Things are not what they seem

This morning I dropped my wife off for the parkrun in Pollok Park and spent the next forty minutes exploring the Park's quieter corners - which means most of them at 9.30 AM on a damp Saturday morning. I was reminded of the first time I ever visited Pollok Park. I was in the last year of my Bachelor's degree. Finals were a few months away and everything was beginning to feel a little bit tense. A few of us made plans to visit Pollok House and get away from everything for an hour or two. We took the train to Pollokshaws West station and walked along the road and into the Park. All of a sudden we were away from traffic and city noise. I felt like I was exhaling fully for the first time in months. I realised I'd been tense for weeks or months or maybe since coming to Glasgow; maybe the tension of a country boy living in the rush and noise of the city.

The Park was beautiful and relaxing but what really struck me, what stayed with me, was this sudden realisation of part of my day-to-day life, evidently ever-present but somewhere below conscious awareness.

Walking around the Park, on a pretty dreich morning, prompted by this memory, thoughts turned to how much else of the world might be lurking somewhere beyond conscious awareness; a very natural topic for a physicist, maybe, but there are many, various, baroque versions of this thought.

Here's the "sound shadow" passage in Gravity's Rainbow:

...Suppose They don't want us to know there is a medium there, what used to be called an "aether," which can carry sound to every part of Earth. The Soniferous Aether. For millions of years the sun has been roaring, a giant, furnace, 93millionmile roar, so perfectly steady that generations of men have been born into it and passed out of it again, without ever hearing it. Unless it changed, how would anybody ever know?

Except that at night now and then, in some part of the dark hemisphere, because of eddies in the Soniferous Aether, there will come to pass a very shallow pocket of no-sound. For a few seconds, in a particular place, nearly every night somewhere in the world, sound-energy from Outside is shut off. The roaring of the Sun stops...

Are there good consequences from the resulting moment of revelation? Doesn't seem very likely. Anyway it's Gravity's Rainbow so the focus moves on.

Towards the end of Stanislaw Lem's Futurological Congress the main character sees a world of luxury dissolve to something very grim and grimy. A world on its way out is made bearable for most of its inhabitants only via mass administration of hallucinogenic drugs. How could we know if this were the case? And which is worse, the miserable state of full knowledge, or the happily deluded state?

After a few Philip K Dick books, for instance, we're no longer surprised when the rug of reality is pulled from under the main characters. This is a recurring theme in philosophically inclined science fiction, in movies just as much as books. The Matrix is an obvious example. They Live is a personal favourite, darkly satirical, pulpy to the core (underlined by the casting of an ex-pro wrestler in the title role). The main character comes across a pair of sunglasses that reveal the world as it truly is, a totalitarian state run for the benefit of hideous aliens, bedecked in subliminal messages: "Obey Authority" "Have Children" etc.

Could any of these entertainments be hinting accidentally at a true, hidden state of affairs? It would be fun (of a sort) but doesn't seem too likely. Nonetheless we are led, possibly willingly, possibly kicking and screaming, but inevitably nonetheless, to some very strange understandings or theories via a road that starts not at the feet of some 60s guru, nor in the glare of the psychedelic light show with the reek of pot in our nostrils, but with hard-nosed laboratory experiments. In this fundamental case what we can't know can't be fixed, however; there are no scales that can fall from our eyes.

I thought about related questions not so very long ago, in conversation with a fellow redundancy pool member. She reminded me of the frog in the pot of boiling water. Throw it in and it jumps straight back out. But sit it in a pot of cool water and heat it up gradually and it will just sit there, possibly not even remembering a time without pain.

Mind-boggling things to see with your own eyes....

....possibly with some help from a small telescope.

The M101 supernova is harder than ever to see now. Let's emphasise just how mind-boggling several other, less elusive, maybe less hyped sky sights are.

1. Crab Nebula Quite a small telescope (e.g. 3" refractor) will show the Crab Nebula clearly, although it does suffer in light polluted conditions. Look closely at the ESO image. What is that strange blue glow it's shrouded in, that seems to overlay the coloured filaments? It's synchrotron radiation, the glow of electrons moving at 99.999999..% of the speed of light (i.e.with enormous individual energies) in the presence of a magnetic field. Synchrotron radiation seems to lack any sort of easy description on the WWW. Anyway here's the Wikipedia article, too technical for many but including a nice historical bit. Those electrons are so energetic ultimately because of the Crab nebula's pulsar; a routine kind of object to strophysicists but still, let's face it, extremely exotic. And this is some of the glow you see in a small telescope.
   
2. White dwarf A stellar ember, the mass of the Sun but the size of the Earth, glowing now only because it's still hot from its glory days as the core of a star. A spoonful does indeed weigh a ton. The white dwarf in the triple star system Keid is maybe one of the easiest to spot in a small telescope, as people in some of my DACE classes have seen.
   
3. The Andromeda galaxy Not immediately arresting, often hidden in urban light pollution, this enigmatic, elongated smudge is nonetheless quite obvious to the naked eye if you're somewhere reasonably dark and you look in roughly the right place. Who would have guessed, in the time before telescopes, that it represents the summed-up light of 100,000,000,000 stars? That had taken two and a half million years to reach us? And yet there it is in plain view.
   
4. The Milky Way that ethereal band of light, so familiar to people of earlier cultures, sadly now buried in light pollution for most Earthlings. Its appearance tells us we live in the middle of an enormous, disk-shaped system of stars, gas and dust; our own galaxy. Here's a fabulous panorama.
   
5. The darkness between the stars tells us that our Universe started at a finite time in the past. Really.
   

In small telescopes the Crab Nebula and Andromeda galaxy are just smudges, and any white dwarf just a wee faint star. It's looking at them in the knowledge of their natures that makes them really fascinating.

"German satellite hurtling towards Earth"

ROSAT, a German satellite is indeed "hurtling towards Earth", as the Guardian and many other news outlets have been telling us in recent days. Well, "hurtling" isn't quite accurate, but it'll reach us sometime in the next few days as its orbit gradually decays (in fact, since I typed this it looks as though it's come down).

I was slightly surprised to learn it hadn't come down a long time ago. It was a pioneering X-ray astronomy space mission of the early 1990s. When the first X-ray detectors were thrown briefly up above the atmosphere on rockets, there were no great expectations. This was in 1962 and imaginations stretched only to a faint glow from the Sun's million-degree outer atmosphere, or possibly from the Moon's surface as energetic particles in the solar wind smashed into it. As the world knows, the results were much more exciting: bright, point sources of X-rays beyond the solar system, among the stars of the Milky Way; a cosmic "background", X-rays coming from all directions on the sky; X-radiation from the Crab Nebula. A new window had opened on the high-energy universe of black holes and neutron stars; nobody thought much about X-rays from the Moon for a long time.

ROSAT closed this particular historical circle by detecting, for the first time, X-rays from the Moon. The ROSAT image of the Moon, illuminated only on its sunward side, looks so familiar that you might need to look twice and think about it to realise just how amazing it is. It is lit up only on the sunward side because the Moon's surface is reflecting X-rays from the Sun (strictly, scattering those X-rays, and apparently also fluorescing).

ROSAT was used to make many important advances in X-ray astronomy; a brief list is here. I always had a soft spot for it because it closed the lunar loose end. None of this prevented its fiery doom, however, which no doubt is as it should be. None of us escapes his doom, watery, fiery or otherwise, no matter what sort of songs we've sung in the meantime.

None of the news reports let us forget it was a German space mission, rather than, say an "X-ray telescope", "orbiting X-ray laboratory" or some such border-less phrase. I wonder why? If it had actually fallen on somebody's head, would the German nation have been held to account? Would we have seen invoked the ghost of Wernher van Braun? I'm really not sure what's behind this.

One of the best Universities in the world

I wanted to black out the room for the sake of my powerpoint slides but the blind was broken. "And this is one of the top hundred universities in the world!" I joked. The students laughed. None of them corrected me although the latest Times World University Rankings had in fact just placed us at 102 in the world.

Are these league tables useful? I don't know. I'm sure there are people who consider them to be useful if they seem to support decisions already made. Maybe extremely affluent parents will look closely at them before deciding where in the globe to dispatch their glittering young things.

Every university manager in the country will be staring at their own position, asking themselves, "What can we do to move further up next year?" They'll be looking at the Universities they regard as close competitors. Cal Tech people must be really worried: the best they can do is stand still. Although we moved up 26 places I'm sure our leaders will be cross we didn't break the top 100 (we were a top 100 university two years ago, I think - or was that somebody else's list?).

The Times are very proud of their table. I'm sure they have thought in advance of possible criticisms, probably had to meet them in previous years. They make use of 13 separate prefomrance indctors (sorry, I can't type those words spasm-free) under five headline categories. Because they "recognise that different users have different priorities" the tables can be manipulated and customised (to some degree - haven't tried to play with them myself yet).

We can't do better than quote Einstein: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." Numerical tables based on PI's inevitably focus on phenomena that can be counted. Inevitably these only capture part of the activity they're intended to describe. But they take on weight through the league tables so there will be good consequences for those who push them up and bad stuff is more likely to happen to those who don't - even if they contribute to their universities in ways that don't get caught in the PI's.

The choice of PI's and weightings represents a statement of values. Worst of all is the possibility that these values are formed by accident, rather than constituting the starting point for this exercise.

How should Principals and Vice-Chancellors respond? Well, they have presumably thought long and hard about what a University is, its function in society, and the means by which that function can be carried out. This should be their starting point and the extent to which the league tables support those values should be the starting point of their response. Anything less would devolve to the newspapers the job of leading the universities.

LabLit

I'm having a day off (is it sad that I do this sort of thing on a day off?). Via the familiar procrastinating internet directed random walk I came across this really interesting website: http://www.lablit.com/ "LabLit" aspires to be a literary movement rooted in the real lives of scientists. Its progenitor, Jennifer Rohn has written a couple of novels in exactly this spirit. One of them, for example, is an engaging romantic thriller set against the backdrop of contemporary scientific research. Sounds good. Even as ("just") a romantic thriller in an unusual setting it would be interesting, a way of illuminating the life of the professional scientist. But it goes further, apparently weaving science into the heart of the story, the resolution of the mystery; just as science tends to keep mattering in the lives of scientists after 5.30 in the evening.

LabLit sounds a great idea to me. "Scientists are humans" sounds trite but also goes to the heart of what science is and what it does, in a hundred ways: how it functions, how it impacts on society more widely, how the ideas current in society more widely feed into scientific discovery.... LabLit can only help this principle, and its consequences, to be understood.

Of course I'm thinking of astronomical LabLit examples. I haven't read the book, but Contact is one of the best science-fiction movies I've seen, partly because of its depiction of the life of the working scientist: the large facility locations, the collegiality that grows among small groups of people with shared aims and interests, the search for funding, for justifying your passions more widely, etc. I guess the movie is fairly close to the book in many ways and that it also does this job nicely. (Do I need to mention, however, that nobody I know has yet as part of their work traveled to the centre of the Galaxy or met aliens taking the forms of family members?)

My eye was caught by Total Eclipse when I spotted it in the Biblocafe. I liked its early chapters describing life in an Observatory: again a fairly realistic depiction of the community of researchers, mixed characters jumbled up together in their wee, closed world living a life both intense and dull at the same time. A total eclipse of the Sun is one of the most amazing sights possible in a human life, however, and the dismal account near the end of the book is just not on. There is a subplot involving accusations of data faking whose resolution, unfortunately, makes no sense in terms of actual research practice. This was the author's first novel and she may have fallen on the wrong side of the "building deliberately/boring" divide; my wife, who reads lots of crime fiction, ditched it after a chapter or two. Other people seem to have enjoyed it but as LabLit it's a bit of a mixed success.

Both of these examples predate Jenny Rohn's movement. There must be more I don't know about - maybe you could tell me in the Comments below?

Here's the usual DACE tie-in: in the adult education setting this human side of science comes out very naturally, the stories of personalities, arguments, how and where ideas developed, what it's like to spend time at CERN or big telescopes.... And it would come from the horse's mouth, maybe even better than from fiction. You all know this; we'll see you there.

Now, on a day off after several weekends of work commitments, I really should smell fresh air.

Can I see the M101 supernova?

The supernova in M101 is undeniably exciting, the nearest and brightest since SN1987a. What a COMPLETELY MIND-BOGGLING thing this would be to see with your own eyes! The media have, quite rightly, been encouraging people to go and look for it themselves. But I do think they're overstating how easy it will be to see. It's great that lots of people who don't normally look at the sky will be doing so. How likely is it that they will find and recognise the supernova?

Here's the bottom line: it can be seen in binoculars, but bigger, more powerful ones than most (non-astronomer) people will have handy. The supernova will be one of many wee, faint stars in the field of view; working out which one might need a wee bit of care and effort. It might not be as easy as it sounded on TV, but it's still more than worth the effort. The rest of the post fleshes out this view.

Astronomers use a funny system called magnitude to talk about the brightness of objects in the sky. Faint objects have large values of magnitude, bright objects have smaller values. The bright stars have magnitudes between 0 and 1. The brightest star, Sirius, has a negative magnitude, -1.4. The faintest stars you can see with the naked eye, in a very dark place a long way from street lights, will have magnitudes somewhere between 6 and 7, depending on exactly how dark it is. In my suburban back garden one can't usually see stars fainter than about magnitude 5. Sometimes it's worse than this. In the city centre light pollution will hide most stars, even those with magnitudes of 3 or 4.

The supernova has a magnitude of about 10, which means it is much too faint to be seen with the naked eye. You need some sort of optical aid, binoculars or a telescope. 10 is a lot bigger than 6, so tiny wee binoculars, like you might stick in your pocket to take to a big gig or the theatre, won't be big enough.

Two numbers describe your binoculars: magnification; and diameter of the lenses (in mm). So, 7 by 50 binoculars (for example) have lenses of 50 mm diameter and they magnify everything 7 times (i.e. make things 7 times bigger). If they magnify more than 10 times, or have lenses bigger than 50 mm, they're physically difficult to use without a tripod to steady them.

Here is a very detailed study of how faint you can see with binoculars of various sizes and magnifications. You probably won't want to trawl through it, so let me skip straight to the bottom line. 10 by 50 binoculars are the absolute minimum that might show the supernova. You will need to be somewhere that you can see stars at least as faint as mag. 5.5 with the naked eye - certainly not in a big town, or the poor wee supernova will just be lost in the general sky glow. If your binoculars need cleaned, or weren't high quality to begin with, they won't do the trick. You have a much better chance with e.g. 20 by 80 or 25 by 100 binoculars, big beasts that are too heavy to just hold without a tripod, and sufficiently specialised to be found in very few houses. Here I'm in complete agreement with the Berkeley Lab video about the supernova.

With my own 7 by 50 binoculars and in my suburban back garden, I know I will struggle to see things fainter than about magnitude 9. To see the supernova I will have to use a telescope, or borrow bigger and more powerful binoculars from somebody.

How would I know where to point the binoculars? That's explained quite nicely in this video, from the Lawrence Berkeley Lab in the USA. Actually what's explained is how to find M101, the galaxy in which the supernova has taken place. If your sky is dark enough and your telescope or binoculars big and powerful enough for M101 to be visible, a wee faint star amidst the glow of the galaxy will be unmistakable. If you have a telescope with "GoTo" technology - and you know how to use it - you can just tell the telescope to find M101.

But, as the Sky and Telescope article mentions, the galaxy M101 is quite large, as such objects go. Its surface brightness is low, even although its total magnitude is quite large, and it may be hard to see against the glow of the sky, especially if there is light pollution. In my back garden it is invisible in binoculars, and even with a very high quality 70 mm telescope (much more detail in this excellent book). So the galaxy may not be visible as a marker. Then the question becomes: "which of the several wee faint stars in my binocular field of view is the one I'm interested in?" In my opinion, this needs some preparation. You will not just point your binoculars in the right place and go, "oh wow, there's the supernova". One possibility is to study the Berkeley Lab Youtube video. Freeze it and practice recognising the stars immediately around M101 and the supernova. Stellarium is wonderful, free software that shows you what's in the sky. It will help you find M101 but I don't think it includes stars as faint as 10. Cartes du Ciel will do this for you, if you download all the possible star catalogues with it, but it is maybe not quite as easy to use as Stellarium. You could use the link to the AAVSO website in the Sky and Telescope article but the resulting chart is also a wee bit technical in nature.

I think TV and some newspapers have made seeing the supernova sound easier than it really is, at least for people who haven't previously looked much at the sky. If you're willing to point a (big enough) pair of binoculars to the right part of the sky and be happy that one of those little points of light is probably the supernova, that's not so tricky. Really finding the supernova and being confident that you have seen it is also perfectly possible, but needs more attention and probably a bit of preparation before you go outside. Serious amateur astronomers will know all this already, so perhaps the best solution is to get in touch with your local Astronomy society. There you'll find people who can do these things confidently.

It's great that people are getting fired up to look at the sky and that the phenomenon of the supernova has caught so many peoples' imagination. It may be harder to see than the media have suggested, but what more amazing incentive could there be for a little bit of care and attention?

I had useful discussions on Twitter with Robert Massey and Pete Lawrence.

(added the summary paragraph near the top, 9 Sept)

supernova!

Warning: Astronomy themed posting

One evening in August of 1975 my mate Neil Bone phoned our house unexpectedly. We were in the same class in high school, geeky boys keen on science. Neil was already becoming a star, so to speak, in the amateur astronomy world, getting mentioned regularly in the "Circulars" of what was then the Junior Astronomical Society. He wanted me to run outside and confirm that the constellation Cygnus had unexpectedly gained a new star: a "nova". I knew Cygnus well enough and an extra star was obvious to the naked eye.

Eventually we heard that somebody else had spotted it an hour or two earlier. Nova Cygni 1975 did not become "Bone's Nova" but this was a pretty exciting episode all the same.

Just as Bone's Nova fell a little bit short for Neil, so Nova Cygni 1975 fell a little bit short of the ultimate astronomical event. A remarkable, dramatically brightening star, it was nonetheless not a supernova.

A white dwarf is an extremely exotic object, the mass of the Sun condensed to an object the size of the Earth. A spoonful does indeed weigh a ton. There are a few that are fairly easy to see for yourself, with a small telescope. Come to one of my classes and - weather allowing - I'll show you one; possibly the most exotic object I can let you see in a small telescope, and one of the most innocuous looking.

A white dwarf next to a normal star, in a binary system is in a difficult place. Gas falls onto it continually from the normal star. Maybe more and more hydrogen gas piles up on the surface of the white dwarf until there is a thermonuclear explosion, a naturally occurring hydrogen bomb on a huge scale. Then the star brightens up dramatically as a nova, a "new star". The accumulated gas is blown off in a huge explosion and the star settles back down to its previous timidity. This is what Neil and I - and of course many others - saw in 1975.

Much more desperate stuff can happen, much more rarely. If enough gas falls onto the white dwarf it may collapse catastrophically and blow itself completely to bits in an enormous nuclear explosion, a Type Ia supernova. Then this single star shines briefly with the brightness of all the stars of a galaxy. It is believed that these events all have more or less the same intrinsic brightness, so they play a vital role in estimating the distances to distant galaxies and thus estimating the age and future fate of the Universe.

I've been thinking of all this recently because there has just been a Type Ia supernova in M101, one of the nearest galaxies. People with modest telescopes may be able to spot it as it brightens over the next week or so, a single, ferociously luminous star 20 million light years away, a poor wee white dwarf driven beyond the Chandrasekhar limit and thus to fiery destruction; a much more dramatic event than the nova Neil spotted in 1975, but involving the same sort of object.

A supernova in one of the nearest galaxies: Neil would have loved this.

The future

It's foolish to worry about the future. It doesn't exist.

But we can definitely think about how we'll deal with the present as it changes over the next few years. The most immediately pressing job was to get the new DACE programme out. If you're not one of the lucky people with a personal paper copy it's available, as always, on the website. All of us are really happy, first that it exists at all, but also that there are as always things in it we're excited about: novelties in teaching, unusual mixes of disciplines and so on. Maybe I'll mention one or two of my own here over the next couple of weeks. We're hoping for lots of enrolments!

In the longer term we'll be looking at a new future situated (at least administratively) in the centre of the University. We'll certainly be looking at new kinds of job. We'll have new challenges to meet (not least a financial one) but possibly new opportunities also.

In a time of change, a newly fluid situation, it's interesting to look at other organisations. Perhaps there will be new ideas for how we should look, or indeed confirmation that other universities find something like us useful. So today I was fascinated to look at the website of Cambridge University's Institute for Continuing Education. I found a unit similar to DACE with subject academics, active in their own disciplines, delivering a range of courses of various lengths, academically sound but widely accessible, lots of possibilities for mixing disciplines. This blog from their Director (a scientist, someone whose research papers I can understand) gives a nice example of this inter-disciplinarity - as well as reminding us that Cambridge has quite a heritage to draw on. Of course we have some heritage ourselves (as Dave Clark, for one, will show in his day school on Astronomy in Glasgow over the centuries).

The next few years will be interesting, that's for sure. We'll certainly be keeping core activities going but there will equally certainly be changes and it seems likely that some at least will be surprising. As we think about our own possible futures it's reassuring to know there are examples like Cambridge out there.

Tribes of Science

A dentist appointment this morning made it easiest for me to travel by car, and also meant I was coming to work after 9.30. So I happened to hear a very nice, short programme on Radio 4. It is probably not the first time that an anthropologist has looked at a group of scientists, but it's the first time I've come across such a thing away from academic literature. So the programme mixed little snippets of Diamond Light Source science with words from the staff scientists: how they worked together and interacted, both among themselves and with visitors using the facility, how they felt about their role of service (as opposed to leading and driving scientific projects), their dress code: a "tribe of science". Perhaps he viewed them from a vantage point similar to Margaret Mead in Samoa - and I wonder how far they told him what they thought he wanted to hear, or should hear. No sex though, at least on the radio.

So I very much appreciated a scientific story humanised by the voices of the scientists themselves, and the agenda of an outside view. Just the sort of thing you also get in a forum where scientists themselves will tell their stories, where you can inquisite them, change the agenda, ask them how they feel as humans about geeky and abstract pre-occupations; in university adult education in fact. Good thing the brochure will be out soon.

The challenge of science outreach

http://xkcd.com/895/

reviews

I've just come across this selection of Amazon.com reviews. From Amazon's extensive product list, "Bewerter" has reviewed:

• a chair;
  
• an electric fan;
  
• and a popular book on Algorithmic Information Theory and philosophy of Mathematics

(you can guess which of those led me to stumble across him).

This is so interesting. First of all there's the Amazon customer's name: "Bewerter". That means "reviewer", doesn't it? Certainly not "mathematician" or "sedentary person" or "cool guy". And the objects reviewed, though few in number, are so spectacularly diverse. What do they have in common? Only that this chap (somehow I think it's a he) has reviewed them.

Is Bewerter showing us a new way of looking at the world? One rooted in Web 2.0 and the new forms of online capitalism? Where the defining attribute of objects is not function or content, but how they've been reviewed?

Glasgow Science Festival

Next Wednesday I make my contributions to the Glasgow Science Festival. I'm giving a talk: Fat tails, stock market crashes and the extinction of the dinosaurs: thinking about unlikely events" I have my own take on these stories, of course, starting from some of my professional interests, but best-selling books have also dealt with related topics recently.

I have to expect, for instance, that some of the people in the room will have read The Black Swan by N N Taleb. So I'm reading it myself to have some idea of what he says, and in case there are some good ideas in there I can steal. At the moment this feels like excessive dedication to duty. Mr Taleb has some interesting things to say but he does say them at length. I have no idea what he's like in person but he comes across in print like a certain sort of person you meet in academia: highly intelligent, creative, arrogant, opinionated, garrulous, both inspirational and tedious, difficult to be around. A thin, elegant monograph could have put the same central ideas elegantly and compellingly - and the central ideas are very interesting. But that book wouldn't have been a best-seller, appealing to people who like the image of the hectoring visionary, and Mr Taleb would have had much less fun writing it. Unfortunately a book that is fun to write might be less fun to read.

Haven't finished it yet, maybe it'll get better. Already I dislike anybody in the audience who's read it! (only joking ,please come along even if you have).

One of his recurring images is of the turkey that gets used to regular feeding, to a stable, comfortable environment, oblivious to the possibility of a sudden, dramatic change in its fortunes. Were we turkeys in DACE? I don't think so - but even a keen awareness of bad possibilities doesn't allow you to predict exactly when they will happen. Perhaps this is Mr Taleb's point, and he'll have something useful to say on these lines before I finish the book.

I know I also need to read the sections on natural science before forming a final view. Don't know if I'll mention him or not next Wednesday, let's see where he leads.

Maybe see you there anyway!

cro-mo

DACE may survive. People who are following the Save DACE Facebook or website know this. DACE no longer exists, of course, but it has been singled out in the past few months as though it does so I at least have begun to speak about it again as though it did. I think in many ways it still does. And some of the recommendations of the consultation panel amount to a revival of DACE.

It would be increasingly strange, at the moment, not to comment here on what's been happening. There's a lot to be said, but some of it shouldn't be said in this setting. Some of it is much bigger than DACE.

Anyway I've been enjoying bike runs at the weekends. I believe I'm not a very fast cyclist but I enjoy cycling on a fast bike. I love those weekend sensations: of setting off from the house on my road bike and thinking, "wow, this is fast even just rolling downhill"; of shooting uphill in high gears; of having been out for a long time and feeling you can just keep going and going. I've begun to pore over descriptions of more expensive bikes, wondering if they would actually feel faster, if I might travel less pathetically slow on one. I've learned that so-called cro-mo steel alloys have excellent strength to weight ratio and are preferred for bike parts for this reason. "Cro-mo" is steel alloyed with chromium and molybdenum.

Molybdenum, what a strange name. Element number 42 - nice number, six times nine. Where does it come from? Actually we know the answer to that question. It is produced in the interiors of red giant stars in the so-called s-process, and behind the blast wave that travels outward through a star in the explosive events of a supernova, in the r-process. "s" stands for "slow" and "r" for "rapid". Both involve the absorption of neutrons by nuclei, and radioactive decay of resulting, unstable nuclei. Immediately after the supernova explosion there are lots more neutrons flying around than normal, even for the interior of a star; hence the "r".

There is enough molybdenum now, in the Earth's crust, for us to be able to use it in cro-mo alloys and work towards those sensations of speed, because the universe is 13.7 billion years old and there has been enough time for lots of generations of massive stars, becoming red giants, spawning supernovae, and enriching the abundances of such heavier elements in the Milky Way as a whole.

If I ever get one of those nice bikes with the cro-mo parts and enjoy sensationally fast feeling bike rides in the myriad tiny, sunlit roads south of Glasgow, my thoughts will doubtless turn occasionally to the Sun's far future, to a time when it has swollen and engulfed the Earth and molybdenum is getting manufactured with many other rare substances in its deep interior, when DACE and universities and human beings are part of history, possibly lost from all conscious thought. I'll relish that sense of speed and think about the age and far future of the Universe.

(Supernova 1987a image: NASA, ESA, K France, P Challis, R Kirshner)

Crazy men

Well, this isn't really a "DACE Memorial Blog" at all, is it? It's mostly me sounding off about things that amuse me. So here's a new one - there'll be lots of real DACE talk any day now.

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is an amazing photograph, just moments after launch, of the Redstone rocket that took the first American into space, 50 years ago today. What strikes me, looking at this picture, is what a tiny wee rocket this was, compared to the Saturn monsters that powered men towards the Moon. Look at the details that gave scale: the platform on the hoist just next the launch pad, presumably just big enough for a couple of people; the windows in the cabins that are part of the launch gantry. Not to mention the actual Mercury capsule itself, one-human sized, no doubt painfully cramped, perched on top of this very long pipe bomb. They stuck Al Shepherd on top of a great big firework and shot him into space - just; sub-orbital.

He got significantly higher than Joseph Kittinger had just months previously, but in a much more explosive way. Kittinger ascended gently to just under 20 miles altitude, by balloon. Then he jumped out. Nobody has ever fallen further.

Which man was crazier?

"Between the immense galaxies and the infinitesimal particles"

We've just come to the end of a DACE course on "Life in the Universe". Martin Hendry, Graeme Ruxton, Helen Fraser (Strathclyde) and I took a look at several aspects of this perennially fascinating subject.

Even the title opens up whole classes of questions:

"life" - what is it, anyway?
"the universe": how big? containing what sorts of objects? why does it look the way it does?
"in": why life on Earth? and not lots of other places? where else might we find it? can we spot it if it's out there? are there deep connections between our own emergence from inorganic matter and the universe in which we find ourselves?

From SEED magazine, here's a very nice blog posting touching on similar topics, with a leaning to biochemistry and the insights to be gained from artificial organisms, and a few very illuminating phrases, like "software that makes its own hardware". And emphasising that, between the fundamental questions associated with the very large and the very small, there is also the question of the emergence of complexity, of "life and its place in the cosmos" where a "revolution in understanding" will be just as fundamental.

Compared to professional research, a course like this is a different sort of fun, a chance to look up from the detailed equations or observations to the big picture. The sort of teaching experience that involves out-of-the ordinary conversations with colleagues and people from a huge range of backgrounds, and sends you back to your research with new questions in mind. Just as much fun for us as for the participants; just what we should be doing in a university, consultation or none.

strategy

What an incredible two days we've just lived through, many people more intensely than me. When - if ever - were such events last seen in a British University? Here's what was happening yesterday. And here's what's happening today.

This afternoon I attended an emergency meeting of Glasgow UCU. Originally called to respond to the consultation process it wound up also commenting on the extraordinary events of the previous 36 or so hours. Although rather an aside to the key issues, there was some discussion of the now-closed Research Club, former occupant of the Hetherington House (now the site of the student occupation); and here's the connection to the specific territory of this blog.

Susan Stuart pointed out that mature students particularly found the Hetherington Research Club a friendly, useful place, congenial, easier for them to be in than the Unions. I also know this was the case, that many former DACE students, from Access and other programmes, made the Research Club their headquarters. Reasons aren't hard to guess. First, they were among grown-ups. Second, they were in the sort of place many of them imagined when they started making their way to University: a place where you can have all sorts of conversation on all sorts of subjects with all sorts of people, where drunken nonsense rubs shoulders with intense debate, where most people value ideas and are happy to talk about them. A supportive environment, multi-disciplinary, research-led ... in fact with all the attributes highlighted in the University's strategic plan; surely thus a core resource for the University to realise its aims.

Cells at war

suppose all the cells in your body were individually conscious and capable of analytical thought and moral judgements. They begin to realise that the entity they're all part of, yourself, wants to do things that harm many of them (for example, drink too much whisky). Why you want to do this is a mystery to them. They, especially the brain cells, are the medium for such emergent thoughts and desires but don't individually share in them.

They begin to glimpse what's going on and don't like it, even although they, in a sense, generate it. What could they do about this situation?

Miscellaneous

WHAT should we blog about just now? There are things to be said about our present situation, about Glasgow University, adult education, etc., but this probably isn't the place to say them. Well, not yet anyway.

So instead let's first note a couple of interesting developments in the sort of science that's my own business. First of all, April's Cafe Scientifique will feature my colleague Martin Hendry, a regular contributor to DACE Astronomy courses, and a man putting even more of his effort into science outreach at the moment, as a STFC Science and Society Fellow - turn up, get yourself a drink and enjoy the chat.

Also I just learned of a new, interesting-sounding venture, the Galilean Society. Free, monthly talks will be offered on science subjects and each speaker will be asked to "include a description of the scientific methods as they see it"; process as well as findings, a philosophy we'd certainly agree with. Professor David Saxon, who was Head of the Dept. of Physics and Astronomy in Glasgow, will be the first speaker on 19 March.

Want to delve further into such topics, in a context where you can hear what academics believe and also ask them why? You know where to come!

Like the rest of the world I've been horrified by the consequences of the huge earthquake in Japan. I'm also horrified by this disgraceful article in the Daily Mail. It's discussed in more detail in the Bad Astronomy blog.

Gresham College London

Gresham College has provided free public talks within the City of London for over 400 years.

Founded in 1597, Gresham College is London’s oldest Higher Education Institution. The eight Gresham Professors — of Astronomy, Commerce, Divinity, Mathematics, Law, Music, Medicine, and Rhetoric - and other visiting speakers offer over 100 free public events every year.

What an excellent institution! Anybody know any more about it?

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein had a sign on the wall of his office in Princeton that said "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

campaigns and capitalism

We're in difficult times. Every Glasgow University adult education student knows this. So does anybody who reads the Herald, or who's a Facebook friend of mine or of the fabulous Hetherington Building Occupation ("Glasgow Uni Occupied"). I was really pleased when I discovered somebody had already set up a Save DACE" Facebook group.

I had some chats today with a friend in another institution. Our local troubles in Glasgow are not unusual just now, not at all unique.

The original version of this posting attempted to construct some sort of big picture view of what's happening, to think beyond the local. It made reference to this, to this really interesting discussion of some of the recent trends in higher education and to this great book looking at capitalism and its consequences, in a time when many feel it to be the only viable way of organising our society. It was too long; I'm sure you can piece the arguments together for yourself.

Should Glasgow University continue to offer adult education courses for the public or not? This should be an argument about values, in which views on the nature and function of universities hold centre sway. We do not yet have private universities in this country (and it's interesting that many of the most famous US examples, Harvard, Stanford, etc., have very large extension studies departments, which they apparently do not find inconsistent with their missions). So it's only right and proper that all sorts of people, the ultimate owners of the universities until they withdraw from the state system, are involved in this argument.

all round the Sun

it seems to me that vague feelings about the world and how it works become more firmly held and acted on as one gets older. So I find myself at last turning into a Guardian reader. It has to be admitted there are many sorts of entertainment on the Guardian's website particularly, such as today's article on Isabella Rossellini's series of animal sex short films. Also catching my more professional eye is this item on the first 360° view of the Sun's surface. Will we learn something uniquely new form this? Of course not: no dragons or UFO's or day-glo sunspots have been lurking in the unseen parts of the Sun's surface, always furtively avoiding our cameras and telescopes. It's a symbolic moment, a point where our monitoring of the Sun and its outputs can attain a new level of sophistication; a small step for routine science, the kind that eventually and unspectacularly leads to changes in thinking. It's certainly a media friendly step, however, even if there is no media-friendly huge new discovery,and the Guardian's article is only one of many all over the internet. That incremental process will lead to new things - or not - in its own sweet time, and in the meantime everybody can enjoy the continually improving view of our nearest star.

Aberdeen

"External examiner" is one of those roles, unseen probably in the wider world, that nonetheless keep the academic world rolling on. How can we all be satisfied that the courses at a particular university are any good? One of the methods is to invite somebody from another university to come along and have a wee look once or twice a year: an "external examiner". We all do this for each other. So courses may still be rubbish but they'll be sort of uniformly rubbish across the whole sector, there shouldn't be any particular islands of unique outstanding rubbish.

I've just taken on the role of external examiner for Aberdeen's Science Access course. I have to say I really enjoy this particular sort of service, meeting colleagues in other universities and learning how they go about things and how they think about their work. Earlier this week I went up to Aberdeen for the day and met the staff and tutors. I liked what I saw up there, a course like ours where academic standards are maintained and students introduced to rigorous thought and study; and where we do our best to help them cope with the rest of their lives at the same time as they feel their way into new ways of thinking and amazing new possibilities: all the stuff that doesn't show up in Quality Assurance forms. It was so nice to be reminded that there are others who haven't given up on the potential of people and the worth of ideas, or surrendered to the prevailing, managerial culture that values nothing that can't be summed up in crude, summary statistics. How do you measure "personal growth"? Doesn't matter, we know it when we see it!

Birkbeck College London

What is Birkbeck College London? Here's the answer in their own words:

Birkbeck is a world-class research and teaching institution, a vibrant centre of academic excellence and London's only specialist provider of evening higher education.

Their About Us page goes on to say

We encourage applications from students without traditional qualifications and we have a wide range of programmes to suit every entry level. Our academic reputation also attracts many traditional full-time postgraduate students.

I thought about Birkbeck today because I received a circular email announcing a seminar there. The exact title was new but the words stirred an echo of current preoccupations from somewhere just below the conscious surface: "Lifelong Learning in a time of austerity". Sounds like a topic that will inevitably turn up in future blogs.

It's only some months since I had a look at Birkbeck's website, when events were forcing me to think about DACE and its relationship to the rest of the University. I loved those words when I read them. As I'd suspected, this seemed to be an entire institution founded on the DACE principles. Here is the reconciliation of "research-led" and "inclusive"; the philosophy of university adult education within which I made sense. The alternative is unspeakable, immoral: you declare that people from particular postcode areas are suited only to certain sorts of education. No Philosophy or Astronomy for them.

London's population is equal to that of Scotland and can support an entire institution operating on this philosophy. We were the Birkbeck wing of Glasgow University; outward-looking, accessible teaching conceived and delivered by active researchers, leading for those who want it into the mainstream. Every such University should have a Birkbeck wing.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this view ignores sociological or political realities, subscribes to an incomplete notion of what's valuable, misunderstands the nature of a university, overrates what we achieved towards these ends.... I'd love to see the arguments. The DACE project is still alive, not yet unhealthy but not strengthened by the events of the last year. And we were not granted the respect implicit in debate.