Life in the Cosmos

Are there living things elsewhere in the universe? Barring the arrival of the flying saucers over the capital cities of the world, we'll have to try to answer this tantalising question using the same tactics employed for any of the big scientific questions, a bit like the assembly of a very large jigsaw puzzle of an unusual character. We have lots of little, detailed pieces for some bits of the picture but there are other, big sections we have few or no pieces for and we're going to have to go out to try to find them. Sometimes we'll come back with a handful of pieces that turn out to be wrong, or to belong in a different jigsaw. We're not really sure of the ultimate size or shape of the picture and there may be entire sections we're not yet aware of, whose existence will only become clear because they're needed to fit into the bits we've completed in detail. At the present time the sizes of the pieces also vary enormously: some parts of the picture are represented in detail by lots of teensy pieces, other bits are like the big, chunky pieces of a toddler's jigsaw, drawing crude, unsubtle shapes in primary colours. We'd love to take the jig saw to those bits and render them more finely, in particular to see if there are big new, unsuspected bits that border them. People will spend their entire scientific careers filling in wee bits of the jigsaw and they may even turn out not to be so important - they were smaller bits, making a smaller part of the picture, than we thought at the time.

There might never come a time when the jigsaw is definitively finished.

Astronomers are working very hard at the extraterrestrial life jigsaw right now, on several different fronts, and there are stories in the media all the time. So in the last couple of days we have learnt that there has been liquid water on Mars in "recent" times; and we've heard that one quarter of observed Sun-like stars harbors a close-in terrestrial-mass planet (these links are to the American journal Science - you can read the abstracts but you'll have to be inside an organisation with a subscription to go further).

The presentation of these stories in the mass media often causes problems, however. "Scientists might possibly have found a new Earthlike planet" is not nearly as attention-grabbing a headline as "At last, an Earthlike planet that could harbour life!" The widely reported discovery of such a planet a couple of weeks ago has turned out to be more tentative than most reports suggested, with an inevitable backlash as foolish as the initial hype. The mystery of the disappearing planet in the Guardian deals really well with this, highlighting the perennial clash between the demands of journalism and the long, painstaking process of completing the jigsaw puzzle.

How can you find out what's behind the headlines? Come to our courses! We'll mention the caveats and uncertainties alongside the exciting results. There's time to ask questions and we're aiming to explore the ideas, not propagandise. My starting point here is Astronomy - and we do have a "Life in the Cosmos" course after Xmas - but these comments apply to any of our science courses, and "explore the ideas", in science or otherwise, is what universities are for.

It's too beautiful a day to sit in the house. But before I stop, here's a very different, I think wonderful sort of science communication: "Dance your PhD 2010".

Mandelbrot

Benoit Mandelbrot passed away on 14 October. The Guardian gives quite a good obituary. The Economist's is admirable and even includes some mathematics.

He was a character of hen's teeth rarity, a mathematician known far beyond the confines of academia. Fast computers became a routine tool of mathematical work during his career and he seized on the resulting possibilities for making abstract mathematics visible. His investigations were always rooted in the visible anyway, in questions like "How long is the coastline of Britain?" and the geometrical objects he studied opened up new possibilities for understanding the messy character of the world around us, for a "science of roughness" embracing clouds and coastlines. Mandelbrot set and fractals became almost household phrases and the beautiful images that reveal their properties turned up on tee-shirts, paperback covers, rock gig posters, ... they entered the vocabulary of popular culture (They also entered the lexicon of phrases used to legitimise sciencey sounding gibberish in other academic areas but we can't blame the man himself for that depressing outcome). Mandelbrot did not invent all the mathematical tools he exploited but he promoted their use, now routine in many sciences - in contrast to the suggestion in the Economist obituary that popular interest has drifted away again.

I wonder now why a topic so illuminating and so visually appealing hasn't cropped up more in DACE Science courses. Rex Whitehead once gave an excellent talk in a day school on Antichaos, prompted by a Channel 4 documentary and the Channel 4 Science Club (does anybody remember it?). Fractals certainly turn up in other topics, for the insight they give. Maybe it's time for another day school, maybe "Mandelbrot's legacy" - could be really cross-disciplinary, many sciences and creative arts too.

In 2005, World Year of Physics, we had a day school looking at Einstein's three 1905 papers and what followed from them. I spoke about his theory of Brownian motion, its importance in demonstrating the reality of molecules and its significance as a starting point for statistical physics, one road that leads to Mandelbrot. One feedback form voiced the view that too much time had been spent on this. These forms are of course anonymous but it turned out I know the person who made this comment and he was quite happy to repeat it to my face. He thought my talk was interesting and there was nothing wrong with it - but if we'd left it out there could have been more time spent on the topics he regarded as 'fundamental': cosmology, relativity, quantum mechanics. I think this is wrong! But I guess this is not an unusual view and it might make Mandelbrot's legacy a hard sell.

Any thoughts? I'd love to hear them.

Holding on to Ancient Egypt

Yesterday, after a (non-departmental) meeting, I introduced several colleagues (formerly of DACE) to a collection of ancient Egyptian objects very kindly loaned out to me for teaching by Sally-Anne Coupar at the Hunterian Museum. Everyone seemed to enjoy the experience of being able to hold something old and a little bit precious in their hands.

The pieces are mostly amulets that would have been worn around the neck or held in the hand both during life and then accompanied their owner into their tomb after death. They're not the grandest of ancient Egyptian objects to come down to us, but there's something special about holding onto something that meant a lot to a person who lived 3,000 years ago. Some of the amulets are worn almost smooth by the amount of handling they received from their ancient owners.

Today, I'm putting the objects to work again in my Ancient Egyptian Art class. I've been dropping tantalising hints about the surprise that I've planned for them this week, but I haven't told them exactly what they're in store for. I'm hoping that they'll enjoy it. They'll also have the chance to update the Hunterian records, which are patchy. Their observations about the objects will hopefully enrich the museum's catalogue and make it a little more accurate (one amulet with wonderfully rounded leonine ears is listed as a figure of the god Horus, who was falcon-headed!).

Thanks also to Mike Keen, who spent some time with me identifying the materials of some amuletic bracelets and necklaces among the collection. Only in a (insert inoffensive synonym for 'department') that brings together Egyptologists and geologists could such a confab happen easily!

I'll report back on what my students made of their chance to hold a bit of ancient Egypt in their hands...

Celebrity Lifelong Learning

Today I glanced at the BBC website while eating my excellent soup and sandwich from the St Andrews Building cafe and learned about Lenny Henry's "slow-burn academic career". A very familiar story, really, to DACE people, somebody bright and able who didn't thrive in school but valued education enough to come back to it repeatedly. His particular story gets a public telling because he's a high-profile media figure but there are thousands and thousands of similar tales across the country, some of those people passing through our very own doors.

Each one of these stories has its own particular features, life events, influences from family, friends, places, wider culture. He evidently learned to value learning in the family home and that stayed with him in spite of school experiences; a wee moral for any of us who are parents. And I was glad he liked his science teacher - but sadly not enough to actually study science.

It would be nice to see lots more of these stories written down in one place, not just those of celebrities. You would get such a rich sense of the complexity and variety of adult lives, the myriad ways in which learning stays alive in them, all the stories hidden behind statistics and policies. Does that exist, outside academic journals (where 'biographical studies' are a well-defined genre)? Who could do it....?

In the meantime, well done Lenny Henry and good luck with the PhD.