R.I.P. Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)

Posted in Books, Talks and Reviews, Television, The Universe and Stuff with tags on March 14, 2018 by telescoper

I woke today to the sad news of the death, at the age of 76, of theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking. We all knew he had to pass away one day, but having been diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease and given just a couple of years to live at the age of 22, I think we had all come to regard him as indestructible, so news of his death still came as a shock.

Stephen’s immense contributions to physics, including but not restricted to cosmology, are remarkable in their own right, but made even more remarkable that has done so much after having been stricken by such a debilitating disease when he was only in his twenties. Hawking was undoubtedly a brilliant and inspirational mind, but his courage and physical endurance in the face of difficulties that others might have found unbearable have provided inspiration for many far beyond the field of physics.

To give an example of his scientific work, here is an equation which I think would serve as a memorial to Stephen Hawking as it brings together quantum mechanics, gravity and thermodynamics in giving the entropy of a black hole in terms of its surface area and fundamental constants:

I’ve talked and written quite a lot about Stephen Hawking over the years. In particular I have in the past gone on record, both on television and in print, as being not entirely positive about the `cult’ that surrounds him. I think a number of my colleagues (and some some people at the University of Cambridge) have found things I have said insufficiently reverential or perhaps even disrespectful. This is not the time to go over these things. For the record I’ll just say (yet again) that, while I stand by everything I have said, I do – and always will have – enormous respect for Hawking the physicist, as well as deep admiration for his tenacity and courage.

I may post a longer reflection on Stephen Hawking’s life and work in due course, but for now let me just offer my condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues. He was one of the most celebrated public intellectuals of his day as well as a courageous and determined human being. He is irreplaceable.

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USS Pension Proposal: Poll

Posted in Education, Politics with tags , , , , , on March 13, 2018 by telescoper

Last night I saw the news on Twitter that negotiators on behalf of the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) and the employers’ organisation Universities UK (UUK) under the auspices of the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) agreed a proposal to end the strike over pensions that has been going on since the end of February.

The text of the agreement can be found here (PDF). This proposal will have to be discussed and ratified formally, but the negotiators hope this can be do today and that the strike will be suspended from tomorrow.

The proposal suggests a transitional period of three years from April 2019 during which a much reduced Defined Benefit scheme will operate, but it still affirms the much disputed November 2017 valuation of the scheme which means that it is overwhelmingly likely that after three years the dispute will be back on.

I shall be leaving the USS scheme in July 2018 as I’m moving full-time to Ireland where I will be joining a Defined Benefit scheme so the changes outlined in the document will not affect me. Moreover, though I have supported the strike I am not a member of UCU. If I were I would not be in favour of accepting this deal because it seems to me that it amounts to an abject surrender on all the main issues. But given my personal situation I don’t think my opinion should carry much weight. The few friends I have discussed this with feel the same as I do, but I’m interested to know what the general opinion is. If you feel like filling in the poll below please feel free to do so. I’ve divided the responses between UCU members and non-UCU members to see if there’s a difference.

On one matter however I am less equivocal. The document calls on staff to `prioritise the rescheduling of teaching’ (lost during the strike). I have a one-word response to that: NO. Not only will it be logistically impossible to reschedule so many teaching sessions, but I am also not going to do extra teaching for free when my pay is being deducted for days on strike.

As usual, I invite your comments through the box below.

UPDATE: Here is a Google Document showing how UCU branches are responding to the proposal: at the time of posting, it is solidly `reject’..

UPDATE: Following on from the above, the UCU has now formally rejected the proposal. The strikes continue.

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Bird of Paradise – In Memoriam Charlie Parker

Posted in Jazz with tags , , on March 12, 2018 by telescoper

Today is the 63rd anniversary of the death, in 1955 aged just 34, of the great saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker, also known as `Bird’.  I know a lot of people don’t really `get’ Bird’s way of playing, but for me he created some of the most beautiful and exciting sounds not only in jazz, but in any musical genre. Here, to mark his memory, is a piece called Bird of Paradise (a thinly disguised version of the Jerome Kern standard All The Things You Are) recorded in 1947 for the Dial label with a quintet that included a young (21 year-old) Miles Davis on trumpet. Miles Davis was still finding his way musically at the time of the Dial sessions, but Bird had already established himself as a powerful creative force and his solo on this number is absolutely exquisite.

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De Valera’s ‘Last Letter’, Kilmainham, May 1916

Posted in History with tags , , on March 11, 2018 by telescoper

I’ve just been reading Charles Townshend’s book ‘Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion’ and was searching for the photograph it includes of Eamon de Valera surrendering with his men at the end of the uprising. I found it at this excellent blog post, which includes a great deal of other interesting information, so I thought I’d reblog the whole thing!

Brenda Malone's avatarThe Cricket Bat that Died for Ireland

Last letter of Eamon de Valera, May 1916 (copy) (NMI Collection)

The National Museum holds many of the last letters written by the men executed in Kilmainham Gaol in May 1916 for their part in the Rising. The collection includes Patrick Pearse’s letter to his mother, and letters from Con Colbert, Michael Mallin, Eamonn Ceannt and others, written to family and friends. All these letters have common themes; a final goodbye to loved ones, a sense of acceptance of their fate and a pride in having fought for their ideals and a free Ireland. They make for emotional reading, especially with the knowledge that within hours of writing their author was dead.

Among these is also a contemporary manuscript copy of a last letter written in May 1916 by Eamon de Valera, who had his death sentence commuted to penal servitude for life and was not executed along with the other leaders of the Rising. It was donated to the museum…

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An Image For Our Times

Posted in Art, Politics with tags , , on March 10, 2018 by telescoper

Picture Credit: Mark Harrison

I couldn’t resist posting this brilliant photograph (by Mark Harrison) of Jacob Rees-Mogg. I’ll refrain from commenting on the subject, but I think the picture is a work of art!

Anyone like to suggest a caption?

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An Interview with Lauritz Melchior

Posted in Opera with tags on March 10, 2018 by telescoper

I’ve written more than once about the great tenor Lauritz Melchior, and the other day I came across this fascinating interview with him recorded when he was in his eighties and was living in America.

It’s full of interesting comments, but I have to say that above all I just love the way he speaks. English spoken with a Danish accent sounds so wonderful to my ears, especially with that tendency to inflect downward at the end of words. It sounds wonderfully lugubrious.

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A Problem involving Simpson’s Rule

Posted in Cute Problems, mathematics with tags , on March 9, 2018 by telescoper

Since I’m teaching a course on Computational Physics here in Maynooth and have just been doing methods of numerical integration (i.e. quadrature) I thought I’d add this little item to the Cute Problems folder. You might answer it by writing a short bit of code, but it’s easy enough to do with a calculator and a piece of paper if you prefer.

Use the above expression, displayed using my high-tech mathematical visualization software, to obtain an approximate value for π/4 (= 0.78539816339…) by estimating the integral on the left hand side using Simpson’s Rule at ordinates x =0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1.

Comment on the accuracy of your result. Solutions and comments through the box please.

HINT 1: Note that the calculation just involves two applications of the usual three-point Simpson’s Rule with weights (1/3, 4/3, 1/3). Alternatively you could do it in one go using weights (1/3, 4/3, 2/3, 4/3, 1/3).

HINT 2: If you’ve written a bit of code to do this, you could try increasing the number of ordinates and see how the result changes…

P.S. Incidentally I learn that, in Germany, Simpson’s Rule is sometimes called called Kepler’s rule, or Keplersche Fassregel after Johannes Kepler, who used something very similar about a century before Simpson…

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Willow Weep For Me – Mary Lou Williams

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , on March 8, 2018 by telescoper

Today is International Women’s Day, so I thought I’d post this lovely performance of the standard Willow Weep For Me, not just because it is played by the wonderfully talented pianist composer and arranger Mary Lou Williams, but because the song itself was written by Ann Ronell…

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Back to Maynooth

Posted in Biographical, Cardiff, Maynooth with tags , , , on March 7, 2018 by telescoper

So here I am back in Maynooth. The University re-opened on Monday after being closed from Wednesday last week owing to the extremely bad weather. I’m told the snow was several feet deep and the town was virtually cut off until the weekend. There is still some snow lying here and there, but the thaw has begun and you can see the effect of the meltwater on the river (the Lyreen) that flows through town, which is usually no more than a little stream:

Picture Credit: Coyne’s Family Butcher, Maynooth

It’s not quite a raging torrent, but getting there!

At the moment there’s no sign of a resolution to the industrial action that’s affecting Cardiff University (as well as others in the UK) so I decided to travel to Ireland yesterday rather than my usual Wednesday. The flight over was virtually empty and so was Dublin Airport, so I got on the bus well ahead of schedule and made it back to my flat (which was cold, but otherwise all in order) in time to buy some groceries and make dinner. The panic-buying of bread had caused a shortage, but all seems to be back to normal again.

I had arranged for someone else to do last week’s Thursday lecture and Lab session so I could attend the event the IOP event I posted about, but as the campus was closed they were cancelled anyway and I now have to find a way to catch up. Do not worry, though, I have a cunning plan.

Unless there’s an announcement in the next couple of days that next week’s strike is off I plan to stay in Ireland over the weekend, which will give me the chance to explore Dublin a bit, something that my schedule has not so far allowed. Next week will be the fourth week of industrial action and the last of the current batch of strike days, this time a full week (having escalated from two, three and four days in the preceding weeks). If there is no resolution by then I don’t know what will happen, possibly an all-out indefinite strike. Nobody wants that, but there’s no doubt in my mind who is to blame for this dispute and it’s not the Universities and Colleges Union. However, there are some signs of movement, so let’s hope for a negotiated settlement. If not, I’m seriously thinking of trying to bring forward my full-time move to Maynooth. There’s little point continuing in my post in Cardiff if I’m going to be permanently on strike.

Anyway, I have a 9am lecture to give tomorrow so I think I’ll toddle off, get some tea and have an early night.

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R.I.P. Trevor Baylis (1937-2018)

Posted in Biographical with tags , on March 6, 2018 by telescoper

I heard yesterday the sad news of the death of inventor Trevor Baylis, who was most famous for his wind-up radio device. This brought back memories of when we both appeared in a Tomorrow’s World Live event that took place 21 years ago. I didn’t get to know him very well, but seemed to me to be a nice man, and the very epitome of an old-school boffin complete with pipe and tweed jacket.

I was on the show to do an item on the Tomorrow’s World Live show – which was not broadcast but performed in front of an audience of a few hundred people in a temporary theatre. In fact there were four shows a day for the period of the event (19-23 March 1997). Each show was only about 30 minutes long, but it was quite hard work as there were many technical things to sort out in between performances.

My role was to do a little piece about the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope and then answer questions on astronomy and cosmology from the audience. I had no script for that bit, as it was impossible to know what would be asked. I answered with varying degrees of success.

Other items featured on the show, as well as Trevor’s clockwork radio, were an  electric sports car, and a device for scrambling an egg without breaking its shell. I couldn’t see the point of the last invention, as one would have to break the shell to eat the egg anyway.

The best bit about being involved in Tomorrow’s World Live was meeting so many of the presenters, all of them proper professionals (unlike me) who were very friendly and helpful although most of them seemed very nervous beforehand. I think they knew better than I did how many things might go wrong. Only two presenters were involved in each show,  and  each pair only did one or two shows, so over the five days I got to work with the whole set, including Craig Doyle, Philippa Forester, Howard Stableford, Vivienne Parry and Shahnaz Pakravan. I didn’t envy them as they had to work not only with amateurs like me, but also had to learn a detailed script and deal with the gadgets. I was relieved that I could basically just wing it.

My clearest memory of the whole event was the technical rehearsal early  in the morning before the very first show. Apart from the wind-up radio, nothing worked properly, and I was convinced that it was all going to be a complete disaster. Somehow, however, it all came together and there weren’t any major problems in any of the real shows.

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