Whisky

I am enraged by those age check things when you look at Scotch whisky distillery websites (example). Will looking at pictures of seaweed and highland cows and distilleries and peaty hillsides make 12 years olds more likely to hit the booze? Will they be saving their pennies to try the latest port cask expression? Will they say, "well, I didn't enjoy Frosty Jack's very much, but that 21 year old Old Pulteney with its tastes of engine oil and smoke looks just the thing for me"? Is there scientific evidence that febrile young minds exposed to boozy images will be turned from the path of light, corrupted, set on the path to a diseased relationship with alcohol, bibulous futures sealed as certainly as if they had crossed the event horizon of a black hole?

And if they're old enough to look at a distillery website, aren't they also old enough to choose a fake date of birth?

What good can this possibly do? Bah.

I was looking for work reasons, by the way. More of that soon.

An evil tree

Probably it is not evil. In Pollok Park it must see so many passers-by that any routine evil-doing would have become well-known. Of course it might choose shrewdly its victims and the moments to take them. A park in a big city will supply them fairly regularly: alone and melancholy, remote from or devoid of friends and family. Nobody will notice if they never return from some restless nocturnal stravaig. The end of unrest might even be a kindness.

Probably it is not evil. Nothing happened to me. I was able to photograph it. But I was there in daylight; other people were around; I am not unloved.

Probably it is not evil. It is not after all an ill-favoured Ash Tree. Still, Let's hope they chop the thing down. Yes, Let's hope they chop the thing down.

Fort William

I spent last weekend at the Fort William Mountain Festival. Jane Magill and I were there with the Cosmic Way roadshow. The Cosmic Way aims to spread the word about the Scottish scientist CTR Wilson, the invention of the cloud chamber which earned him a share of the 1927 Physics Nobel Prize, and the study of radiation from space. Wilson always traced a very direct line to the cloud chamber from his stay on the summit of Ben Nevis in 1894. He also speculated that immensely penetrating radiation from space might arrive all the time at Earth and carried out a wee experiment to test this idea, in the Neidpath railway tunnel on the edge of Pebbles. In our minds we thought of a squiggly line on the map like a cloud chamber track, with Ben Nevis at one end and Peebles at the other. It could be a long distance journey, like the West Highland Way or the Southern Upland Way: the Cosmic Way!

By the way, I have ventured out into the world beyond the farm and I know there are Fort Williams and Peebles's in other parts of the world. In this Scottish story I'm talking about the Scottish versions.

Fort William is one of the obvious venues for the Cosmic Way. We meet people who know Ben Nevis and its summit very well (our stand was next to the John Muir Trust, who own Ben Nevis above 700m) and who love the outdoors and nature, just as CTR Wilson did himself. For some of them this esoteric science might become a bit less forbidding when they learn that it starts with a love of the natural world and its beauties.

On Sunday I took some time and walked up Glen Nevis a little bit. I hadn't really expected to have - or to take - any time during the weekend so I didn't have proper gear for long, rough walks or snow but I did start up the Ben Nevis path from Achintee, that thousands of people follow to the summit every year. I turned back when I came to a burn running down over the path. This is the same track that was constructed in 1883 so that the Ben Nevis Observatory could be built and operated. And in turn the Observatory gave Wilson a couple of weeks' work in September 1894, inadvertently starting him on the road towards the cloud chamber. So, in the absence of an ice axe or even decent boots, this wee toddle was exactly the right one for Cosmic Way reasons.

Interstellar travel

Alien was shown on telly over the Xmas period. What a great movie! I saw it when it came out in 1980, a day or two after the last examination of my BSc degree. With those big exams behind me I was in a bit of a black mood but Alien really lifted my spirits. My only real disappointment was that one of the humans survived.

It's amusing how quickly images of future technology date. One of the crew interacts with a computer via a 1980s keyboard and a CRT monitor, for instance - not even a touch screen, far less by speaking, and in text, no GUI. In many other ways it's far-sighted, however.

Interstellar space is such a potential playground for science fiction. It's quite irresistible to authors and film-makers but the enormous distances have always been a huge problem: how could you make these journeys in a human lifetime, far less a time short enough for the action of space battles and political intrigues? Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity shows that the speed of light is a sort of ultimate speed limit of the physical world. As accelerated objects move at speeds closer and closer to the speed of light, they get more and more massive, so it gets harder to accelerate them further. Worse, some invented method for faster-than-light communication would open up the most horrible paradoxes: you could receive the answers to questions before you decided to ask them, for instance. Most people prefer to believe it's just not possible, rather than allowing that the normal sequence of cause and effect might sometimes break down. So we're stuck with travel no faster than the speed of light which means four years at least to the nearest star, even supposing we can make our spaceships move close to the speed of light, and many thousands of years to most others.

The normal solution of science fiction is to assume some advance in physics that will enable a way round this problem. For example, you can learn probably more than you ever wanted to know about Star Trek's "warp drive" in Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki. I still remember the gasps in the cinema when the Millenium Falcon entered hyperspace for the first time. There are probably very few Britons who don't know about Doctor Who's TARDIS, especially with the hugely successful reboot of recent years (but I need to get something off my chest here: I HATE it that they now show the TARDIS flying about like some sort of helicopter. It's WRONG. WRONG.). From thousands of science fiction novels that casually invoke such unknown physics, let me mention one personal favourite: M John Harrison's brilliant Light, in which the inventor of faster-than-light travel is also a serial killer.

Let's face it. There is every chance that the physical world just doesn't work this way. No faster-than-light travel is possible and all our Star Treks and Star Wars and Doctors are just fantasies, not even "science fiction". Don't cry.

I like it that Alien takes the less preferred but more likely solution. The human crew are placed in suspended animation for most of their enormously long journeys and only revived after the many years of travel - unless, of course, they intercept signals of intelligent life that turn out to be warning them to keep away from beasties that will use them as incubators for a few hours before bursting fatally out of their stomachs. Anyway this device allows recognisable humans to make interstellar journeys although it does raise interesting questions beyond the scope of the movie, about the maintenance of a culture when communication involves such long intervals of time.

We're not really adapted for interstellar travel. Our individual lifespans are so short. But interstellar travel might eventually make sense if we evolve or, more likely, engineer ourselves into beings that live for, say 1,000 years. Then a 10 or 20 year journey to a nearby star would be a fine way of spending a little bit of your life. This might become possible with our existing bodies through bio-engineering, as imagined so excitingly by Freeman Dyson, or we might even find some way of divorcing consciousness from the body and supporting it in machines: "uploading" a person into a computer. Then the "person" would keep working as long as the machine did.

Of course science fiction has tackled these ideas as well. A student on one of my courses handed me a copy of Diaspora by Greg Egan. The protagonists in this book are our cultural and, umm, mechanical descendants but they have long since moved beyond organic bodies. As minds existing within machines they can contemplate journeys of thousands of years; they are effectively immortal. Most of the interest and possibly the deterrent value of this book lies in the nature of its protagonists, their motivations and relationships. In a time after biology these transhumans are not exactly people we can imagine having a beer and a chat with.

I haven't even mentioned Alcubierre and so on, attempts at identifying a road to faster-than-light travel based on known physics (which, so far, involve using a sort of matter not known to exist as well as demanding the generation of infeasible amounts of energy). Even if these technologies ultimately prove to be possible I believe they belong to an extremely distant future. I think changes to the physical nature of humanity will make thousand-year journeys feasible and attractive first.

So, Alien notwithstanding, I think the future of interstellar travel is summed up in a couple of phrases often heard in Scotland: "ye canna change the laws o' physics, Captain"; and "it's not for the likes of us".

Telepathy

David T Lykken was Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota. He became very famous, far beyond academia, for his studies of identical twins separated at birth. In 1991, in an article reflecting on the practice of psychological research, he wrote these words:

Just as there are few hypotheses that we can claim as proven, so there are relatively few that we can reasonably reject out of hand. Extrasensory perception is a good example. Having worked for years with hundreds of pairs of adult twins, hearing so many anecdotes of apparent telepathic communication between them, which usually occur in moments of stress or crisis, I am inclined to believe in telepathy - as an individual but not as a scientist.

Brazil (4) "From a land of monsters to monsters in the sky"

A year or two into my PhD I started to work with colleagues in France. I learned lots from them, scientific and otherwise. In particular I learned the defining features of Scotland, as viewed from the rest of Europe: the Loch Ness Monster, and haunted castles. Nessie didn't surprise me but I hadn't been aware we were particularly haunted. The existence of a dedicated Wikipedia article seems to offer definitive confirmation, however (***FOR THOSE WHO DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW ME: IRONY ALERT!!!***).

I thought again recently of these defining characteristics. In São Paulo I'm a pretty exotic specimen. I thought I should offer a little bit of my exotic self to the city so we discussed a talk for the public, on a Scottish science story I have told often at home: CTR Wilson, the Ben Nevis Observatory and the origins of the study of cosmic rays. Lots of people, apparently, have found my webpages on these topics, come across one of the many appearances of the Cosmic Way roadshow, or heard me give a popular talk on these topics. Thinking of a title that would scream, "Scotland!!!" I mulled over the monster and the castles. I remembered a book I liked by an Italian astronomer, Paolo Maffei, called Monsters in the Sky (a nice book but a bit out of date now). The "monsters" of his title are the exotic objects of modern astrophysics, the black holes and exploding stars that are studied via the X-rays they emit. Some of the pioneers of X-ray astronomy, like Bruno Rossi, started out as cosmic ray scientists and adapted their expertise to this new subject. We know now that these same objects play major roles in the origin of the cosmic rays. Scientifically, we can indeed trace a line from CTR Wilson and the very beginnings of cosmic rays to the study of these outrageous objects, "monstrous" both in scale and in the challenges they present to our everyday ideas of the world. So the theme of "monsters" seemed to tie together all the strands of my talk together: "From a land of monsters to 'monsters in the sky'" was the title of the talk.

If I'd thought just a day or so longer I might have kept "ghosts" too. Wilson's Nobel Prize (still the only Physics Nobel for someone born Scottish) was for the invention of the cloud chamber, the device that brought electrons and ions, "phantoms" of the subatomic world, into the realm of the visible. "Monsters and ghosts: a Scottish tale of fundamental physics" might have been an even better title. Maybe next time.

We all thought this public talk was a nice idea but the timing was not good, there was no big high-profile event to attach it to, and a lot of end-of-teaching-year activities complicated finding a room for it. Anyway there was a nice audience for the talk, many familiar faces but at least one member of the public because I brought her with me. I enjoyed augmenting this familiar tale for a southern hemisphere audience, using MacKinnon tartan, Victorian paintings of highland cows crossing cloudy mountain passes, etc.; generally wallowing in cheesy Scottishness as well as, for instance contrasting the roughly 5 million population of Scotland and the 22(?) million of the São Paulo urban area.

Perhaps this was also a wee subconscious device to start turning my thoughts to home. I have only a few more days here until I swap fejoiada for black pudding, cachaça for whisky, temperatures between 20 and 30°C (not always with clear skies, to be fair, or even dry) for wind, rain, snow and short days. Home to a land of ghosts and monsters.

Brazil (3): A solar physicist takes a taxi ride

On the day I arrived a colleague kindly met me at the airport. On a Tuesday he could not bring his car (traffic congestion control measure) so we took a taxi to my new lodgings. I guess the phrase "South American big city taxi ride" will conjure up a particular, hair-raising image. Stereotypes concocted from a great distance so often turn out to be wrong; not this time. I'm sure we travelled at 60 miles an hour through dense traffic in busy streets. Over and over again we cut in front of other cars at what felt like well after the last possible minute to take some sliproad or junction. Our driver's eye and reflexes were fantastic. We'd have been in ten crashes at home but nobody even tooted their horn. Evidently drivers expect such craziness of each other. I said out loud, "this is exciting".

Here's a São Paulo taxi crossing the Avenida Higienópolis not far from Mackenzie University. The camera has frozen it but I expect it was travelling at high speed and dodging from lane to lane. I actually took this photo because I like the name, "Higienópolis". It also applies to the whole area: "hygiene town" and reflects how nice and clean it was, compared to Downtown, when they started expanding the city in this direction. It's still appropriate.

Much later it struck me that the taxi is a nice metaphor for some of the science that triggered my visit. The gas of the Sun's atmosphere is sitting quietly, atoms moving around randomly in all directions, with a range of speeds but none of them going too much above the average speed. Then from somewhere above them comes an electron or an ion at enormous speed, like one of those São Paulo taxis heading from the airport into the city centre. Unlike the taxis it has no skilful driver, only speed, and it just crashes into all the rest of the traffic, sending them flying in all directions with much greater speeds than they had before; heating them up and making them glow in various ways. Exactly why they glow holds our detailed attention. But of course we'd really like to know, "who ordered the taxi?" And why was it moving so quickly?

If a taxi crashes into a car all that happens is car and taxi get mangled and some fragments go flying off in all directions. When we look more closely at the collisions in the Sun's atmosphere things get a bit stranger. Most of the time no actual damage is done. A very fast-moving proton crashes into a slow-moving proton. Afterwards the slow-moving one is going faster than before, because it's had a big dunt, but both protons are still protons. No lumps are knocked off them, both are still intact. But if the incoming proton is going fast enough, things get weirder, a bit like a surreal, Looney Tunes version of such a car-crash. The two protons crash into each other, there's a bit of a blur, but afterwards, different stuff comes out and moves off. It's as though the taxi crashed into the car and then, afterwards, the car shot off in a new direction and not just the original but two new taxis also get spat out the far end of the collision, only different sizes and maybe colours from the original (protons don't have a "colour". But in the "Big book of science" type books I read as a kid they were always drawn as little red billiard balls, red for positive electric charge. Electrons were blue (negative) and neutrons were green.)

Let's stick with the taxi metaphor. A fast red taxi crashes into an identical, slow-moving red car. Afterwards we'd expect a red taxi and a red car to come shooting out of this collision. Instead we get a red taxi, a green car and a funny wee yellow, sort of half-size taxi. Before our eyes, the funny new car travels a short distance then changes into something else different again.

The taxi metaphor's running out of steam. Here's what happens: accelerated to very high energy by an uncertain process, a proton collides with another proton. After the collision some of the energy of the proton has been transformed into a new particle, called a pion. After about one hundred millionth of a second the pion changes into a different, less massive particle called a muon, and finally the muon decays and spawns an electron or a positron (the antimatter counterpart of the electron). The electron or positron emits gamma-rays (like X-rays only even more penetrating) which we detect with instruments above the Earth's atmosphere on satellites. Once we detect those gamma-rays we can follow this sequence of events backwards to learn about the protons that were accelerated in the first place.

My colleagues here in Brazil lead the world at observing very short wavelength radio waves from the Sun. Recently they've begun to explore the wavelengths between radio and infra-red, what is called Terahertz radiation. This is a frontier and they have made some discoveries that we don't completely understand yet. The stories I've described above might be part of understanding Terahertz radiation in solar flares and that's a big part of why I'm in Brazil.

Since arriving I've had other taxi rides that were not nearly as exciting as that first one. Was the driver thinking of proton-proton collisions and pions? That question will probably go unanswered but we can be more optimistic about the reasons that solar flares glow in Terahertz radiation.