Just time for a short update on the aftermath of the Dutch Raid on the Medway as recounted by Samuel Pepys which I blogged about last month.
The Dutch fleet withdrew from the Medway in mid-June of 1667 (Old Calendar) but they did attempt further raids later that month and in early July. Fed by wild rumours about the intentions and whereabouts of the Dutch, London was a jittery place. Pepys summed up the mood in his Diary, ending with a quote which has become famous:
Follow @telescoperThese are busy days in cosmological circles, especially regarding the Hubble Constant controversy. The latest contribution to appear on the arXiv is by George Efstathiou of Cambridge. Here is the abstract:
I don’t know if George has voted in my ongoing poll relating to this issue, but I bet that if he did he would vote low – along with the majority (so far):
Incidentally, I have seen no evidence of Russian interference in the voting.
Follow @telescoperI was later than usual coming to the office today as I had to arrange some things to do with the house I’m buying in Maynooth. It was mid morning when I walked up towards campus. I was a little bit confused to see a large crowd of people walking along Main Street, but when I got closer I realized they were all walking behind a hearse on their way to a funeral service at St Mary’s Church. I followed the procession all the way along Main Street and up Mill Street where another large group of people was waiting outside the Church. I don’t know who had passed away but judging by the attendance they must have been popular in the community.
This is the first time I’d seen such a procession here in Ireland, though I was of course already aware that the Irish treat funerals very differently from the English. Coincidentally, though, today saw the funeral of Jack Charlton which began with a procession through the streets of Ashington, the cortege led by piper playing the Northumbrian pipes. Many hundreds turned up to show their respects.
Because of Covid-19 restrictions, only about 20 people could attend the funeral service, which was held at the West Road Crematorium in Newcastle upon Tyne. As it happens, that was where the funeral of my Mam took place about 9 months ago. There were no Covid-19 restrictions then, which makes it seem like a different age altogether.
Anyway, going back to Jack Charlton, I saw last week marvellous comic book tribute to him called The Life and Times of Jack Charlton by David Squires in the Guardian. The poignant last panel is beautifully done.
Today is another big day for cosmology as the last and final – why do people say that? – data release from the Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS) is now available. That is the culmination of 20 years of effort with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Here is a pretty picture showing the enormous scales probed by the survey:
There is an overview paper on the cosmological implications of the survey on the arXiv here. Fortunately, the latest Cosmology Talk on the YouTube channel of Shaun Hotchkiss features a very interesting presentation by Eva-Maria Mueller who is the first author of that paper:
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It’s a tough lesson to learn in life that the people you admire or idolize for their contribution in a particular arena (whether that be sport, art, science or something else) turn out to be people you can’t stand in terms of their character or political views.
You have to separate, for example, having a high regard for Ian Botham’s cricketing prowess from having a high regard for his personal character. In fact I can think of few sportspeople whose company I’d enjoy socially.
The same goes in many other spheres. Richard Feynman was a truly great physicist but I’ve never bought into the personality cult surrounding him. In fact I doubt I would have liked him very much at all if we’d ever met in person. They say you should never meet your heroes. They’re right.
Another example is Richard Wagner, a brilliant composer but really horrible man, who brings us to this clip from the end of Twilight of the Gods (the last episode of Series 7 of Inspector Morse, first broadcast in 1993).
I won’t spoil the plot if you haven’t seen it but it involves a famous opera singer, Gladys Probert, who visits Oxford to perform and receive an honorary degree. On the way to the ceremony she is shot, but was she the intended victim?
Opera-loving Morse is a huge admirer of Gladys Probert but in the course of his investigation he uncovers some unpleasant truths about her private life. He solves the crime but the case leaves him dispirited.
Here is the ending. John Thaw is Inspector Morse and Kevin Whateley is Detective Sergeant Lewis.
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The time of Covid-19 was already an “interesting” time to be an academic in Ireland but yesterday it got more interesting still, as news emerged that this year’s (estimated) Leaving Certificate results will not be published until 7th September, which is three weeks later than usual. The first round of CAO offers will be made on 11th September. All this is about three weeks later than the usual cycle of examinations and results.
Here at Maynooth University the start of the academic year has been delayed by one week to September 28th, so the three week delay in Leaving Cert means we have to speed the processes up of getting everything in place for new students to start by two weeks. That is going to be a challenge, and even if we manage it we will only find out very late in the day how many students we have to accommodate in first-year lectures.
The current plan for teaching next semester at Maynooth University is that all modules will be allocated the same timetable slots and rooms as last year. However, most lecture rooms have had their capacity reduced by more than half. Lecturers need to know how many students they have in order to decide how to use the available lecture slots and how to strike a balance between live and online delivery.
To give an example, I had about 90 students in my first-year module last year for which I had three lectures per week in Physics Hall, which has a normal capacity of 90. Next year the capacity of this room is likely to be around 30 with social distancing so. if I have the same numbers as last year, I will have to split the class into three groups and have one weekly session with each group. The material not covered live will be put online. I’m planning on that basis now, but if I find we have more students in Year 1 than last year I’ll have to have a Plan B. I won’t know that until just before teaching starts.
And then there is the possibility that teaching will actually start later for first-year students, requiring the lecture content to be revised. That’s not the current plan at Maynooth University, but a lot can happen between now and September…
We do indeed live in interesting times.
Of course I’m not the only one to be facing such challenges. Mine is a relatively small class by first-year standards and other bigger courses will experience far more serious difficulties.
If any prospective student is getting worried reading this, I can promise you that we will be doing the best we can to provide the best education we can in whatever circumstances we find ourselves in this September. Please bear in mind that workloads on academic staff (including Heads of Department!) are going to be very heavy after a summer in which very few will have been able to take any holidays at all. So please bear with us. We didn’t want any of this any more than you did, but we just have to make the best of it.
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Given yesterday’s news from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, among other things suggesting a low value of the Hubble constant of around 67.6 km s-1 Mpc-1, it might be fun to run another totally unscientific poll about which of the two Hubble constant camps has the most support in the community. The two camps are:
Of course you might also believe that both are wrong and the `true’ result lies outside both error regions but I’d like to focus on these two possibilities, so the question is posed assuming that one of them is right, which one is that most likely to be. In your opinion. Humble or otherwise.
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There’s some excitement in cosmological circles with the announcement of new results from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, which is situated in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The two papers describing the new results can be found on the arXiv here and here and the data set will be made available here (it is Data Release 4; or DR4 for short).
If you want a laugh, the structure in the above map is on arc-minute scales – exactly the sort of thing I was trying to simulate way back in the 1980s. Here’s an ancient monochrome plot! The contours show 1σ, 2σ and 3σ fluctuations above the mean rather than the full distribution shown in the map above.
The full results will be discussed at a Zoom presentation at 11am Eastern Time (4pm Irish Time). I suspect it will be very busy so you will have to register in advance.
UPDATE: The Webinar is over but was recorded. I will post a link to the video when it is available. You can then guess which question was mine!
The new results from ACTPol are consistent with those from Planck, even down to the colour scheme used for the map, but the line taken by most media presentations I’ve seen (e.g. here and here) has been the issue of the Hubble Constant. The value of around 67.6 km s-1 Mpc-1 obtained by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, though consistent with Planck measurements, is lower than most distance-scale measurements of H0. The dichotomy between `low’ estimates from cosmological observations and `high’ values persists.
This gives me an excuse to include my poll again:
There have been nearly a thousand responses so far, with opinion very divided.
The burning question however is when will face masks featuring the above map be made available for purchase? It could be a nice little earner…
Follow @telescoperToday Facebook reminded me that the picture below is now 25 years old. I have posted it before and it has done the rounds at a number of cosmology conferences (usually to the accompaniment of lots of laughter), but I thought I’d circulate again as a bit of nostalgia and also to embarrass all concerned with this image. The picture was taken at a graduate school in cosmology in Leiden (in The Netherlands) in July 1995. In my memory that was a sweltering hot summer, which is my excuse for the informality of my attire.
Anyway, various shady characters masquerading as “experts” were asked by the audience of graduate students at a summer school to give their favoured values for the cosmological parameters. from from top to bottom these are:
From left to right we have Alain Blanchard (AB), Bernard Jones (BJ, standing), John Peacock (JP), me (yes, with a beard and a pony tail – the shame of it), Vincent Icke (VI), Rien van de Weygaert (RW) and Peter Katgert (PK, standing). You can see on the hi-tech digital display screen blackboard that the only one to get anywhere close to correctly predicting the parameters of what would become the standard cosmological model was, in fact, Rien van de Weygaert. Actually he was the only one of us to include a non-zero cosmological constant. My own favourite model at the time was a low-density model with negative spatial curvature.
Nobody is suggesting that panel discussions are the right way to settle scientific questions, of course, but it is interesting to see the diversity of opinions that were around in 1995.
P.S. Note that not all the combinations of parameters presented there are consistent with a Friedman model, but nobody said they had to be!
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In the Dark 