Higgs-mania Day

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on December 13, 2011 by telescoper

I woke up this morning to the BBC Radio News at 7am announcing that scientists at CERN were going to report “hints” of the discovery of the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider;  you can find a longer discussion by the BBC here. This was later accompanied by articles tackling the important questions of the day such as whether the discovery of the Higgs would justify the enormous expense of Brian Cox the LHC.

Prize for the most  inaccurate science report goes to  the Daily Fail:

‘God’ particle found:

Atom smasher reveals Higgs boson, the key to the universe

Evidence soon emerged however that this particular squib might be of the damp variety. Consistent with previous blogospheric pronouncements, a paper on the arXiv this morning suggested no convincing detection of the Higgs had actually been made by the ATLAS experiment.

I then had to make an important choice between watching the live webcast of the CERN seminar at which detailed information on the Higgs searches was to be presented or to accept a free lunch with the examiners of a PhD candidate. I chose the latter.

Catching up on events after lunch confirmed the underwhelming nature of the Higgs “detection”, but with some intriguing evidence an excess signal at around 126 GeV at the 2.3 sigma level, in the frequentist parlance favoured by particle physicists and others who don’t know how to do statistics properly. In the words of the late John Bahcall:  “half of all three-sigma detections are false“. Of course if they used proper Bayesian language, scientists wouldn’t make so many nonsensical statements. Personally, I just don’t do sigmas.

My attention then switched to the CMS experiment. As a point of information you should be aware that CMS stands for Compact Muon Solenoid, where “compact” is a word used by particle physicists to mean “fucking enormous”. CMS makes  pictures like this:

Anyway, it seems from the CMS part of the presentation that they find a bit of a peak at a similar mass ~ 125 GeV but spread out over a larger range, this time at a level of – sigh – 2.6 sigma.

All in all, it’s a definite maybe. Putting the results together in the way only a frequentist can the result is a 2.4 sigma detection. In other words,  nothing any serious scientist would call convincing.

It’s interesting how certain these particle physicists are that the Higgs actually exists. It might, of course, and I think these results may be pointing the way to more convincing evidence based on more data. However,  I still think we should bear in mind the words of Alfred North Whitehead:

There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.

If there is a Higgs boson with a mass of 125 GeV then that would of course be an exciting discovery, but if there isn’t one at all wouldn’t that be even more exciting?

Final word from the Director of CERN:

We have not found it yet, we have not excluded it yet, stay tuned for next year.

Thunder and hail descended on Cardiff just as the webcast finished, which is clearly not a coincidence although I couldn’t say how many sigmas were involved.

And a final, final word from the Chief Executive of the Science & Technology Facilities Council, John Womersley:

There is still some way to go before the existence of the Higgs boson can be confirmed or not, but excitement is mounting. UK physicists and engineers have played a significant role in securing today’s results, and will continue to be at the forefront of exploring the new frontiers of knowledge opened by the results coming from the LHC. This is an incredibly exciting time to be involved in physics!

Brian Cox is 43.

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Before an Examination

Posted in Poetry with tags , on December 12, 2011 by telescoper

The little letters dance across the page,
Flaunt and retire, and trick the tired eyes;
Sick of the strain, the glaring light, I rise
Yawning and stretching, full of empty rage
At the dull maunderings of a long dead sage,
Fling up the windows, fling aside his lies;
Choosing to breathe, not stifle and be wise,
And let the air pour in upon my cage.

The breeze blows cool and there are stars and stars
Beyond the dark, soft masses of the elms
That whisper things in windy tones and light.
They seem to wheel for dim, celestial wars;
And I — I hear the clash of silver helms
Ring icy-clear from the far deeps of night.

by Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943)

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Citation-weighted Wordles

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , on December 12, 2011 by telescoper

Someone who clearly has too much time on his hands emailed me this morning with the results of an in-depth investigation into trends in the titles of highly cited astronomy papers from the past 30 years, and how this reflects the changing ‘hot-topics’.

The procedure adopted was to query ADS for the top 100 cited papers in three ten-year intervals: 1980-1990, 1990-2000, and 2000-2010. He then took all the words from the titles of these papers and weighted them according to the sum of the number of citations of all the articles that word appears in… so if the word ‘galaxy’ appears in two papers with citations of 100 and 300, it gets a weighting of 400, and so-on.

After getting these lists, he used the online ‘Wordle‘ tool
to generate word-clouds of these words, using those citation weightings in the word-sizing calculation. Common words, numbers, etc. are excluded. There may be some cases where non-astronomy papers have crept in, but as much as possible is done to keep these to a minimum.

There’s probably some bias, since older papers have longer to accumulate citations, but the changing hot-topics on ~10 year time-scales take care of this I think.

Anyway, here are the rather interesting results. First is 1980-1990

Followed by 1990-2000

and, lastly, we have 2000-2010

It’s especially interesting to see the extent to which cosmology has elbowed all the other less interesting stuff out of the way…and how the word “observations” has come to the fore in the last decade.

ps. Here’s the last one again with the WMAP papers taken out:

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School for Scandal

Posted in Education with tags , , , , on December 10, 2011 by telescoper

One of the biggest news stories this week derived from an investigation by the Daily Telegraph into the behaviour of officials connected with the Welsh examination board WJEC who, it appears, have been passing on tips about the content of their examination papers to teachers who have paid to attend their seminars. Of course this reflects very badly on Wales – especially coming so soon after the University of Wales scandals – but it is symptomatic of a much wider malaise;  this  episode  undermines not just the examination process  but  the entire education system in the United Kingdom. The sad thing is that that there’s not really anything new in this story.  It’s been obvious for some time that the whole framework  has become corrupted by the profit motive. There have been previous warnings about how the examination boards compete for customers (and cash) by dumbing down examination papers, but nothing seems to have been done.

The problem is particularly acute for A-level examinations, which universities use to select applicants for admission onto courses. In my own subject, Physics, the A-level course being taught in schools are clearly not fit for this purpose – the syllabuses have been filleted of any challenging material and there’s no correlation that I can discern between high grades at A-level and good performance at undergraduate level. In fact,some of our very best students at Cardiff – who are as good as any I’ve come across anywhere –  came in with very modest A-level grades but have performed brilliantly on the course. Relying only on A-levels might have led to us closing the door on these folks. Actually, I don’t know why we bother making offers based on A-level results at all!

Anyway, it’s clearly time to sort out the examinations system properly. The Exam Boards won’t fix the problem themselves because they are doing very nicely out of the status quo, so what should be done?

I like the suggestion is that the Examination Boards should be scrapped and the business of setting examinations should be carried out by one organization: no competition means no temptation to cheat. I’d also add that, at least for A-levels, the people who set and mark the examinations should be based in universities. I’d envisage a series of national subject panels with representatives from a number of institutions. A single Exam Board with members based in the university sector would also help simplify the process of university admissions, perhaps even streamlining it enough to allow  for post-examination applications without having to have earlier examinations. Above all it would ensure that A-level courses are relevant to university entrance requirements, which they are not at the moment.

Another possibility – which also like but which is probably politically a non-starter – is to scrap our tarnished A-levels altogether and adopt the International Baccalaureate as the UK’s educational gold-standard. The reason this wouldn’t be acceptable to our Lords and Masters in Whitehall is that it would immediately dispel the comforting myth that  standards in British schools are  rising;  I’d bet my bottom dollar that, relative to the rest of the world, they are not and adopting the IB would demonstrate that as it would allow comparisons to be made which can’t be made with A-levels.

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The Business End

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , on December 9, 2011 by telescoper

Over a year ago I blogged about an event I attended, along with some students and staff from the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University, at Cardiff Business Club. Iwas reminded of it earlier today and found that some pictures of the evening have been posted so thought I’d include them here for a laugh.

First, here’s me (on the right) next to Welsh rugby legend Gerald Davies and the speaker for the evening, Dr Lyndon Evans.

Here, all looking very glamorous, are (left to right) Dr Carole Tucker, Sarah Gossan, Flo Liggins and Patricia Murphy:

The chaps are three from the School – Dr Ken Wood, Matthew McCreadie, and Matthew Barcia Gomes – and Gareth Hall.

And – oh dear – this is me giving my little speech:

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Oops!

Posted in Uncategorized on December 8, 2011 by telescoper

Q: What happens when the wind is too windy for a wind turbine?

A:

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Doomsday

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on December 8, 2011 by telescoper

The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans
Atop the broken universal clock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Our painted stages fall apart by scenes
While all the actors halt in mortal shock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.

Streets crack through in havoc-split ravines
As the doomstruck city crumbles block by block:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Fractured glass flies down in smithereens;
Our lucky relics have been put in hock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.

The monkey’s wrench has blasted all machines;
We never thought to hear the holy cock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Too late to ask if end was worth the means,
Too late to calculate the toppling stock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans,
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

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Astronomy Look-alikes, No. 72

Posted in Astronomy Lookalikes with tags , , on December 7, 2011 by telescoper

Have you noticed the remarkable resemblance between esteemed cosmologist Joe Silk and renowned character actor Alastair Sim? If it weren’t for Prof. Silk’s unusual taste in headgear, it would be difficult to tell them apart….

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R.I.P. Christopher Logue (1926-2011)

Posted in Jazz, Poetry with tags , , , on December 6, 2011 by telescoper

During my enforced separation from the internet I heard the sad news of the death of the poet and political activist Christopher Logue. I therefore decided to repost the following poems, which first appeared on this blog on 3rd May 2009. Logue himself performed them with a Jazz group led by the drummer Tony Kinsey and I first heard them so long ago I can’t remember when. Anyway I’m immensely proud that my blog post made it into the references on Logue’s wikipedia page – and, before you ask, no I didn’t put it there myself!

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I think these are beautiful poems made even more effective by the musical setting. In fact they are loose re-workings of some of the famous love poems of Pablo Neruda. Logue moved far away from the Neruda’s originals, but put them into impressionistic free verse, which he reads in his plummy English accent, while the band provides appropriate backing for the sentiments of the poetry as well as providing improvised passages in between the verses.

You can listen to the record Red Bird here.

Now read the lyrics:

1.

Lithe girl, brown girl
Sun that makes apples, stiffens the wheat
Made your body a joy
Tongue like a red bird dancing on ivory
To stretch your arm
Sun grabs at your hair
Like water was falling

Tantalize the sun if you dare
It will leave shadows that match you
Everywhere
Lithe girl, brown girl
Nothing draws me towards you
The heat within you beats me home
Like the sun at high noon

Knowing these things
Perhaps through
Knowing these things
I seek you out
Listening for your voice
For the brush of your arms against wheat
For your step among poppies grown underwater
Lithe girl, brown girl

2.

Steep gloom among pine trees
Waves’ surge breaking
Slow lights that interweave
A single bell

As the day’s end falls into your eyes
The earth starts singing in your body
As the waves sing in a white shell
And the rivers sing within you
And I grow outwards on them
As you direct them
Whither you make them run

I follow for you like a hare
Running reared upright to the hunter’s drum
You turn about me like a belt of clouds
the silence, though it is stupid
Mocks the hours I lay
Troubled by…… nothing

Your arms – translucent stones wherein I lie
Exhausted
And future kisses
Die
Lust
Your mysterious voice
Folds close echoes
That shift throughout the night
Much as the wind
Which moves darkly over the profitable fields
Folds down the wheat
From all its height

3.

In the hot depth of summer
The morning is close, storm-filled
Clouds shift –
White rags waving goodbye
Shaken by the frantic wind as it goes and
As it goes
The wind throbs over us
Love-making silenced

Among the trees like a tongue singing
A warning or just singing the wind throbs
And the quick sparrow’s flight is slapped by the wind
Swift thief destructive as waves
Weightless without form
Struck through and through with flame
Which breaks
Soughing its strength out
At the gates of the enormous, silent, summer wind

4.

That you may hear me
My words narrow occasionally
Like gull-tracks in the sand

Or I let them become
Tuneful beads
Mixed with the sound

Of a drunk hawk’s bell
Flick me your wrists…..
Soft as grape skin – yes

Softer than grapeskin I make them
Which is a kind of treachery against the world

Yet
You who clamber
Over all the desolations of mine
Gentle as ivy
Eat the words’ meaning

Before you came to me
Words were all that you now occupy
And now they’re no more these words
Than ever they knew of my sadness

Yet
Sometimes
Force and dead anguish still drags them
And yes

Malevolent dreams still betimes
Overwhelm them and then

In my bruised voice
You hear other bruised voices
Old agues crying out of old mouths

Do not be angry with me
Lest the wave of that anguish
Drown me again

Even as I sit
Threading a collar of beads for your hands
Softer than grape skin
Hung with a drunk hawk’s bell

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I’ve grown accustomed to your face

Posted in Jazz with tags , on December 6, 2011 by telescoper

Here’s a little treat. I’m sure I’ve mentioned on here before that there can hardly be a tune ever written that some jazz musician hasn’t taken a fancy to and done their own version that’s probably very different to what the composer intended. I came across this performance by the Brad Mehldau trio a while ago and thought I’d put it up here because I think it’s lovely. The song that forms the basis of their improvisation was originally entitled I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face (music by Frederick Loewe and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner) for the musical My Fair Lady, in which it was memorably performed (if not exactly sung) by Rex Harrison.

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