A Reith Lecture

Posted in Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on May 13, 2010 by telescoper

I’m a bit late getting around to blogging today, primarily because I spent the evening at a lecture by Martin Rees. Not just any lecture, but one of the annual series of Reith Lectures that he has been chosen to present this year. This event took place in the splendid Reardon Smith Theatre in the National Museum in Cardiff, and was preceded by a wine reception where we mingled amongst the relics of Welsh prehistory. The audience for the lecture  included academics, politicians, journalists and students and there was a lively question-and-answer session afterwards.

The Reith Lectures were inaugurated in 1948 by the BBC to mark the historic contribution made to public service broadcasting by Sir John (later Lord) Reith, the corporation’s first director-general. John Reith maintained that broadcasting should be a public service which enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation. It is in this spirit that the BBC each year invites a leading figure to deliver a series of lectures on radio. The aim is to advance public understanding and debate about significant issues of contemporary interest.

The very first Reith lecturer was the philosopher, Bertrand Russell who spoke on “Authority and the Individual”. Among his successors were Arnold Toynbee (The World and the West, 1952), Robert Oppenheimer (Science and the Common Understanding, 1953) and J.K. Galbraith (The New Industrial State, 1966). More recently, the Reith lectures have been delivered by the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks (The Persistence of Faith, 1990) and Dr Steve Jones (The Language of the Genes, 1991). Since 2002, the Reith Lectures have been presented as was tonight’s,  by Sue Lawley.

I think this is the first time any of these lectures have been delivered in Cardiff. Martin Rees is, in fact, almost a Welshman himself ,  being born in Ludlow in Shropshire only about a mile the wrong side of the border; since being elevated to the peerage a few years ago, he is now known as Baron Rees of Ludlow. He is, of course, an immensely distinguished astrophysicist (he has been Astronomer Royal since 1995) but now has a broader portfolio of responsibility in the higher echelons of British science as President of the Royal Society.

As well as being an eminent scientist, Martin Rees is also a very fine public speaker, possessing an effortless gravitas that  any politician would die for.  He speaks with great clarity, thoughtfully and to the point, but with an economical use of language. He comes across as not only highly intelligent , which he undoubtedly is, but also deeply humane, another rare combination. Martin Rees was therefore an excellent choice to give the Reith Lectures. I had been looking forward to the evening for months after I got a phone call from Auntie Beeb asking me if I’d like to attend.

His lecture this evening wasn’t about astrophysics, and neither are the others in the series which has the pretty vague overall title Scientific Horizons. This lecture, the second of the series of four, was entitled Surviving the Century,and it concerned the role of science in identifying and possibly counteracting the threats facing humanity over the next few decades. He touched on climate change, renewable energy, and the possibility of nuclear or bio-terrorism. Although he spelled out the dangers in pretty stark terms he nevertheless claimed to be an optimist to the extent that he believed science could find solutions to the most pressing problems facing our planet, but I also sensed he was more of a pessimist as to whether the necessary measures could be implemented owing to socio-economic and political constraints. Science is vital to safeguarding the future of the planet, but it isn’t sufficient. People need to change the way they live their lives.

I won’t say any more about the lecture – or the interesting audience discussion that followed it – because you’ll be able to hear it yourselves on BBC Radio 4. The Lectures will be broadcast at 9am on Radio 4 starting on Tuesday 1st June (Lecture 1, called The Scientific Citizen). The lecture I attended tonight will be broadcast at the same time the following week (8th June). Lectures 3 and 4 will follow on 15th and 22nd June. Of course they will also be available as podcasts from the BBC website. If you want to be informed, enriched and challenged then I recommend you check them out.

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Into the Blue

Posted in Education, Finance, Politics, Science Politics with tags , , , on May 12, 2010 by telescoper

So there we are.  Britain has a new government. For the time being. Last night David Cameron became the Prime Minister of a coalition government involving the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties (as I predicted). This is hardly a surprise given the arithmetic; Labour and the LibDems wouldn’t have had enough seats to command a majority anyway. It took five days from the election for the new Prime Minister to take over, much longer than the few hours it normally takes when there is a conclusive result, but nowhere near as long as it takes on the continent where coalition-building involves smaller and more diverse parties. In the UK the three main political parties are all centre-right, at least when it comes to economic policy,  and they share a great deal of common ground, so I never thought there would be much problem with the Conservatives and LibDems coming to a deal, which they have done.

Another prediction I got right was that Gordon Brown would resign as leader of the Labour Party, which he has also done. Who will lead the Labour Party now, and for how long, is anyone’s guess.

My third prediction was that the coalition government would fall within a year and there’ll be another general election. As for that, we’ll have to wait and see. It is, after all, a marriage of convenience. I think it won’t be long before a big row develops and the coalition unravels. There’s a lot of overlap between the two parties, but it’s a long way from the left of the LibDems to the right of the Tories. I give it 6 months to the first vote of confidence, assuming the Queen’s Speech passes.

Now that we have a government once more, the unreal business of electioneering is going to be set aside and all the facts that the media have kept quiet about during the election campaign will start to come out. For example, a story in the Financial Times of 11th May (yesterday), which has clearly been on the spike for the duration of the election campaign, reveals how huge cuts in university funding are set to fall hardest on science departments. Vice-chancellors have been making contingency plans for 25% cuts in recurrent funding for some time now, and there’s an obvious temptation to cut the more expensive subjects first.

I’ve already confessed my annoyance that the main parties connived to keep the details of the deep cuts they were all planning to implement out of the election campaign. Now we’re going to find out the true extent of what’s in store, and it’s too late to change.

Niels Bohr once said “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”, and I have no idea whether I’m being overly pessimistic here, but here are  some of  the things I think will affect my own life  as an astrophysicist working in a British university.

First, it’s now clear that there’s  no chance of a reversal in the fortunes of STFC. There never was much of a chance of that, to be honest. It’s more likely now that  STFC will now face further cuts on top of what it has endured already.  Fundamental science in the UK is in for a very lean time.

Second, university funding – the part that comes directly from central government – will be cut by at least 25%, probably more.  This could be achieved in a number of ways. The unit of resource (the payment made per student by the government to a university) could be cut. The number of students funded could be cut. Students could be charged higher fees or have less generous loan arrangements. These options are by no means exclusive, of course. They might all happen.

University V-Cs will have to make very difficult decisions  where to make savings:  some may tighten budgets across the board; others may shut entire departments to save the rest.

Another issue with university funding, however, is that it is not entirely the preserve of central government.  The Scottish Assembly runs higher education in Scotland, not the Westminster government. The Scottish Funding Council has generally funded universities more generously than HEFCE has in England. It’s also much less likely to implement higher tuition fees. More generally, with only one Scottish Tory MP in Westminster and a Scottish Nationalist-flavoured Assembly government, there’s no way of knowing what will happen in Scotland or, indeed, how much strain will be generated there by an English Tory government very few Scots voted for.

In Wales its a bit different. Here higher education is run by the Welsh Assembly government, which currently comprises a Labour-Plaid Cymru coalition. With the Westminster government consisting of an alliance between the other two major parties in Wales we have two levels of administration roughly orthogonal to each other. In principle, the WAG could decide to protect the university system in Wales against the level of cuts being imposed in England, but since we already get a lower unit of resource from HEFCW than HEFCE allocates to English universities, I doubt we’ll be any different in future.

So this is where we’re headed:  fewer science departments with fewer staff with increased teaching loads with less time to do research and with less funding to carry it out and vanishing career opportunities for the scientists they’re supposed to be training.

Still, at least the bankers will get their bonuses.

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Astronomy Look-alikes, No. 23

Posted in Astronomy Lookalikes with tags , on May 11, 2010 by telescoper

Since my Head of School is currently on his way to a boondoggle in Mexico I thought it might be safe to point out, as many have done to me, that he bears more than a passing resemblance to Swiss Tony from the Fast Show. Doing astronomy, you see, is very like making love to a beautiful woman…

Walter Gear

Swiss Tony

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Starchild

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on May 10, 2010 by telescoper

It’s been a busy day today,  so I’ve decided to be lazy and plunder the online stack of juicy Herschel images for a pretty picture to show. This one has done the rounds in the popular media recently, which is not surprising given how strange it looks.

Image Credits: ESA / PACS & SPIRE Consortium, Dr. Annie Zavagno, LAM, HOBYS Key Programme Consortia

This image shows a Galactic bubble (technically an HII emission region) called RCW 120 that contains an embryonic star that looks set to turn into one of the brightest stars in the Galaxy. It lies about 4300 light-years away. The star is not visible at these infrared avelengths but its radiation pressure pushes on the surrounding dust and gas. In the approximately 2.5 million years the star has existed, it has raised the density of matter in the bubble wall by so much that the material trapped there can now collapse to form new stars.

The bright knot to the right of the base of the bubble is an unexpectedly large, embryonic star, triggered into formation by the power of the central star. Herschel’s observations have shown that it already contains between 8-10 times the mass of our Sun. The star can only get bigger because it is surrounded by a cloud containing an additional 2000 solar masses.

Not all of that will fall onto the star, because even the largest stars in the Galaxy do not exceed 150 solar masses. But the question of what stops the matter falling onto the star is an astrophysical puzzle. According to theory, stars should stop forming at about 8 solar masses. At that mass they should become so hot that they shine powerfully at ultraviolet wavelengths exerting so much radiation pressure that it should push the surrounding matter away, much as the central star did to form this bubble in the first place. But this mass limit is must be exceeded sometimes, otherwise there would be no giant stars in the Galaxy. So astronomers would like to know how some stars can seem to defy physics and grow so large. Is this newly discovered stellar embryo destined to grow into a stellar monster? At the moment, nobody knows but further analysis of this Herschel image could give us invaluable clues.

It also reminds me a little bit of the Starchild from 2001: A Space Odyssey…

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Parallels and Tangents

Posted in Politics with tags , on May 9, 2010 by telescoper

An inconclusive general election, mass protests about electoral reform, another stock market crash – Britain’s got the jitters. I think it’s time for a bit of old-fashioned stoicism. In fact, yesterday, when I saw a lot of comments on the unprecedented politicial situation facing Britain, I changed my facebook image to the following poster dating from the Second World War.

I meant it as a bit of a joke but it got me thinking about parallels between the UK’s current situation and that of this month 70 years ago when we faced problems of an altogether different magnitude.

I’m no historian so I’ll just include an excerpt from Simon Schama‘s BBC TV series A History of Britain. The last programme of the series cleverly follows the story of the Second World War through the eyes of two very different Englishmen, George Orwell and Winston Churchill. Here Schama describes how close this nation came, in May 1940, to doing a deal with Hitler. Meeting after meeting behind closed doors in Whitehall took place until eventually Churchill held sway. There was no to be no surrender.

Of course the problems facing the nation in 1940 make those facing us now pale into insignificance, so I’m not going to push the parallel too far. Nevertheless, 70 years on, we once again have lengthy and no doubt heated secret negotiations whose outcome is still by no means certain, but which will probably alter the political landscape of this country for many years to come. This time it’s not so much a matter of danger, but one of opportunity. I think change is in the air, and I also think we need it.

Another parallel is that the war in Europe came to an end almost exactly five years after the installation of Churchill as Prime Minister. Victory in Europe (VE) Day, which marks the anniversary unconditional surrender of the Germans on May 8th 1945, was yesterday. In fact the leaders of all three political parties took time out from their haggling to take part in the commemoration ceremony. Soon after the end of the War, on July 5th 1945, a General Election was held that yielded a Labour landslide and booted Churchill out of office. I don’t think that people were ungrateful, just that their wartime experiences made them aspire to a more progressive vision of the future than the old guard could provide. Clement Attlee‘s government took over a country bankrupted by war, with most of its cities in ruins, and with terrible labour shortages. Not  surprisingly given that it was beset by so many problems, the Attlee government struggled to deliver what it set out to do. Nevertheless, it gave us – amongst other things – a National Health Service and a Welfare State that, to me, are emblematic of the “real” Britain.

I think Schama gets it exactly right in the clip when he talks about the War not just being about Britain as a physical entity but about much more abstract notions, such as freedom and democracy. We weren’t just fighting the Germans, we were fighting Nazism and the threat it posed to the liberties the British people had taken hundreds of years to win. The pricewas very heavy, but it was certainly worth paying. I too, would rather have died fighting than live under Fascism. My only worry would have been whether I had it in me to show the courage and resourcefulness needed to meet the challenge.

This all brings me to the question of what “Britain” actually represents in the modern age.  The BNP present their views as a vision of Britishness, but most British people find their attitudes repugnant.  Not only did they fail to win any seats at the General Election, they also lost all their council representation in Barking, previously thought to be a stronghold. The people of Barking clearly aren’t as mad as they’ve been portrayed.

We probably have very different views on many aspects of our national identity – or even  if there is such a thing at all –  but we can probably agree on, as Schama puts it in the clip, “freedom, democracy, and the rule of law”. Outside that core, people clearly differ. For myself, I would add a sense of social justice and compassion, which is why the Welfare State and NHS  are so important to me.

To me, inclusiveness (whether cultural, religious, racial, or whatever) is also essential to what it means to be British, but that view clearly isn’t shared by everyone. Immigration is a hot potato in British politics these days, a fact  that surprises given our existence as a mongrel nation that has been enriched over the centuries by people coming here from elsewhere. I suppose its natural that people are suspicious of strangers, and this can be exploited by unscrupulous people looking for scapegoats, but we should remember, for example,  that sixty years ago we were desperate to persuade people from the West Indies to move here in order to deal with  the post-war  labour shortage. Nowadays we too need immigration to deal with shortages of skilled labour and to counteract the economic effects of our rapidly ageing population.  I can’t imagine what state our universities would be in if it weren’t for the many excellent researchers who have come here from all round the world, and that also goes for the UK as a whole.I’m not trying to say that immigration is a non-issue, just that it’s neither new nor something we need to panic about. We can cope with it.

After all, we’re British.

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Experiments and Observations

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on May 8, 2010 by telescoper

It’s nice to be able to pass on some upbeat news for once.

The first thing is that, after a lot of delays and a bit of haggling, the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University has finally issued advertisements for a bunch of new Faculty positions in Experimental Physics. The positions, which are tenured,  involve both Chair and Lecturer/Reader levels and there are several positions available. The School and University  have  put together a handsome start-up package for a new group and there’s plenty of spanking new experimental laboratory space to set up shop. Coupled with the fact that Cardiff is a great city to live in, with low costs and great sporting and cultural infrastructure, this should prove a tempting opportunity for someone to set up their own group.

It’s also a welcome vote of confidence from Cardiff University which, despite cuts in its overall budget, has decided to invest heavily in the School’s strategic plan. I hope and believe we’ll attract a strong field for these appointments and look forward to seeing what develops. We need a shot in the arm and this might just deliver it.

What’s particularly interesting about this clutch of new appointments is that they are open to people working in any area of physics, with the exception of astrophysics. Given the massive cuts in STFC’s budget, this is no time to be expanding in areas covered by its remit. I say that as an astrophysicist, with considerable regret but pragmatism in the face of the changing landscape of British science funding. In times of risk you have to broaden your portfolio. However, that’s not to say that astrophysics at Cardiff is downbeat. Far from it, in fact.

ESA held an international press conference to present exciting new results from the Herschel Observatory at the European Space Research and Technology Centre, Noordwijk, The Netherlands, on Thursday 6 May. A webcast of the press conference with Cardiff’s Professors Matt Griffin and Steve Eales taking part, can be seen at from http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Herschel. At the conference Steve Eales talked about the latest results from the Herschel ATLAS survey: an ATLAS of the Universe. ATLAS will cover one eightieth of the sky, four times larger than all the other Herschel surveys combined and is led by Professor Eales and Dr Loretta Dunne at Nottingham University.

Herschel ATLAS has measured the infrared light from thousands of galaxies, spread across billions of light-years. Each galaxy appears as just a pinprick but its brightness allows astronomers to determine how quickly it is forming stars. Roughly speaking, the brighter the galaxy the more stars it is forming. The Herschel images show that in the past there were many more galaxies forming stars much faster than our own Galaxy. But what triggered this frantic activity is not completely understood. Steve Eales said

every time astronomers have observed the universe in a new waveband, they have discovered something new. So as well as our regular science programmes, I am hoping for the unexpected.

I am hoping to get involved with the ATLAS data myself at some point as I am formally a member of the consortium, but I’ve been too busy doing other things to get involved in these initial stages so am not on any of the preliminary science papers. I hope I can get properly involved in this project sooner rather than later…

The ATLAS survey, image courtesy of ESA and the ATLAS consortium

The full press release also includes surprises on how stars are formed including work carried out by Cardiff’s Professor Derek Ward-Thompson. Herschel’s star formation surveys are beginning to reveal the mysteries behind how massive stars are created.

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The Day After

Posted in Finance, Politics with tags on May 7, 2010 by telescoper

I wasn’t planning to stay up last night watching the General Election results come in, but in the end I stuck with it until about 3am, basically hoping to understand what was going on.  Even by that hour there didn’t seem to be a particularly clear pattern emerging, so off I went. I had a revision lecture this morning as well as a lot of other things so I didn’t fancy an all night sitting.

Whenever there’s a General Election I always pay attention to constituencies I used to live in to see how things are changing. Broxtowe (the constituency that contains Beeston, where I used to live when I worked at Nottingham University) changed hands from Labour to the Conservatives. It had been a Conservative marginal in 1997 when it was won during the New Labour landslide. It seemed fairly typical for seats like that to revert to what they were pre-Blair. Brighton – remarkably – returned Britains first ever Green Party MP. Bethnal Green returned to the Labour fold after a flirtation with George Galloway’s Respect party.

Meanwhile here in Cardiff the results were as mixed as elsewhere. My own constituency, Cardiff West, stayed Labour, as did Cardiff South (and Penarth). The Vale of Glamorgan reverted to its pre-1997 Tory hue, unsurprisingly. The Labour candidate in Cardiff North was the wife of former Welsh Assembly leader Rhodri Morgan and it was a definite surprise to see that seat turn blue too. Cardiff Central remained Liberal Democrat.

As it has turned out the exit polls got it just about right, with the Conservative Party leading the popular vote (36%) and number of  seats (306), but not enough to make an overall majority. Labour (28%, 258 seats) and Liberal Democrats (23%, 57 seats) between them have a majority of the votes cast but don’t have enough seats to form a coalition. It’s a well and truly hung Parliament and we look set for days of discussions to see what kind of agreement can be reached between which parties. Gordon Brown remains Prime Minister until some kind of resolution is reached. We live in interesting times.

Although the election results were extremely interesting by virtue of their puzzlingly inhomogeneous variation across the country,  they really amount to little more than a sideshow compared with the spreading panic on international markets. The markets fell sharply, not because of the hung parliament but as part of a worldwide panic over the knock-on effect of the Greece and Portugal sovereign debt problems. The contagion could be very dangerous if Greece can’t convince traders that it’s not going to default and in an attempt to do so its government has put together a severe austerity package. Cue violent unrest. The Greeks live in even more interesting times than us.

I’m not going to pretend that I have the slightest clue how either of these things will pan out, but I’m not very optimistic about the forthcoming months. I hope I’m wrong. We’ll see.

The other thing that struck me  was the story of people being unable to vote because of long queues at the polling stations near 10pm when they closed. At first I wasn’t at all sympathetic. Polls are open from 7am until 10pm, so there’s no need to turn up with only 5 minutes remaining. However, it then emerged that  some polling stations couldn’t cope with the large turnout and people had been queuing for hours by the time the doors closed. The turnout was 65% nationally, higher than last time but by no means ridiculously high. In fact I think it’s a shame the usual turnout  isn’t very much higher than this. However, turnout seems to have been much higher in certain wards and the staff unprepared for the demand, sometimes with insufficient ballot papers and sometimes with out-of-date copies of the electoral register. I don’t mind saying that I found this level of incompetence deeply shaming. We can’t afford to be so careless with our democratic system. It doesn’t matter if only a few hundred people were affected. It’s the principle that matters.

Over the next few days there’ll be a lot of discussion about electoral reform. Perhaps the fact that our current electoral system seems to be showing signs of neglect might generate some impetus for change, quite apart from the scandals of MPs fiddling their expenses. I’ve always been on the fence over proportional representation. Our system is absurd in some respects, delivering huge majorities in the Commons to parties with only a modest share of the popular vote. On the other hand our country is so divided that it’s not obvious what the short-term consequences of changing to PR would be. It seems likely, for one thing, that fringe parties such as the neo-fascist BNP would actually be represented in Westminster. I find that a repulsive prospect, but putting up with people you can’t abide is one of the consequences of democracy.

I have an open mind on electoral reform and I’d like to hear the arguments for and against different systems of PR aired properly. Presumably the Liberal Democrats will want a referendum on this as part of the price of their support in a coalition, so no doubt there’ll be a lot of chat about this.

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Polling Day

Posted in Biographical, Politics with tags , , on May 6, 2010 by telescoper

At last we’ve reached General Election day and I’ve just been to cast my vote following the guidance I passed on a few days ago. I was going to go this morning but I had a meeting at 9.15am to go to (which went on until 1pm, in fact) and I didn’t get up in time to visit the polling station, even though it’s in a Church Hall only a few hundred yards from my house. When I eventually got there just after 7pm it was still quite busy and I had to queue to get my ballot paper. It was very different during last year’s European elections, where the turnout is always pretty low. I don’t know what the turnout is like this time, but I hope it’s good. I don’t think there’s really any excuse for not voting.

I’ve already explained why I’m not as caught up in the campaigning this time as I have been in previous years, so I doubt if I’ll stay up late to watch the results come in. Polls don’t close until 10pm and until then there’s a blackout of press coverage relating to the vote so there’s nothing to follow until quite late at night, when I’m usually tucked up in bed with my cocoa.  The latest opinion polls suggest that the Conservative Party will get the biggest share of the vote, but it’s not clear if they’ll win a majority of the seats. Nor should they, in fact, even if they get as high a share as the polls suggest (37%) then that’s still far less than the number that didn’t vote for them. Labour and LibDems are together worth about 55%. The likelihood therefore is a hung parliament, at which point we’ll probably find all parties agreeing with each other to the implement massive spending cuts they’ve been carefully keeping from the electorate. It will still be interesting to see how the horse-trading works out over the next few days, but after three weeks of phoney war we’ll soon have to face up to reality. I’m not really looking forward to that.

Anyway, a comment by Keith Ashman on an item I posted a few days ago reminded me that no less than 13 years ago I was actually in Lawrence, Kansas, on polling day. Don’t ask me why. I’d arranged a postal vote, but had to watch the proceedings from afar on the TV. In fact, Keith and his partner decided to hold a party that night in their house and I went along to drink beer while the results came in. Watching a British election from the midwest USA is a bit strange, but it’s improved by the fact that the polls close in the UK at what is early evening Kansas-time and it’s all pretty much over by midnight.

That election I was swept up in the euphoria generated by the prospect of a New Labour government with its slogan “Things can only get better”. When they won a landslide majority we celebrated in grand style, singing Jerusalem in Keith’s back garden and then tottered not too soberly to a tattoo parlour to have a red rose put on my arm.

We had a great time that night, and the good vibes continued after I returned to London from my short stay at the University of Kansas. It didn’t take long, however, for my enthusiasm to wane. Instead of doing the really radical things their large majority would have allowed, they basically pratted about for four years. I’m not saying they didn’t do any good things, but they were so keen to tie everyone up in red tape that the good ideas often came to nothing except frustration. Then of course Blair took us into Iraq and I vowed never again to vote for the Labour Party until it renounced that decision, which I haven’t.

But I’ve still got the red rose tattoo.

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First Science from Herschel

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on May 4, 2010 by telescoper

A comment posted today on a previous item reminded me that this is supposed to be a science blog, so I thought it would be a good idea to put up a brief message about the status of Herschel.

Today is the first day of the Herschel First Results Symposium which is being held on the premises of ESTEC at Noordwijk in The Netherlands; you can see the poster below. There’s quite a strong Cardiff contingent there, and the meeting will go on until Friday, so it’s a going to be a bit quiet around here for the rest of the week.

The results being presented at this Symposium are covered by a strict ESA policy and most of them are embargoed, at least  for the time being. However, you can keep up with the meeting to some extent on Twitter, as I’ve been doing from time to time. Just follow #eslab2010. There are also edited highlights on the Herschel Mission Blog. It’s a bit frustrating only getting the odd snippet, but it does at least give you an idea of what’s going on and a heads-up for things that will be released officially soon.

In fact pretty soon a load of Herschel images and other results will be made public and I’ll be spoilt for choice as to what to post on here. In fact, I think all the presentations at the Symposium will be put online after it’s finished. There’s also going to be a deluge of science papers on the arXiv, the result of a lot of hard work (not to say a total panic) by those directly involved in analysing the first data to come through from the telescope. I’m looking forward to that, although there’s no way I’ll have time to read them all!

It’s hard to believe that it’s just a little under a year since we gathered in a state of nervous tension (moderated by a steady intake of alcohol) to watch the launch of Planck and Herschel. I don’t think I’m giving away any secrets when I write that the mission has been an outstanding success so far, even exceeding its specified performance in some respects.

I’ll be posting some Herschel goodies from time to time once the embargo is lifted, but until that happens you’ll just have to wait. I could tell you more but if I did I’d have to kill you.

PS. To return to my first sentence, I’m not even sure I should call this a science blog. I think of it as a personal blog, written by a person who happens to be a scientist…

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Over the Rainbows

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , , on May 3, 2010 by telescoper

I had the misfortune a few weeks ago to see a bit of a terrible BBC TV show called Over the Rainbow, the main aim of which seems to be to use TV License payers’ money to provide free advertising for a forthcoming West End production of the Wizard of Oz. Anyway, when I was thinking yesterday about cover versions of tunes that turned out better than the original, the tune Over the Rainbow sprang to mind. Since I’ve been on holiday today – studiously avoiding doing very much at all – I thought I’d put up some interesting jazz versions of that particular song.

There are hardly any tunes ever written that some jazz musician somewhere hasn’t taken a fancy to and done their own original version, however unpromising the raw material. Louis Armstrong had a particularly amazing ability to turn base metal into solid gold, making glorious music out of tunes nobody else wanted to touch. I’ve picked three quite different versions of Over the Rainbow, all of which I think are brilliant despite the mawkish sentimentality of the original song.

The first is from a concert by Keith Jarrett in Tokyo in 1984. As well as being a brilliant jazz musician, Jarrett is an accomplished classical performer who, for example, made an exceptionally fine recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations a few years ago. Quite a few people seem to get put off by watching his antics at the keyboard. I can see why. I think he sometimes looks like the piano is playing him, rather than the other way around. But if his contortions bother you, just listen to the music, which is just gorgeous… 

When I was still at school back in 1980 or 81 I had the good fortune to get to see the great alto saxophonist Art Pepper playing live with a band led by pianist Milcho Leviev. He played so beautifully on that concert that I became an immediate fan and tried to get hold of as many of his records as I could. I was devastated to hear just a couple of years later that he had died. Like many jazz musicians of his generation, Art Pepper had a serious drugs problem and he spent long periods in jail as a consequence. He joked that San Quentin Prison had better musicians than any establishment on Earth.

His tender, lyrical sound and graceful improvisations are  beautifully represented on this track recorded with George Cables (piano) and – I think – Charlie Haden (bass) and Billy Higgins on drums.

The last one up is by the great Bud Powell. He was another musician who struggled with narcotics, but he also had serious mental illness to deal with – he suffered numerous breakdowns and was heavily medicated in an attempt treat his schizophrenia. Although he moved to Paris in 1959 to make a fresh start, his self-destructive tendencies caught up with him. The quality of his playing deteriorated, his behaviour became erratic and he eventually died in 1966. Before leaving the States, however, Powell had made a number of recordings in which he demostrated the virtuousity and musical imagination that established him as one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time, and certainly the leading stylist of the bebop era.

Bud Powell’s version of Over the Rainbow is one of my all-time favourite pieces of music. He puts so much variation into the way he plays it, alternating a lush romantic style with jagged boppy lines and dark undertones introducing a strong element of parody juxtaposed with a more orthodox treatment of the melody. As much as I love the other two versions, this is my a favourite. By any standards, it is a masterpiece.

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