In the Dark

Bristol and Back

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags Bristol University, Colloquium, Physics on January 17, 2011 by telescoper

I almost did the unthinkable today by not posting anything on my blog. It’s been such a busy day that I wasn’t able to post at lunchtime, chiefly because I didn’t have a lunch break. I don’t want to let the side down, so I decided to put something up, but the following “quick” post will have to do for today.

After an interminable meeting (zzzz...) of the Board of Studies this morning in the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff, where I work, I had to rush back to the office, grab my things and dash off to the station to catch a train to the fine city of Bristol, where I was giving a colloquium in the School of Physics at the University of Bristol. I got there just in time for a quick slurp of tea before heading off to do my bit. I hope the talk was OK, but that’s not really for me to judge.

After the colloquium I got the chance to relax over a pint of beer, chat to staff and students and was then whisked off for a splendid curry. One of the folks that looked after me was Professor Mark Birkinshaw, who taught a course I took when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge; he seemed quite chuffed when I told him I still had the notes! And if Anton is reading this, he asked me to pass on his good wishes to you too! Thence it was back by train in the rain to Cardiff.

I think that’s all I have the energy to write. In fact, this is the first time ever I’ve used the “Quick Post” feature on WordPress, a streamlined interface limited to shorter items without graphics and other complicated extras which I don’t usually use because my typical posts don’t count as “quick” on account of the fact that I usually keep on writing long after I’ve made the points I was going to make and have run out of useful things to say, the excessive verbosity of the resulting articles giving me a bad name in the blogosphere, which, notwithstanding its more problematic aspects, does seem to me at least to have the virtue of encouraging a more concise form of communication than is to be found in other contexts while at the same time … [continued, page 94]

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Dress Rehearsal Rag

Posted in Music with tags Dress Rehearsal Rag, Leonard Cohen on January 16, 2011 by telescoper

It’s been a while since I posted anything by Leonard Cohen, so how about this live performance of his own cheerful little ditty Dress Rehearsal Rag? The Maestro himself delivers a health warning at the start of the recording, so please don’t listen to this if you’re of a depressive disposition…

Here are the lyrics

Four o’clock in the afternoon
and I didn’t feel like very much.
I said to myself, “Where are you golden boy,
where is your famous golden touch?”
I thought you knew where
all of the elephants lie down,
I thought you were the crown prince
of all the wheels in Ivory Town.
Just take a look at your body now,
there’s nothing much to save
and a bitter voice in the mirror cries,
“Hey, Prince, you need a shave.”
Now if you can manage to get
your trembling fingers to behave,
why don’t you try unwrapping
a stainless steel razor blade?
That’s right, it’s come to this,
yes it’s come to this,
and wasn’t it a long way down,
wasn’t it a strange way down?

There’s no hot water
and the cold is running thin.
Well, what do you expect from
the kind of places you’ve been living in?
Don’t drink from that cup,
it’s all caked and cracked along the rim.
That’s not the electric light, my friend,
that is your vision growing dim.
Cover up your face with soap, there,
now you’re Santa Claus.
And you’ve got a gift for anyone
who will give you his applause.
I thought you were a racing man,
ah, but you couldn’t take the pace.
That’s a funeral in the mirror
and it’s stopping at your face.
That’s right, it’s come to this,
yes it’s come to this,
and wasn’t it a long way down,
ah wasn’t it a strange way down?

Once there was a path
and a girl with chestnut hair,
and you passed the summers
picking all of the berries that grew there;
there were times she was a woman,
oh, there were times she was just a child,
and you held her in the shadows
where the raspberries grow wild.
And you climbed the twilight mountains
and you sang about the view,
and everywhere that you wandered
love seemed to go along with you.
That’s a hard one to remember,
yes it makes you clench your fist.
And then the veins stand out like highways,
all along your wrist.
And yes it’s come to this,
it’s come to this,
and wasn’t it a long way down,
wasn’t it a strange way down?

You can still find a job,
go out and talk to a friend.
On the back of every magazine
there are those coupons you can send.
Why don’t you join the Rosicrucians,
they can give you back your hope,
you can find your love with diagrams
on a plain brown envelope.
But you’ve used up all your coupons
except the one that seems
to be written on your wrist
along with several thousand dreams.
Now Santa Claus comes forward,
that’s a razor in his mit;
and he puts on his dark glasses
and he shows you where to hit;
and then the cameras pan,
the stand in stunt man,
dress rehearsal rag,
it’s just the dress rehearsal rag,
you know this dress rehearsal rag,
it’s just a dress rehearsal rag.

Incidentally, the song he refers to in the preamble, Gloomy Sunday, in fact originated in Hungary, not Czechoslovakia; check out the classic version by Billie Holliday, but only if you’re feeling brave…

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Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind

Posted in Literature, Poetry with tags As you like it, Shakespeare on January 16, 2011 by telescoper

Blow, blow, thou winter wind.
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.

Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remember’d not.

Heigh-ho! sing, etc.

From Act II, Scene 7, As You Like It by William Shakespeare.

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Take the A Train

Posted in Jazz with tags Duke Ellington, Take the A Train on January 15, 2011 by telescoper

No particular reason for posting this unusual trio version of the Duke Ellington standard Take the A Train, except that I think it’s wonderful to see the great man playing the kind of extended solo that his big band rarely allowed him space to do.

The Travellers and the Rest

Posted in Biographical with tags Athenaeum, Cardiff, First Great Western, fox, Herschel, Jackson-Gwilt Medal, Matt Griffin, Pontcanna, Royal Astronomical Society, SPIRE, Travellers Club on January 15, 2011 by telescoper

Yesterday’s journey to the Big Smoke wasn’t as bad as it might have been, although it was a bit frustrating at times. The train was diverted through Bath to avoid flooding near Bristol, which added about 20 minutes to the journey time. That was expected, so didn’t cause any major anxiety. After the rather scenic detour we found ourselves back in familiar territory on the Cardiff-London line, Swindon. I never thought I’d see the day when I was pleased to arrive at Swindon! However, my pleasure soon evaporated when we sat on the platform at Swindon without moving, and with no announcements or information or explanation, for another 15 minutes. Obviously 25 minutes late just wasn’t late enough for First Great Western, so they had to hold the train to enhance further their record of unpunctuality. In the end we arrived at Paddington 40 minutes late. Not good.

I still got to the meeting in time for a quick cup of tea before the afternoon’s proceedings. Straight away there was some great news. The President of the RAS, Prof. Roger Davies, announced the recipients of this year’s medals and awards and among them was Cardiff’s own Matt Griffin, who receives the Jackson-Gwilt Medal. According to the RAS website

The Jackson-Gwilt Medal is available for award annually for the invention, improvement or development of astronomical instrumentation or techniques; for achievement in observational astronomy; or for achievement in research in the history of astronomy.

Matt Griffin’s citation reads as follows:

This year’s winner is Professor Matt Griffin of the University of Cardiff, for his work on instrumentation for astronomy in the submillimetre waveband, the region of the electromagnetic spectrum between the far-infrared and microwave wavebands.

Matt Griffin is one of a select group of scientists that helped establish a UK lead in the technical development of instrumentation for submillimetre astronomy. He has been involved in most submillimetre instrument projects over the last three decades, including the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE) camera on Herschel. Matt led a diverse international team to bring this project to fruition, encompassing 18 institutions on three different continents.

SPIRE represents a step change in capability. With the ground-based SCUBA camera, 20 nights of observing led to the detection of 5 galaxies at submillimetre wavelengths. With SPIRE, 6000 galaxies can be detected in 8 hours.

Matt Griffin thus receives the Jackson-Gwilt Medal for in particular his outstandingly successful work on SPIRE, an instrument that is transforming submillimetre astronomy.

Heartiest congratulations to Matt and, of course, to the rest of this year’s awardees!

After the RAS meeting it was time for dinner. Owing to a muddle with bookings The Athenaeum wasn’t available for this month’s RAS Club dinner so we dined instead in the unfamiliar surroundings of The Travellers Club, which is actually next door at 106 Pall Mall.Given the trials and tribulations of travelling with First Great Western, perhaps I should apply for honorary membership?

The room we had was smaller than usual, but cosy, and the staff were very friendly. The dinner wasn’t marvellous but as always there was no shortage of interesting conversation, some of it even relating to astronomy! I got grilled by a few people about what’s going on with STFC new consolidated grants system. I told everyone who asked everything I know about it, which didn’t break any confidentiality because I don’t know anything at all.

The table service was a bit slower than at the Athenaeum so it was quite late by the time we got onto the club business. The January dinner is the “Parish” dinner at which new members and, if necessary, new officers are elected by an amusingly arcane process. A few members had to leave to catch trains before the business was completed but I stayed to the end at about 10.00pm, placing (perhaps unjustified) confidence in the 10.45 train from Paddington actually existing and getting there in time to get it.

I did get to Paddington in good time, and the train hadn’t been cancelled, but it was a bit late leaving. It then apparently developed an unspecified “mechanical fault” which made for slow running. I got into Cardiff about 25 minutes late. No diversions on the way back – presumably the floods had subsided. Perhaps there’s an excuse for the chaos ensuing from the floods, but poor maintenance is surely entirely the fault of the train company. Not a good day for First Great Western, especially when they’ve raised their already exorbitant fares for the new year..

Oh, and one other thing that’s not at all connected with anything else. As I walked back through Sophia Gardens from the station to my house in Pontcanna about quarter to two in the morning, I saw a fox hurtling across the path in front of me then vanishing into the trees. When I lived in Beeston (a suburb of Nottingham) I saw foxes very regularly, often in my own garden. Likewise even when I lived in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London. I was quite surprised when I moved to my house in Cardiff, right next to Pontcanna Fields and Bute Park, that no foxes were to be seen despite the apparently more promising surroundings. I’ve now lived here for two and a half years and this is the first one I’ve ever spotted. I wonder why there are so few foxes in this area?

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Flooding into London

Posted in Biographical with tags Cardiff University, Chipping Sodbury, flooding, Herschel, Rain, Royal Astronomical Society, trains on January 14, 2011 by telescoper

A brave bunch of hardy Cardiff University astronomers are heading into London today for a meeting of the Royal Astronimical Society in London which celebrates the first year of science from the Herschel Space Observatory. This wouldn’t normally constitute too arduous a trip, but it turns out after the last couple of days torrential rain in Wales and the South-West of England, there is flooding on the line at ~~Sodding Chipbury~~ Chipping Sodbury which has sent the railway network into one of its regular episodes of chaos. Half the trains from Cardiff to London are cancelled, and the other half diverted all round the houses so they will take at least an extra half-hour to reach their destination at Paddington.

There isn’t any flooding actually in Cardiff, but the River Taff, which hibernated peacefully through the recent snowy period, has now sprung back into life and seems to be in an angry mood. I took these snaps yesterday as I walked into work, so you can see the water level is high enough to submerge some of the riverside shrubs and trees, but not high enough (yet) to threaten the embankments.

At times like this the Taff is more than a little scary, not so much because of the way it looks but because of the sound of it growling along down to Cardiff Bay, carrying the occasional car tyre and traffic cone with it.

I suppose this is small potatoes compared to the terrible floods in Australia, Brazil and elsewhere in the world, but it is quite exasperating, especially since it happens so regularly yet still catches the train companies completely unawares.

Anyway, I don’t know if the first wave of Cardiff folk managed to get to London in time for the start of the meeting. I had a couple of things to do this morning so decided to go later, even though that meant missing some of the talks that are closer to my own interests. I did think about cancelling my trip entirely, but decided in the end to give it a go. I hope I make it there at least in time for dinner at the RAS Club.

But then there’s the question of what time I’ll get home tonight…

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Mud Wrestling and Microwaves

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags Cosmic Microwave Background, Cosmology, Martin Rees, Planck on January 13, 2011 by telescoper

Reading through an interesting blog post about the new results from Planck by the ever-reliable Jonathan Amos (the BBC’s very own “spaceman”), I was reminded of a comment I heard made by Martin Rees (now Lord Rees) many years ago.

The remark concerned the difference between cosmology and astrophysics. Cosmology, said Lord Rees, especially the part of it that concerns the very early Universe, involves abstract mathematical concepts, difficult yet logical reasoning and the ability to see deep things in complicated spatial patterns. In that respect it’s rather like chess. Astrophysics, on the other hand, which is not at all elegant and has so many messy complications that it is sometimes difficult even to work out what is going on or what the rules are, is more like mud wrestling.

The following image, which I borrowed from Jonathan Amos’ piece, explains why I was reminded of this and why some cosmologists are having to abandon chess for mud wrestling, at least for the time being. The picture shows the nine individual frequency maps (spanning the range from 30 GHz to 857 GHz) obtained by Planck.

What we cosmologists really want to see is a pristine map of the cosmic microwave background, the black-body radiation that pervades the entire Universe. It’s black body form means that it would have the same brightness temperature across all frequencies, and would also be statistically homogeneous (i.e. looking roughly the same all across the sky).

What you actually see is a mess. There are strong contributions from the disk of our own Galaxy, some of it extending quite a way above and below the plane of the Milky Way. You can also see complicated residuals produced by the way Planck scans the sky. On top of that there is radiation from individual sources within our Galaxy, other Galaxies and even clusters of Galaxies (which I mentioned a couple of days ago). These “contaminants” constitute valuable raw material for astronomers of various sorts, but for cosmologists they are an unwanted nuisance. Unfortunately, there is no other way to reach the jewels of the CMB than by hacking through this daunting jungle of foregrounds and instrumental artefacts.

Looking at the picture might induce one of two reactions. One would be to assume that there’s no way that all the crud can be removed with sufficient accuracy and precision to do cosmology with what’s left. Another is to appreciate how well cosmologists have done with previous datasets, especially WMAP, have confidence that they’ll solve the numerous problems associated with the Planck data, but understand why will take another two years of high-powered data analysis by a very large number of very bright people to extract cosmological results from Planck.

There might be gold at the end of the pipeline, but until then it’s going to be mud, glorious mud…

SDSS-III and the Cosmic Web

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags clusters of galaxies, Cosmic Web., Cosmology, galaxies, Sloan Digital Sky Survey SDSS, superclusters on January 12, 2011 by telescoper

It’s typical, isn’t it? You wait weeks for an interesting astronomical result to blog about and then two come along together…

Another international conference I’m not at is the 217th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in the fine city of Seattle, which yesterday saw the release of some wonderful things produced by SDSS-III, the third incarnation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. There’s a nice article about it in the Guardian, followed by the usual bizarre selection of comments from the public.

I particularly liked the following picture of the cosmic web of galaxies, clusters and filaments that pervades the Universe on scales of hundreds of millions of lightyears, although it looks to me like a poor quality imitation of a Jackson Pollock action painting:

The above image contains about 500 million galaxies, which represents an enormous advance in the quest to map the local structure of the Universe in as much detail as possible. It will also improve still further the precision with which cosmologists can analyse the statistical properties of the pattern of galaxy clustering.

The above represents only a part (about one third) of the overall survey; the following graphic shows how much of the sky has been mapped. It also represents only the imaging data, not the spectroscopic information and other information which is needed to analyse the galaxy distribution in full detail.

There’s also a short video zooming out from one galaxy to the whole Shebang.

The universe is a big place.

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First Science from Planck

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags anomalous microwave emission, clusters of galaxies, Cosmic Microwave Background, Cosmology, ESA, galaxies, Planck, spinning dust, Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect, XMM-Newton on January 11, 2011 by telescoper

It’s been quite a long wait for results to emerge from the Planck satellite, which was launched in May 2009, but today the first science results have at last been released. These aren’t to do with the cosmological aspects of the mission – those will have to wait another two years – but things we cosmologists tend to think of as “foregrounds”, although they are of great astrophysical interest in themselves.

For an overview, with lots of pretty pictures, see the European Space Agency’s Planck site and the UK Planck outreach site; you can also watch this morning’s press briefing in full here.

A repository of all 25 science papers can be found here and there’ll no doubt be a deluge of them on the arXiv tomorrow.

A few of my Cardiff colleagues are currently in Paris ~~living it up at the junket~~ working hard at the serious scientific conference at which these results are being discussed. I, on the other hand, not being one of the in-crowd, am back here in Cardiff, only have a short window in between meetings, project vivas and postgraduate lectures to comment on the new data. I’m also sure there’ll be a huge amount of interest in the professional media and in the blogosphere for some time to come. I’ll therefore just mention a couple of things that struck me immediately as I went quickly through the papers while I was eating my sandwich; the following was cobbled together from the associated ESA press release.

The first concerns the so-called ‘anomalous microwave emission’ (aka Foreground X) , which is a diffuse glow most strongly associated with the dense, dusty regions of our Galaxy. Its origin has been a puzzle for decades, but data collected by Planck seem to confirm the theory that it comes from rapidly spinning dust grains. Identifying the source of this emission will help Planck scientists remove foreground contamination which much greater precision, enabling them to construct much cleaner maps of the cosmic microwave background and thus, among other things, perhaps clarify the nature of the various apparent anomalies present in current cosmological data sets.

Here’s a nice composite image of a region of anomalous emission, alongside individual maps derived from low-frequency radio observations as well as two of the Planck channels (left).

Credits: ESA/Planck Collaboration

The colour composite of the Rho Ophiuchus molecular cloud highlights the correlation between the anomalous microwave emission, most likely due to miniature spinning dust grains observed at 30 GHz (shown here in red), and the thermal dust emission, observed at 857 GHz (shown here in green). The complex structure of knots and filaments, visible in this cloud of gas and dust, represents striking evidence for the ongoing processes of star formation. The composite image (right) is based on three individual maps (left) taken at 0.4 GHz from Haslam et al. (1982) and at 30 GHz and 857 GHz by Planck, respectively. The size of the image is about 5 degrees on a side, which is about 10 times the apparent diameter of the full Moon.

The second of the many other exciting results presented today that I wanted to mention is a release of new data on clusters of galaxies – the largest structures in the Universe, each containing hundreds or even thousands of galaxies. Owing to the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich Effect these show up in the Planck data as compact regions of lower temperature in the cosmic microwave background. By surveying the whole sky, Planck stands the best chance of finding the most massive examples of these clusters. They are rare and their number is a sensitive probe of the kind of Universe we live in, how fast it is expanding, and how much matter it contains.

Credits: ESA/Planck Collaboration; XMM-Newton image: ESA

This image shows one of the newly discovered superclusters of galaxies, PLCK G214.6+37.0, detected by Planck and confirmed by XMM-Newton. This is the first supercluster to be discovered through its Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect. The effect is the name for the cluster’s silhouette against the cosmic microwave background radiation. Combined with other observations, the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect allows astronomers to measure properties such as the temperature and density of the cluster’s hot gas where the galaxies are embedded. The right panel shows the X-ray image of the supercluster obtained with XMM-Newton, which reveals that three galaxy clusters comprise this supercluster. The bright orange blob in the left panel shows the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich image of the supercluster, obtained by Planck. The X-ray contours are also superimposed on the Planck image.

UPDATES: For other early perspectives on the early release results, see the blogs of Andrew Jaffe and Stuart Lowe; as usual, Jonathan Amos has done a very quick and well-written news piece for the BBC.

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Extraordinary Rendition

Posted in Music, Opera with tags BBC Radio 3, Florence Foster Jenkins, Mozart, The Genius of Mozart, The Magic Flute on January 10, 2011 by telescoper

BBC Radio 3 is now well into its celebration of the Genius of Mozart, which involves playing every note he wrote over 12 days. I’m a devout admirer of Mozart, but I’m not sure that uninterrupted diet like this is actually a good idea. It is in danger of doing something that I wouldn’t previously have thought possible – making me bored of Mozart.

I’m a firm believer that you should just an artist, composer, musician (or scientist, for that matter) by his or her best work and by that reckoning Mozart is among the greatest of them all. But I have to say among the glorious masterpieces there’s also quite a lot of quite dull stuff. Take the symphonies, for example. Mozart wrote his First Symphony when he was only 8 years old. That fact on its own makes the work worth listening to. However, in my humble opinion, you can fast forward through at least twenty of the following compositions before finding one that’s really worth listening to, and even further before you find the really brilliant ones.

I’m not saying that the lesser works of Mozart shouldn’t be played. In a balanced programme, contrasted with works by other composers, they are interesting to listen to. It’s good to hear the rarely performed works from time to time, if only to understand why they are rarely performed. However, with only Mozart on offer day after day the effect is only to lessen the impact of the great works by surrounding them with hour after hour of lower quality music. I don’t think the BBC has done the Mozart legacy any favours by revealing that he actually wrote too much music, a lot of it not particularly good.

After that, I’m about to duck back down below the parapet but before I do, I thought I’d make my contribution to the ongoing Mozartfest with a piece from my favourite Mozart opera, The Magic Flute, in a version that’s itself very rarely heard. Fortunately. This is what Florence Foster Jenkins – the opera singer to end all opera singers – did with Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen. For some reason Sony admits to owning the copyright of this, so you’ll have to click through to Youtube to hear it in its full glory.

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