his career in which he travelled widely playing with “traditional” bands around the world during the height of the “trad” boom of the fifties and sixties. He died in 1968.
Anyway, because it’s Good Friday I thought I would post this video of him in his later years playing the hymn The Old Rugged Cross, which was written in 1912 and has been a staple of New Orleans funeral processions ever since:
So we’ve arrived at the Easter weekend. No work tomorrow, Good Friday, or on Easter Monday. I’ve put my out-of-office autoreply on and I’m taking a break from work for four days in an attempt to recharge the batteries before the examination and marking season. I only have two papers to correct this year, but because my Computational Physics class larger than it has been for a few years so I have quite a lot of projects to assess too. The deadline for those is in May, as are the examinations.
Today while finishing off a few things before the break – including the last Computational Physics lab test – I noticed an email from Human Resources, announcing that May 2022 is “Employee Wellbeing Month”. Among other delights we are promised a “wide range of wellbeing workshops that will run throughout May” which most of us teaching staff will be far too busy to attend.
And don’t get me started on making us come in for an Open Day on the May Bank Holiday weekend…
I wonder if there’s any empirical evidence at all that wellbeing workshops and whatnot do anything at all to alleviate work-related stress? I suspect not. It seems to me that they’re just a way of telling academic staff that they’d better get used to it because no attempt will ever be made to deal with the real causes of burnout: lack of resources, staff shortages, ever-increasing workloads, and the suffocating influence of remote and unsympathetic management.
This week though I learnt a far better way to experience feelings of wellbeing. Yesterday evening, for the first time in ages, I went to a pub for drinks with some current and former postgrads and colleagues (and partners thereof) from the Department of Theoretical Physics. Unlike, for example, Cardiff (where visits to the pubs with colleagues were a regular occurrence for me) I hadn’t really socialised with folks from Maynooth University even before the lockdown put paid to the possibility entirely. Last night was actually an initiative by some of our PhD students, and I’m very grateful to them for organizing it!
I’d been to the pub – McMahon‘s on Main Street – a few times before so when invited to go along it seemed like having a couple of pints there might be a good way of trying to shake off the agoraphobia. The evening turned out to be ideal for that purpose – the pub had enough people in it to have atmosphere but not so many that it was heaving. I went with the intention of staying an hour or two, but ending up leaving at midnight.
I hope this sort of thing becomes a regular feature from now on. Going to the pub with some friends now and then is far more likely to improve my state of mind than any number of wellness seminars. Although slightly hungover this morning I was in a very good mood, at least until my computer decided to embark on a Windows Update that took over an hour to complete…
Today I gave Lecture 20 in my final-year module on Advanced Electromagnetism which was about dipole radiation. That means I have four lectures remaining. All I have left to cover is the interaction between electromagnetic fields and waves and various types of medium, which means I’m more-or-less on track. Next week is the Easter vacation for the students so my next lecture won’t be for about a fortnight.
I’m looking forward to the Easter break, which actually starts on Friday. Surprisingly Good Friday isn’t actually a Bank Holiday in Ireland, though Easter Monday is, but the University is closed on that day. I don’t have any lectures on Fridays this term anyway so it doesn’t make any difference to me. My last teaching session before the break is tomorrow after, a two-hour Computational Physics Lab session.
This term has been both exhausting and dispiriting. Student attendance at lectures and tutorials has fallen to very low levels: I’m getting only about 30-40%. I discussed some of the possible reasons for low engagement here. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens in the May Examinations as a result of this lack of participation, but at least we get a break before we have to confront that.
There are other issues weighing me down too, but it’s probably best I don’t write about them here. Suffice to say that I’m very tired and frustrated and I don’t think a week off will do much to change that. On the bright side my term as Head of Department is due to end on August 31st 2022, just 140 days from now…
I was a latecomer to the TV comedy series Derry Girls but I soon became a fan. Indeed, the finale of Series 1 is one of the best things I’ve ever seen on television. I can now barely contain my excitement that the third and final series starts tonight (on the soon-to-be-destroyed-by-the-Tories Channel 4). Anyway, to whet your appetite here are some of the best bits of Sister Michael (memorably played by Siobhán McSweeney).
Update: the 1st Episode of Series 3 was very funny but in order not to give out spoilers I won’t mention the cameo by Liam Neeson.
The first round of voting in the French Presidential Election is under way today and it reminded of this clipping from a few years ago:
(Read the caption.)
Last week’s announcement of a new high-precision estimate of the mass of the W boson by the CDF collaboration at Fermilab has generated a lot of excitement in the news because it doesn’t seem to fit the predictions of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Here is a graphic showing the latest result (which is not a new measurement, but a new analysis of old data) together with some previous values:
The units of the measurements are MeV/c2 and the latest number is 80,443.5 ± 9.4 MeV/c2 while calculations based on the standard model give 80,357± 4 [inputs]± 4[theory] MeV/c2. The difference is small but apparently significant, though I’m not sufficiently expert to understand all the details of the statistical analysis.
If true, this result has implications for the Standard Model because although this model has free parameters which have to be measured rather than obtained from theory, the model does imply relationships between these parameters. The reason this applies to particle masses is that these are affected to a greater or lesser extent by interactions with all the fields present in the theory. The first thing you learn when you study particle physics is that it’s not primarily about particles, it’s about fields. The mass of the W-boson is significantly affected by the mass of the top quark and the Higgs boson both of which have been measured to some level of accuracy, but the new W measurement doesn’t seem fit with these known values.
Anyway, here is the discrepancy with the top quark mass
So it’s definitely interesting, though it clearly needs further analysis: there could be uncorrected systematics in the measurement, for example. Also, as far as I know, some of the other masses feeding into this calculation may turn out to be wrong.
Incidentally, a student asked me yesterday why there’s no corresponding measurement for the Z-boson. The answer I gave (which I think is correct) is that the mass of the Z is already known much better than the W because it, being neutral, can decay into an electron-positron pair, both of which are easy to measure, but the W, being charged, has to decay into a charged lepton and a neutrino (or antineutrino) combination and the latter is much harder to deal with experimentally.
P.S. For some comments by a physicist who knows much more about this stuff than I do, see here.
In the Dark 