In common with much of the professional sports media, this blog on a number of occasions has given the impression that England’s cricket team boasts excellent team spirit, a strong batting line-up and powerful bowling attack so, as a consequence, has a realistic prospect of retaining the Ashes on their current tour of Australia.
In the wake of their humiliating defeat in the First Ashes Test in Brisbane, however, I realise that this opinion was misguided and in fact they are poorly prepared, lacking in determination and confidence, their batting is flimsy and prone to collapse, and their bowlers ineffectual and unconvincing.
I would like therefore to apologize for having misrepresented the situation and for any inconvenience caused by this error.
Today is the official 50th birthday celebration of Doctor Who and, since The Doctor and myself are of the same vintage, I thought I’d repeat an old post about the show. I just listened to the original theme music again before posting this and I still think it sounds amazingly fresh.
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As a Professor of Astrophysics I am often asked “Why on Earth did you decide to make a career out of such a crazy subject?”
I guess many astronomers, physicists and other scientists have to answer this sort of question. For many of them there is probably a romantic reason, such as seeing the rings of Saturn or the majesty of the Milky Way on a dark night. Others will probably have been inspired by TV documentary series such as The Sky at Night, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos or even Horizon which, believe it or not, actually used to be quite good but which is nowadays uniformly dire. Or it could have been something a bit more mundane but no less stimulating such as a very good science teacher at school.
When I’m asked this question I’d love to be able to put my hand on my heart and give an answer of that sort but the truth is really quite a long way from those possibilities. The thing that probably did more than anything else to get me interested in science was a Science Fiction TV series or rather not exactly the series but the opening titles.
The first episode of Doctor Who was broadcast in the year of my birth, so I don’t remember it at all, but I do remember the astonishing effect the credits had on my imagination when I saw later episodes as a small child. Here is the opening title sequence as it appeared in the very first series featuring William Hartnell as the first Doctor.
To a younger audience it probably all seems quite tame, but I think there’s a haunting, unearthly beauty to the shapes conjured up by Bernard Lodge. Having virtually no budget for graphics, he experimented in a darkened studio with an old-fashioned TV camera and a piece of black card with Doctor Who written on it in white. He created the spooky kaleidoscopic patterns you see by simply pointing the camera so it could see into its own monitor, thus producing a sort of electronic hall of mirrors.
What is so fascinating to me is how a relatively simple underlying concept could produce a rich assortment of patterns, particularly how they seem to take on an almost organic aspect as they merge and transform. I’ve continued to be struck by the idea that complexity could be produced by relatively simple natural laws which is one of the essential features of astrophysics and cosmology. As a practical demonstration of the universality of physics this sequence takes some beating.
As well as these strange and wonderful images, the titles also featured a pioneering piece of electronic music. Officially the composer was Ron Grainer, but he wasn’t very interested in the commission and simply scribbled the theme down and left it to the BBC to turn it into something useable. In stepped the wonderful Delia Derbyshire, unsung heroine of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who, with only the crudest electronic equipment available, turned it into a little masterpiece. Ethereal yet propulsive, the original theme from Doctor Who is definitely one of my absolute favourite pieces of music and I’m glad to see that Delia Derbyshire is now receiving the acclaim she deserves from serious music critics.
It’s ironic that until earlier this year I used to live in Cardiff, where the newer episodes of Doctor Who and its spin-off, the anagrammatic Torchwood, are made. One of the great things about the early episodes of Doctor Who was that the technology simply didn’t exist to do very good special effects. The scripts were consequently very careful to let the viewers’ imagination do all the work. That’s what made it so good. I’m pleased that the more recent incarnations of this show also don’t go overboard on the visuals. Perhaps that’s a conscious attempt to appeal to people who saw the old ones as well as those too young to have done so. It’s just a pity the modern opening title music is so bad…
Anyway, I still love Doctor Who after all these years. It must sound daft to say that it inspired me to take up astrophysics, but it’s truer than any other explanation I can think of. Of course the career path is slightly different from a Timelord, but only slightly.
At any rate I think The Doctor is overdue for promotion. How about Professor Who?
I agree with some of Jon’s comments and do believe that past Research Assessment Exercises have generally raised the quality of research in UK universities. I do however think that there are some very bad things about the way the REF is being implemented, and that these far outweigh the positives Jon mentions. In the interest of balance, therefore, I thought I’d respond with a list of six (very) bad things about the REF, and particularly how it applies to physics. I’ll keep them brief because I’ve blogged about most of them before:
The rules positively encouraged universities to play games with selectivity. This is absurd. All academic staff on teaching and research contracts should be submitted if a true indication of research quality is to be obtained.
The criteria for what constitutes 3* or 4* publications are vague and subjective, leaving everything in the hands of the panels. Worse, all paperwork will be shredded after the panel’s deliberations leaving no possibility for appeal. This absolutely stinks.
How QR funding will be allocated on the basis of the REF is not made clear in advance of the submission. Nobody knows how heavily the funding will be skewed towards 4* and 3* submissions. Having encouraged departments to play games, therefore, the REF refuses to disclose the rules. It’s not even clear there will be any QR funding.
The panels will be unable to perform a detailed peer review of submissions simply because there will be too many papers. Each panel will be expected to make decisions on many hundreds of papers, leaving time only for a cursory reading of each.
Limiting the physics submission to 4 papers per person is ridiculous. This corresponds to a tiny fraction of the outputs of a typical physics researcher. If someone has written ten 4* publications in the REF period, why should these not be counted?
Impact counts for a sizable fraction (20%) of the funding, but the rules governing what counts as “impact” are absurdly restrictive and clearly encourage short-term commercially-oriented boilerplate stuff at the expense of genuine long-term “blue skies” research.
Well, I got to six in just a few minutes and could easily get to sixty, but that will do for now. Perhaps you’d like to contribute your own bad things through the comments box?
No time for a proper post today as I’ve got a lot to do before this afternoon’s meeting of Senate. It’s such a cold and miserable day I thought it would be an idea to post this which I bookmarked some time ago but have never got round to posting. If you enjoy it half as much as I did then I enjoyed it twice as much as you…
As autumn turns to winter the thoughts of many an undergraduate turn to the task of applying for PhDs. Nowadays this involves a lot of trawling through webpages looking for interesting projects and suitable funding opportunities.
In order to help prospective postgraduates this year, the Astronomy Centre at the University of Sussex has produced a number of videos to give some information about the available projects. To start with, here are four examples, covering topics in theoretical, computational and observational astrophysics:
For information, we’re expecting to offer at least six PhD studentships in Astronomy for September 2014 entry. Also there’s a University-wide postgraduate open day coming up on December 4th..
Just a quick announcement that we’re stepping up the testing phase of the Open Journal for Astrophysics and would really appreciate it if astrophysicists and cosmologists out there would help us out by submitting papers for us to run through our swish new refereeing system.
Just to remind you The Open Journal for Astrophysics is completely free both for submission and for access; there are no Author Processing Charges and no subscription payments. All papers will be fully peer-reviewed using a system which is, as far as I’m concerned, far better than any professional astrophysical journal currently offers. All this is provided free by members of the astrophysics community as a service to the astrophysics community.
I know that many will be nervous about submitting the results of their research to such a new venture, but I hope there will be plenty among you who agree with me that the only way we can rid ourselves of the enormous and unnecessary financial burdens placed on us by the academic publishing industry is by proving that we can do the job better by ourselves without their intervention.
The project has changed a little since I suggest the idea last year, but the submission procedure is basically that which I originally envisaged. All you have to do is submit your paper to the arXiv and let us know its reference when this has been accomplished. Our software will then pick up the arXiv posting automatically and put it into our refereeing pipeline.
In future we will have our own latex template to produce a distinctive style for papers, but this is not needed for the testing phase so feel free to use any latex style you wish for your submission.
For the time being the OJFA website and associated repositories are not publicly available, but that’s just so we can test it thoroughly before it goes fully live, probably early in the new year; at that point all the papers passing peer review during the test phase will be published. I’m really excited about the forthcoming launch which will, I hope, generate quite a lot of publicity about the whole issue of open access publishing.
If anyone has any questions about this please feel free to ask via the comments box. Also please pass this on via twitter, etc. The more, and the more varied, papers we get to handle over the next couple of months the quicker we can get on with the revolution! So what are you waiting for? Let’s have your papers!
Here’s a challenge for cosmologists and aspiring science communicators out there. Most of you will know the standard cosmological model involves a thing, called Dark Energy, whose existence is inferred from observations that suggest that the expansion of the Universe appears to be accelerating.
That these observations require something a bit weird can be quickly seen by looking at the equation that governs the dynamics of the cosmic scale factor for a simple model involving matter in the form of a perfect fluid:
The terms in brackets relate to the density and pressure of the fluid, respectively. If the pressure is negligible (as is the case for “dust”), then the expansion is always decelerating because the density of matter is always positive quantity; we don’t know of anything that has a negative mass.
The only way to make the expansion of such a universe actually accelerate is to fill it with some sort of stuff that has
In the lingo this means that the strong energy condition must be violated; this is what the hypothetical dark energy component is introduced to do. Note that this requires the dark energy to exert negative pressure, ie it has to be, in some sense, in tension.
However, there’s something about this that seems very paradoxical. Pressure generates a force that pushes, tension corresponds to a force that pulls. In the cosmological setting, though, increasing positive pressure causes a greater deceleration while to make the universe accelerate requires tension. Why should a bigger pushing force cause the universe to slow down, while a pull causes it to speed up?
The lazy answer is to point at the equation and say “that’s what the mathematics says”, but that’s no use at all when you want to explain this to Joe Public.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explain in language appropriate to a non-expert, why a pull seems to cause a push…
Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day.
The views presented here are personal and not necessarily those of my employer (or anyone else for that matter).
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for a simple model involving matter in the form of a perfect fluid:
