R.I.P. Tom Lehrer (1928-2025)

Posted in Music, R.I.P. with tags , on July 27, 2025 by telescoper

I just heard that the great musical satirist Tom Lehrer has passed away at the age of 97. I was trying to pick one of his songs to post as a tribute but I couldn’t decide which one to choose. I was going to go with “The Elements” but that would be lost on an audience of astronomers for whom there are only Hydrogen, Helium and Metals…

So instead of picking one tune I thought I’d share an entire concert of his, recorded in 1967 in Denmark, that contains no fewer than 17 of his songs including such favourites such “The Elements” and “The Vatican Rag” but also some less familiar numbers. There are even Danish subtitles to help you.

The Sixties were a hot time for satire, and it’s amazing how well some of Tom Lehrer’s songs stand up sixty years later, even today when satire is mostly impossible. Tom Lehrer”s irreverent, and sometimes rather dark, humour brought laughter into the lives of so many people.

It’s worth mentioning that, having decided  that he’d made quite enough money,  Tom Lehrer released all his songs into the public domain. Class.

R.I.P. Tom Lehrer (1928-2025)

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Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 26/07/2025

Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 26, 2025 by telescoper

It’s Saturday morning again, so it’s time again for an update of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published seven new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 105, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 340. I expect we’ll pass the century for this year sometime next week. I had expected a bit of a slowdown in July, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. Anyway, with the century for the year having been achieved, the next target is 120 (the total number we published last year). At the current rate I expect us to reach that sometime in August.

The papers published this week, with their overlays, are as follows. You can click on the images of the overlays to make them larger should you wish to do so.

The first paper to report is “Non-equilibrium ionization in the multiphase circumgalactic medium – impact on quasar absorption-line analyses” by Suyash Kumar and Hsiao-Wen Chen (University of Chicago, USA). This was published on Tuesday 22nd July 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It discusses time-dependent photoionization (TDP) models that self-consistently solve for the ionization state of rapidly cooling gas irradiated by the extragalactic ultraviolet background (UVB) and the application thereof to observed systems.

The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version can be found on arXiv here.

The second paper of the week, also published on Tuesday 22nd July but in the folder Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, is “Do We Know How to Model Reionization?” by Nick Gnedin (University of Chicago, USA). This paper discusses the similarities and differences between the radiation fields produced by different numerical simulations of cosmic reionization. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on arXiv here.

The third paper of the week is “The effects of projection on measuring the splashback feature” by Xiaoqing Sun (MIT), Stephanie O’Neil (U. Penn.), Xuejian Shen (MIT) and Mark Vogelsberger (MIT), all based in the USA. This paper describes an investigation whether projection effects could lead to any systematic bias in determining the position of the boundary between infalling and accreting matter around haloes. It was published on Wednesday 23rd July in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. The overlay is here:

The officially-accepted version can be found on arXiv here.

The fourth paper of the week, also published on Wednesday 22nd July in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Host galaxy identification of LOFAR sources in the Euclid Deep Field North” by Laura Bisigello, Marika Giulietti, Isabella Prandoni, Marco Bondi, & Matteo Bonato (INAF, Bologna, Italy), Manuela Magliocchetti (INAF-IAPS Roma, Italy), Huub Rottgering (Leiden Observatory, Netherlands), Leah, K. Morabito (Durham University, UK) and Glenn, J. White (Open Universirty, UK). This presents a catalogue of optical and near-infrared counterparts to radio sources detected in the Euclid Deep Field North using observations from the LOw-Frequency ARray (LOFAR). The overlay is here:

The final, accepted version of the paper is on arXiv here.

Fifth one up is “Constraining the dispersion measure redshift relation with simulation-based inference” by Koustav Konar (Ruhr University Bochum), Robert Reischke (Universität Bonn), Steffen Hagstotz (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München), Andrina Nicola (Bonn) and Hendrik Hildebrandt (Bochum); all authors based in Germany. This was published on Thursday 24th July in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It discusses using simulations to develop the use of Dispersion Measures of Fast Radio Bursts as cosmological probes. The overlay is here:

You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.

The penultimate (sixth) article published this week is “Generating Dark Matter Subhalo Populations Using Normalizing Flows” by Jack Lonergan (University of Southern California), Andrew Benson (Carnegie Observatories) and Daniel Gilman (University of Chicago), all based in the USA. This paper describes a generative AI approach to subhalo populations, trained using the semi-analytical model Galacticus. This paper was published yesterday (i.e. on Friday 25th July) in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

You can find the final version on arXiv here.

The last article published this week is “21 Balmer Jump Street: The Nebular Continuum at High Redshift and Implications for the Bright Galaxy Problem, UV Continuum Slopes, and Early Stellar Populations” by Harley Katz of the University of Chicago, and 13 others based in the USA, UK, Germany, Denmark and Austria. This discusses the implications of extreme nebular emission for the spectroscopic properties of galaxies, especially at high redshift. It was published on Friday 25th July in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.

The overlay is here:

You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here.

And that’s all the papers for this week. I’ll do another update next Saturday, when we’ll be into August.

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R.I.P. Cleo Laine (1927-2025)

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , on July 25, 2025 by telescoper
Cleo Laine in concert in 1980.

I just heard the very sad news of the death at the age of 97 of that great jazz singer, Cleo Laine. Although stylistically related to Sarah Vaughan, her voice was instantly recognisable. It always struck me that most British jazz singers would adopt an American accent when performing, but Cleo Laine always kept a very crisp diction and sounded very English…

I think it’s her musical and personal partnership with John Dankworth (who passed away in 2010) for which she will be known best. He hired Cleo Laine as a singer for his small band in 1951; they married in 1958 and remained together for over 50 years, until separated by John’s death.

I think it is appropriate to use this lovely version of George Gershwin’s great tune Lady be Good (with lyircs by his brother Ira) as a tribute. It’s always good to end on a high note. John Dankworth takes a back seat – as he often did when Cleo was singing – but the band is in great form. Unfortunately there is no personnel listing, apart from John Dankworth. The small band you see and hear here was drawn from his larger orchestra and many of the musicians therein doubled on different instruments. The vibes player, for example, could be Alan Branscombe, who also played piano. Or he could be the pianist. The trumpeter could very well be a young Kenny Wheeler.

Anyway, if you didn’t realise what a terrific vocalist Cleo Laine was, then pin back your lugholes around 2 minutes in where she demonstrates a range and level of vocal ontrol that would put many opera singers to shame.

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Harvard Astronomer Latest!

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on July 25, 2025 by telescoper

I couldn’t resist sharing the first abstract on today’s astro-ph announcement, one of the authors of which is Avi Loeb (the pseudonym of “Harvard Astronomer”). Here it is:

We examine the funding disparity in astronomical research priorities: the Habitable Worlds Observatory is planned to receive over $10 billion over the next two decades whereas extraterrestrial intelligence research receives nearly zero federal funding. This imbalance is in contrast to both scientific value and public interest, as 65% of Americans and 58.2% of surveyed astrobiologists believe extraterrestrial intelligence exists. Empirical psychological research demonstrates that humanity possesses greater resilience toward extraterrestrial contact than historically recognized. Contemporary studies reveal adaptive responses rather than mass panic, conflicting with the rationale for excluding extraterrestrial intelligence research from federal funding since 1993. The response to the recent interstellar object 3I/ATLAS exemplifies consequences of this underinvestment: despite discovery forecasts of a new interstellar object every few months for the coming decade, no funded missions exist to intercept or closely study these visitors from outside the Solar System. We propose establishing a comprehensive research program to explore both biosignatures and technosignatures on interstellar objects. This program would address profound public interest while advancing detection capabilities and enabling potentially transformative discoveries in the search for extraterrestrial life. The systematic exclusion of extraterrestrial intelligence research represents institutional bias rather than scientific limitation, requiring immediate reconsideration of funding priorities.

arXiv:2507.17790

You probably don’t need an AI summary (whether the A stands for “Artificial” or “Alien”), but it the gist of this new article is “Shut everything down and give me the money!”…

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The Confirmation – Edwin Muir

Posted in Poetry with tags , on July 24, 2025 by telescoper 
Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face.
I in my mind had waited for this long,
Seeing the false and searching for the true,
Then found you as a traveller finds a place
Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong
Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you,
What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,
A well of water in a country dry,
Or anything that's honest and good, an eye
That makes the whole world seem bright. Your open heart,
Simple with giving, gives the primal deed,
The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,
The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea.
Not beautiful or rare in every part.
But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

by Edwin Muir (1887-1959)

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Masters from Cambridge

Posted in Biographical, Education with tags , , , on July 23, 2025 by telescoper

A few weeks ago, after I posted an item about it being 40 years since I graduated from the University of Cambridge, I was talking to some students. The main subject was that the primary route for becoming a research student is to do an undergraduate degree (Bachelors) followed by a taught postgraduate programme (Masters) before starting a PhD or equivalent. In the course of that discussion I mentioned that I skipped the middle step and went straight from my (three-year) BA at Cambridge to my DPhil at Sussex. Nevertheless, I have got a Masters degree: MA (Cantab), to be precise.

I had to explain that if you graduate from the University of Cambridge then all you have to do is wait a few years and then your B.A. automatically becomes an M.A. In my memory I received news of this just a year or two after graduation but this evening I found the correspondence and it was later than that:

By December 1988 I’d already finished my DPhil thesis, though I wasn’t formally awarded the degree until the following July. I didn’t turn up to the graduation ceremony, of course. I had done at least some work for my B.A. but did nothing at all for my M.A. except survive for three and a half years. Neverthless, I still have the stiff ticket (right) which I show here alongside my B.A. certificate (left) to demonstrate that it looks just like a proper degree certificate even though it is, frankly, a bit of a fraud.

I bet our MSc students currently hard at work on their dissertations wish that theirs were so easy!

By the way, having an MA also gives you (limited) dining rights in College. I’ve never once availed myself of this privilege.

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Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan

Posted in Literature with tags , , on July 23, 2025 by telescoper

Now on a bit of a roll, I’ve finished reading the third of the  six novels I bought earlier this year. The first of these I read was Foster, by Claire Keegan who also wrote the latest, Small Things Like These. There’s much in common between these two works, not only in the beautifully spare writing style with which the stories are told, but also in the message hope of they find in grim circumstances.

The current book is revolves around a character called Tom Furlong, a hard-working and moderately successful timber and coal merchant who makes deliveries around his neighbourhood. It is set in the 1980s, in a time of economic recession, shortly before Christmas. Tom is happily married with five daughters. Tom doesn’t know who his father was; he was raised by a kindly Protestant lady. One day making his delivery round takes him to the local convent, where he sees the harsh treatment of young unmarried mothers in the Magdalene laundry run by the nuns; later visiting the same place to deliver coal he finds a young girl locked in the coalhouse, in the freezing cold. These and other episodes unsettle Tom, by making him think about how lucky he has been, largely thanks to the kindness of others, and how small things can make a huge difference to how one’s life turns out. What he does at the end of the story is not a small thing at all, and we aren’t told how it works out, but it is an act of kindness and he does it for all the right reasons, so we feel it will somehow all work out for the best.

The last novel I wrote about was a work of historical fiction, and so is this. Although it is set in the 1980s, that was a time in which social attitudes in Ireland were much more dominated by the Roman Catholic Church than they are now, the cruelty of the mother-and-baby homes being just one example. Keegan is at pains to point out that the convent is right next door to the local school, two aspects of the same system of social control.

Small Things Like These was published in 2021 and has already been made into a film featuring Cillian Murphy. I haven’t seen the film, unlike Foster in which case I saw the film based on it, An Cailín Ciúin, before reading the book. I must see the film.

P.S. At the end I found myself thinking of these lines from Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey

As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.

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BBC Sounds Confusing

Posted in Music, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on July 22, 2025 by telescoper

The BBC Proms having started on Sunday (20th July), I decided to listen to some of the concerts via BBC Sounds. One can’t get BBC Radio 3 on the radio here in the Republic, at least not this far from the border.

I was disappointed, then, to see that BBC Sounds is no longer available to listeners outside the UK. Apparently The BBC is making BBC Sounds exclusively available to UK license fee payers, meaning users outside the UK, including those in Ireland, will no longer be able to access the full service. This change came into effect yesterday (21st July).

So here I am, as I write this, on 22nd July, listening to this evening’s Promenade concert via BBC Sounds. No, I’m not doing anything illegal or unlawful. Neither did I last night, when I listened to Mahler’s Symphony No. 7. It’s just that the change has been implemented in a very peculiar and confusing way.

To start with, this is what I see a see on my screen right now:

I don’t think you get the top message if you listen in the UK, but then you might be listening on the radio anyway.

At the top it says use the BBC.com or the BBC App. For one thing I can’t find any sign of the “BBC App” on PlayStore on anywhere else. For another, BBC.com offers only Radio 4, BBC World Service and a random selection of podcasts. So neither of those options are any good for listening to Radio 3.

If you click to “Find out how to listen to other BBC stations” you get this page which “explains”:

Earlier this year, we launched a new audio service outside the UK on BBC.com and the BBC app. This includes access to BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service English, thousands of hours of podcasts (including Global News Podcast, World of Secrets and Infinite Monkey Cage) – as well as some of the best of the BBC’s journalism and storytelling including news and history programming.  

As part of the announcement, we said we planned to close BBC Sounds to audiences living outside the UK later this year, making it available exclusively to people in the UK. Anyone who lives in the UK will still be able to use the BBC Sounds app when they go on holiday abroad. We can now confirm that BBC Sounds closed for listeners based outside the UK on 21 July 2025.

Leaving aside the mystery of the “BBC app”, this suggests that BBC Sounds is closed to listeners outside the UK. Except it isn’t.

The article goes on to explain:

Please use the links below for live listening access to the BBC’s other radio stations from across the UK, including BBC Radio 1, Radio 2 and Radio 3, 6Music, 1Xtra and Asian Network, Radio 4Xtra and 5Live, all the BBC’s stations from the UK nations and every local radio station in England.

The link to BBC Radio 3 is this:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live/bbc_radio_three#noapp

In other words, it takes you back to BBC Sounds, which is where I am listening now! As far as I understand it, one can still listen to the live internet stream of BBC Radio on BBC Sounds, so it’s not closed to listeners outside the UK after all. What is closed (to us foreigners) is the back catalogue of past recordings. I only ever listen to live broadcasts, however, so after all that it’s business as usual for me.

I hope this clarifies the situation.

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Happy Retirement, James Hirschfeld!

Posted in mathematics with tags , , on July 22, 2025 by telescoper

I’m indebted to my erstwhile colleague from Sussex days, Dorothy Lamb, for passing on the news that another former colleague from Sussex days, mathematician Professor James Hirschfeld, has finally retired at the age of 84. He formally retired some years ago, but remained in employment as a Tutorial Fellow. He was very popular with students and staff alike.

Prof. James Hirschfeld, picture credit: University of Sussex

James started as a lecturer at Sussex University in 1966, soon after the opening of the University, and remained working there for almost 60 years. I remember him well from both my stints here: from 1985-990 when I was a research student and then postdoc in the Astronomy Centre, and then from 2013 to 2016 when I was Head of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, of which the Department of Mathematics was a part. He was an excellent colleague who knew the workings of the University inside out and provided valuable advice on many occasions.

James’s retirement was marked by an event at Sussex University. I’m sure I speak for many present and past colleagues and students in wishing him a long and happy retirement.

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CP Violation in Baryons

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , on July 21, 2025 by telescoper

I was (pleasantly) surprised to learn a few weeks ago that I shall be teaching particle physics again next academic year. That means that I’ll have to update to the notes to reflect the latest news from CERN. Researchers from the LHCb collaboration have published evidence for CP violation in baryons. The paper is published in Nature here.

For those of you not up with the lingo, CP is an operator that combines C (charge-conjugation, i.e. matter versus anti-matter) and P (parity, i.e. inversion of coordinates). Parity has been known since the 1950s to be violated in weak interactions, so the weak nuclear force distinguishes between states of odd and even parity. CP violation was first demonstrated in the 1960s CP in the decays of neutral kaons resulted in the Nobel Prize  in 1980 for its discoverers Cronin and Fitch. CP violation has subsequeuntly been seen in many other meson decays.

But the mesons (consisting of a quark and an antiquark) are only half of the family of particles made from quarks; the others are the baryons which are made of three quarks (c.f. James Joyce’s “Three quarks for Muster Mark” in Finnegans Wake). Antibaryons consist of three antiquarks, but such are not mentioned in Finnegans Wake.

The baryons concerned in the LHCb experiment contain an up quark, a down quark and a beauty quark and were produced in proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider in 2011–2018. These baryons and antibaryons can decay via multiple channels. In one, a baryon decays to a proton, a positive K-meson and a pair of pions – or, conversely, an antibaryon decays to an antiproton, a negative K-meson and a pair of pions. CP violation should create an asymmetry between these processes, and the researchers found evidence of this asymmetry in the numbers of particles detected at different energies from all the collisions.

Figure 1 from https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09119-3

A problem with calculating the magnitude of this effect for baryons is that there is a contribution from the strong force – see the curly line indicating a gluon in the lower panel on the left above – and that is much harder to compute than a pure weak force (represented by the wavy lines indicating W– bosons. Yo will see that the tree and loop diagrams involve quark mixing, a process that allows quarks of different generations to couple via weak interactions; there is a buW vertex in the top panel and a tsW vertex in the bottom one. Given the uncertainties, it seems the results are consistent with the level of CP violation predicted in the Standard Model of particle physics.

The big question surrounding this result is whether it can account for the fact that our Universe – or at least our part of it -contains a preponderance of baryons over anti-baryons, so somehow the interactions going on during the Big Bang must have shown a preference for the former over the latter. This problem of baryogenesis is not explained in the Standard Model and, since these results are consistent with the Standard Model, the answer to that question is “no”…

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