Here’s a lovely and rare video of a performance by Dexter Gordon, playing What’s New in 1963 (after a characteristically jaunty introduction by him) which I just had to post. Actually, he reminds me a lot of Barack Obama in this clip…
It also gives me the excuse to post one of my all-time favourite Jazz photographs, which happens also to show Dexter Gordon but was taken in 1948 by the great Herman Leonard. Jazz clubs just haven’t been the same since the smoking ban…
A news item today about BOSS (yet another observational cosmology survey) gives me an excuse to recycle an idea from an old post.
The phrase expletive deleted was made popular at the time of Watergate after the release of the expurgated tapes made by Richard Nixon in the Oval Office when he was President of the United States of America. These showed that, as well as been a complete crook, he was practically unable to speak a single sentence without including a swear word.
Nowadays the word expletive is generally taken to mean an oath or exclamation, particularly if it is obscene, but that’s not quite what it really means. Derived from the latin verb explere (“to fill out”) from which the past participle is expletus, the meaning of the word in the context of English grammar is “something added to a phrase or sentence that isn’t strictly needed for the grammatical sense”. An expletive is added either to fill a syntactical role or, in a poem, simply to make a line fit some metrical rule.
Examples of the former can be found in constructions like “It takes two to Tango” or “There is a lot of crime in Nottingham”; neither “it” nor “there” should really be needed but English just seems to like to have something before the verb.
The second kind of use is illustrated wonderfully by Alexander Pope in his Essay on Criticism, which is a kind of guide to what to avoid in writing poetry. It’s a tour de force for its perceptiveness and humour. The following excerpt is pricelessly apt
These equal syllables alone require,
Tho’ oft the open vowels tire;
While expletives their feeble aid do join;
And ten low words oft creep in one dull line
Here the expletive is “do”, and it is cleverly incorporated in the line talking about expletives, adding the syllable needed to fit with a strict pentameter. Apparently, poets often used this construction before Pope attacked it but it quickly fell from favour afterwards.
His other prosodic targets are the “open vowels” which means initial vowels that produce an ugly glottal sound, such as in “oft” (especially ugly when following “Tho”). The last line is brilliant too, showing how using only monosyllabic “low” words makes for a line that plods along tediously just like it says.
It’s amazing how much Pope managed to fit into this poem, given the restrictions imposed by the closed couplet structure he adopted. Each idea is compressed into a unit of twenty syllables, two lines of ten syllables with a rhyme at the end of each. This is such an impressive exercise in word-play that it reminds me a lot of the skill showed by the best cryptic crossword setters. Needless to say I’m no more successful at writing poetry than I am at setting crossword clues.
Anyway, what’s all this got to do with cosmology?
Well, I was reminded of it when I attended the 2012 Gerald Whitrow Lecture by Andrew Liddle last Friday at the Royal Astronomical Society, during which he talked, amongst other things, about Dark Energy.
The Dark Energy is an ingredient added to the standard model of cosmology to reconcile observations of a flat Universe with a matter density that seems too low to account for it.
Other than that it makes the cosmological metric work out satisfactorily (geddit?), we don’t understand what Dark Energy really is or why there is as much of it. Indeed, many of us would rather it wasn’t there at all, because we think the resulting model is inelegant or even ugly, and are trying to think of other cosmological models that do not require its introduction.
In other words, Dark Energy is an expletive (though not one that’s been deleted).
Incidentally, one of the things Andrew said in his talk – and I agree with him 100% – is that in some sense we already know enough about dark energy from observations that we know we don’t understand it at all from a theoretical point of view. Bigger and better surveys, such as Euclid, producing more and more data will characterize its properties with greater statistical accuracy, but they won’t on their own solve the Dark Energy puzzle. For that we need better theoretical understanding.
My own view is that the problem of the vacuum energy is of the same character as the ultraviolet catastrophe that ushered in the era of quantum physics: a big problem that needs a big solution. What I mean by that is that it’s not something that can be resolved by tinkering with the existing theoretical framework. Something much more radical is needed.
Follow @telescoperOnce again I find myself too busy to do a substantial post this lunchtime. However, I’ve been rescued by Prof. Philip Moriarty who tipped me off about the following video from the series “Sixty Symbols” which features this blog in a supporting a role as a source of old examination papers. The theme is the dire state of mathematics education in British schools, something I’ve moaned about on many occasions myself, so I thought I’d post it here. You’ll get a flash of my organ about 6 minutes and 15 seconds into the clip, so if you don’t want to see it please watch with your eyes closed.
Follow @telescoperMove him into the sun–
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it awoke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds–
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved,–still warm,–too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
–O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Follow @telescoper
It’s Remembrance Sunday which happens this year to fall exactly on Remembrance Day, so I scheduled this in advance to be posted on the eleventh hour as seems appropriate. I’ll be observing two minutes’ silence as this goes online, on my own as I prefer to do it on such occasions. I’ve written long posts about my feelings about Remembrance Day (see the tag Poppy for examples), so I won’t repeat myself here.
I will however take the liberty of posting this video about shell shock and other reactive disorders, as a reminder that the Poppy Appeal is not just about remembering the fallen, but also about helping the survivors who have been maimed or traumatised by war. It’s not an easy clip to watch, but then it’s not supposed to be. Click through to the other segments if you can stand it.
I’ll also add that many victims of shell shock were shot as cowards, including three seventeen year-old British soldiers who had lied about their age in order to enlist. Nowadays this is recognised as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder and although it can be treated, there is no complete cure.
Some people say that Remembrance Day glorifies war. I don’t see it that way at all. It’s there as a reminder of the horrors of past wars to urge us avoid armed conflict in the future. It’s a pity our politicians seem not to understand this.
Lest we forget.
Follow @telescoperJust time for a quickie today. I seem to be writing that virtualy every day at this time, in fact. Anyway, yesterday I gave the last of a series of lectures on Fluid Dynamics during which I talked a little bit about the Navier-Stokes equation, and introduced the concept of turbulence, topic that Richard Feynman described as “the most important unsolved problem in classical physics”. Given that the origin of turbulence is so poorly understood, I had to cover it all fairly qualitatively but did at least explain that its onset is associated with high values of the Reynold’s Number, an interesting dimensionless number that characterizes the properties of viscous fluid flow in such a way as to bring out the dynamical similarity inherent in the equations. The difficulty is that there is no exact theory that allows one to calculate the critical value of the Reynold’s number and in any particular situation; that has to be determined by experiments, such as this one which shows turbulent vortices (or “eddies”) forming downstream of a cylindrical obstacle placed in flowing fluid. The (laminar) flow upstream, and in regions far from the cylinder, has no vorticity.
What happens is obviously extremely complicated because it involves a huge range of physical scales – the vorticity is generated by very small-scale interactions between the fluid elements and the boundary of the object past which they flow. It’s a very frustrating thing for a physicist, actually, because one’s gut feeling is that it should be possible to figure it out. After all, it’s “just” classical physics. It’s also of great practical importance in a huge range of fields. Nevertheless, despite all the progress in “exotic” field such as particle physics and cosmology, it remains an open question in many respects.
That’s why it’s important to teach undergraduates about it. Physics isn’t just about solved problems. It’s a living subject, and it’s important for students to know those fields where we don’t really know that much about what is going on…
PS. The title is a quotation from the libretto of Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, uttered by the eponymous Count as he is dragged down to hell. It translates as “Whence come these vortices?” Pretentious, moi?
Follow @telescoperRight. Now I’m annoyed. Annoyed enough to dash off a quick post before getting the train to London to see this year’s RAS Gerald Whitrow Lecture.
RCUK, the umbrella organisation for the United Kingdom’s seven research councils, has announced that it will set aside £17 million next year, and £20 million the year after that, to pay for Gold Open Access publication of the research it sponsors. These funds will be made available to universities in the form of block grants to enable researchers to pay the infamous APCs (“Article Processing Charges”). The average cost of an APC has been taken from the Finch report (estimated as £1727 plus VAT).
It’s astonishing that RCUK have fallen for this trap. What were they thinking of? The Finch report was clearly hijacked by the vested interests of the academic publishing industry who see the Gold Open Access model as an easy way of maintaining their profit margins at taxpayer’s expense. The new RCUK scheme will simply divert funds away from research into a subsidy for wealthy publishing houses (and, in some cases, the learned societies that run them). The actual cost of processing an article is nothing like £1727 and is any case borne by the people doing the work, i.e. academics who perform the refereeing usually for free. An APC at this level is simply a scam. That the RCUK has fallen for it is a disgrace.
What RCUK should have done was given universities and other research institutions funds to set up and maintain their own Green Open Access databases or international repositories like the arXiv. Throwing money at Gold Open Access is disastrous way of proceeding. It’s not only ruinously expensive but also unsustainable. In a few years’ time it is inevitable that the traditional academic publishing industry will be bypassed by researchers doing it for themselves. All the money spent propping up the fat cats in the meantime will have been wasted.
However, despite its obvious stupidity, the RCUK did give me one idea. I’ve blogged before about how much learned societies such as the Institute of Physics “earn” from their own publishing houses. In effect, these outfits are living on income provided to them by hard-pressed university library budgets. In such cases it can be argued that the profits at least remain within the discipline – the IOP does many good things with the money generated by its publishing arm – but is this actually an honest way of supporting the activities of learned societies?
Anyway, it seems clear to me that the financial model under which most learned societies, including the IOP, operate will not operate for much longer, as more and more researchers go for Green Open Access and more and more institutions cancel subscriptions to their ruinously expensive journals. How then can they survive in the long term?
Instead of splashing money around for Gold Open Access, RCUK should mandate that all its research be published in Green Open Access mode. That would pull the rug out from under the learned societies, but why not replace the funding they are syphoning off from journal subscriptions with direct block grants. Such grants would have to be audited to ensure that learned societies spend the money on appropriate things, and would probably amount to much less than such organizations currently receive. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think there’s a strong case for the IOP to be downsized, actually.
So there’s my suggestion. No RCUK subsidy for the academic publishing industry, but direct subsidies for the learned societies and Green Open Access to be compulsory for all RCUK funded institutions.
How’s that for a plan?
Follow @telescoperNo time for a proper post today, but time to pass on news of the launch of a new independent campaigning body called The Council for the Defence of British Universities.
Here is the CDBU manifesto:
The Council for the Defence of British Universities is independent of any political party, for although we oppose many of the present government’s proposals, the assumptions to which we object were equally evident under its predecessor.
Our core principle is that the Council for the Defence of British Universities exists to advance university education for the public benefit. This is underpinned by nine supporting aims:
• To defend and enhance the character of British universities as places where students can develop their capacities to the full, where research and scholarship are pursued at the highest level, and where intellectual activity can be freely conducted without regard to its immediate economic benefit
• To urge that university education, both undergraduate and postgraduate, be accessible to all students who can benefit from it
• To maintain the principle that teaching and research are indispensable activities for a university, and that one is not pursued at the expense of the other
• To ensure that universities, while responding to the needs of students and society in general, should retain ultimate control of the content of the courses taught and the methods of instruction employed. As well as often providing vocational training, university education should equip graduates with the mental skills and intellectual flexibility necessary to meet the demands of a rapidly changing economy. It should develop the powers of the mind, enlarge knowledge and understanding, and enable graduates to lead fuller and more rewarding lives
• To emphasise that, as well as often having vital social and economic applications and being subject to accountability, academic research seeks to enhance our knowledge and understanding of the physical world, of human nature and of all forms of human activity
• To ensure that methods employed to assess the quality of university research do not encourage premature or unnecessary publication or inhibit the production of major works that require a long period of gestation
• To safeguard the freedom of academics to teach and to pursue research and enquiry in the directions appropriate to the needs of their subject
• To maintain the principle of institutional autonomy, to encourage academic self-government and to ensure that the function of managerial and administrative staff is to facilitate teaching and research
• To ensure that British universities continue to transmit and reinterpret the world’s cultural and intellectual inheritance, to encourage global exchange and to engage in the independent thought and criticism necessary for the flourishing of any democratic society.
For more information about the CDBU, including details on joining, you can visit their website.
Follow @telescoperI think this is a wonderfully sharp satirical take on pollsters, physicists and statistics…
Mainstream media outlets around the world have declared Barack Obama the victor in yesterday’s US presidential elections, but particle physicists at CERN say that the race is still too close to call.
With every state except Florida reporting, the New York Timesannounced that Obama had won the popular vote and easily gained the electoral college points needed to win re-election. The Princeton Election Consortium put the probability of Obama’s victory at 99.2%.
But that confidence level is still several standard deviations away from the point at which particle physicists would be willing to declare the next president. According to the norms of the field, pollsters would have to be 99.99995% confident that Obama had won before physicists would be willing to call the race.
“All we can say right now is there is some evidence that Barack Obama will return to the White House in January,” says Marcus Georgio…
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