500 years of Astronomy in Glasgow

In this year's Open Studies programme we have a day school, Saturday 5 October, 10.00 - 13.00, on the history of Astronomy in Glasgow. I know lots of people would find this day school fascinating, even if they think they're not interested in Astronomy. People who come to Astronomy courses sometimes say they want to hear about new discoveries, not history: black holes, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, dark energy, etc., so some of them might need a little persuasion too. We can Tweet about this, or post on Facebook but I'd like to use a few more words to try to persuade lots of people that they should come. Here we are - please read on!

The tutor for the day, Dave Clarke, has just published Reflections on the Astronomy of Glasgow which tells the story of 500 years of Astronomy in the city. Dave is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy and was Director of the University Observatory when he retired just a few years ago. In the Preface he writes about his successful interview in 1966, the old astronomical clocks that caught his eye that very day, and how his attention returned to them much later in his career, leading almost inevitably to this detailed history. So he is THE authority on this subject at the moment, with a wealth of detailed information and stories at his fingertips. In the day school Dave will lead a wee walk around the university campus, looking at these same clocks - which are very old, and extremely interesting - as well as portraits of some of the key characters and other relics. But before this there will have been a fascinating look at the succession of - very varied - Professors of Astronomy in Glasgow, the development of the subject in the University and its relationship to the history of the city more widely.

Most people nowadays have a clock built into their mobile phones and all of us are locked into a single, global standard of time via wireless telecommunication. GPS tells us where we are on the surface of the planet. Things were of course not always so simple (they're not simple now! But most of us can just use them as though they were). Astronomy played an essential role in the regulation of time, and in navigation, all through the 19th century when Glasgow's wealth was being built on global trade. So the Professors of Astronomy had vital jobs to do and their stories at various points illuminate the development of the city. They're closely tied to the growth of the port, the development of the harbour and the city centre along the river, the story of shipping on the Clyde. You can still set your watch by Edinburgh's famous one o'clock gun; Glasgow's is mostly forgotten but provides one amusing incident in the middle of these tales.

Alexander Wilson was the first Professor of Astronomy in Glasgow, from 1760-1784. Here's a nice, modern perspective on the feature of sunspots that still bears his name. A fascinating array of characters succeeded him. I've always had a soft spot for J P Nichol, a hugely successful populariser of Astronomy, pal of poets and literary types (like Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas de Quincey), teacher of Lord Kelvin.

The Dowanhill Observatory is long gone but its memory lives on in the name of Observatory Road, just off the top of Byres Road. The now-bustling West End was still green fields when it was established in 1845. Like so many city observatories, Glasgow's have been pushed further and further out by burgeoning populations but the physical move of the university from the Old College in the city centre to Gilmorehill was also part of the story.

So: the growth and development of Glasgow and its place in the Empire, the evolution of scientific knowledge and ideas and their relationship to wider currents in society, the evolution of the fourth oldest University in Britain, both physically and organisationally; all of these strands and more are viewed through the particular, illuminating lens of Astronomy's history in the city. Dave is a a warm, enthusiastic speaker. This day school was in our programme last year and Dave also gave a wee talk on these lines as part of our contribution to the West End Festival. Each time people came out saying, "that was excellent. There should have been ten times that number of people." I know if you come along you'll agree with the first of these statements. And I hope the second won't be necessary.

I linked to details of Dave's excellent book above and you can get it from Amazon.

Raspberry Pi

Really just a few notes, mostly for my own benefit; like the MOOC post. I might not even click "post".

The Raspberry Pi is the hardware core of a small computer. It was conceived primarily as a sort of sophisticated, educational toy that kids would learn to program, gaining basic skills of programming and computer systems in the process. You buy a board with a processor and some memory. The board has interfaces so one can attach a keyboard, video display device (a TV - HDMI not VGA) and various other sorts of device. There's a USB socket. It's just credit card sized, so it's great for all sorts of physically small projects that need some computing power, flying a webcam on a balloon to take aerial photos for instance. The teddy bear that repeated Felix Baumgartner's amazing leap from the edge of space was Raspberry Pi-powered.

The Raspberry Pi and some other bits of hobbiest scale electronics form the heart of the AuroraWatchNet magnetometer design, for monitoring geomagnetic activity (manifested visibly as the aurora).

Various enthusiasts are thinking about radiation detectors based around raspberry Pi's. Here's a forum discussion. A simple radiation detector kit built around a photodiode rather than a Geiger tube might be a good starting point.

Don't know how many people read these; probably more than find them interesting! If you find this and know something about these topics, any comments will be read eagerly.

Added next day: you run Linux on these. The preferred flavour is Debian. Ubuntu and no doubt others cannot support the Raspberry Pi.

radio thunderstorms

In Scotland we've just had the second hottest summer on record. As the month wore on more and more cloud accompanied those high temperatures and July closed with some beautiful thunderstorms. I was tickled to see them showing up in the measurements from our little Callisto radio telescope, mentioned in an earlier post, e.g.:

This picture is called a spectrogram. What's it showing? Time increases from left to right, across the picture. The caption at the top tells us that the picture represents events on 25 July, 2013. At the bottom of the picture you can read that the picture starts at 14.45, quarter to three in the afternoon, and that it represents about a quarter of an hour's worth of data, i.e. of measurements of the radio signals arriving at the antenna out at Acre Road.

Each of those vertical streaks is the pulse of radio waves from a bolt of lightning. You've heard the radio when there is lightning, that loud "click". Draw a horizontal line across the picture and each time it crosses one of those vertical lines, that's a lightning strike; a "click" if you're feeding the radio waves to a loudspeaker. For example there was a bolt of lightning just before 14.52. I should emphasise that this is the pulse of radio waves from the lightning strike arriving at the antenna; the lightning itself might be some miles away.

The height at which that horizontal line is placed represents the frequency of the radio waves. For older readers (like myself), we can think of where we stop moving the dial that tunes the radio to a particular station, perhaps the Home Service or the Light Programme, or one of the many more distant and exotic possibilities: Radio Luxembourg, Hilversum , Athlone....

You can read the frequency of the radio waves from the scale at the right-hand side. They lie between 45 and 80 MHz ("megahertz" - Mega, millions, of Hertz, cycles per second). This is quite a nice range: Medium Wave radio stations mostly transmit between 0.1 and 2 MHz, while FM radio stations are mostly between about 85 and 110 MHz. So this range is away from strong, man-made signals and that's why we use it. Across the top of the picture there's a funny, repeating pattern and that's some sort of man-made radio signal, possibly from some sort of electrical machinery rather than a deliberate transmission.

The colours represent how intense the radio waves are (how loud the click would be if we played them through a loudspeaker), at each time and frequency. The blue colour that's mostly there in the background means nothing much is going on. The most intense radio waves are yellow. Looking at that lightning "click" just before 14:52, for instance, it would have been a much quieter click if we had tuned the dial to below 50 MHz or above about 75 MHz, than in between these frequencies.

When I saw this lightning signal it reminded me of the very beginnings of radio astronomy, in 1932 and 1933. Bell Labs wanted to start using radio frequencies of 10s of MHz for communication, but they needed to know what competition radio transmissions would face from natural sources. Karl Jansky, a young physics graduate, was tasked with answering this question. He discovered three natural sources of radio waves at these frequencies. The first is the one we've seen here: nearby thunderstorms, highly variable, intense but short-lived. The second was the weaker, steadier signal from more distant thunderstorms; there's usually thunder happening somewhere. The third, a steady "hiss", was a much more unexpected discovery. Jansky was able to work out that this came from the sky, from a direction that stayed fixed among the stars and seemed to coincide with the direction to the centre of the Milky Way. "Star static," he called it. This was the first indication that radio waves could tell us something about the universe beyond Earth, although there was only slow progress at first in following up this discovery. Now, of course, radio astronomy is a major branch of the subject. The information it has given us on, e.g. cool gas in interstellar space, neutron stars, or supermassive black holes in other galaxies, could not have been obtained in any other way. The radio wavelengths still have a major role to play in answering the big, fundamental questions of Astronomy, so bigger and more powerful telescopes are still being built, like LOFAR.

Our Callisto receiver's antenna is too wee to detect most cosmic sources but it does pick up what it's meant to: the bursts of intense radio waves that sometimes come from the Sun when there are sunspots, flares etc. These were discovered in February 1942 by J S Hey, an English physicist working on radar during World War II. He soon recognised that this new sort of signal was coming from the Sun, not a German radar jamming technology at all. Jansky would have discovered these solar radio bursts if he hadn't been working at the bottom of the sunspot cycle, when the Sun was not very active at all.

Now that we can understand spectrograms, here's a wee sample, from earlier in July on a day the Sun was particularly busy. Just one comment just now: the solar radio bursts might look a little bit like very intense versions of the signals we get from thunderstorms on Earth. They're not! They're something quite different that can only happen in the tenuous, high temperature gas of the Sun's outer atmosphere. More in a future blog post.

Lastly, here's a nice lightning photo also from July 2103:

Northbourne: lightning continues
  © Copyright Chris Downer and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Kafka bus company

On non-biking days my journey home from the St Andrews Building often involves a wee walk up to Great Western Road to catch the number 6 bus. Then the mysteries start.

First of all, I almost never get there at the perfect time to board a bus.

1. Mostly the buses just aren't anywhere near - more about this case below.
2. Sometimes they get to the bus stop just before I arrive and I get to watch them disappear along Great Western Road towards the town centre, just before I actually reach the bus stop. I hate those days! Watching that bus come to a halt, pick up passengers, and move off again while I'm trapped on the other side of the traffic racing along Great Western Road, feels like one of those punishments visited in perpetuity for sins I no longer remember.
3. Sometimes I get to the bus stop just at the perfect moment. The bus is just a few yards away (this is the British Empire after all) and it comes to a halt so I can board it effortlessly, no hanging around at all, looking like one of those people who surf reality, stepping weightlessly from one perfectly timed action to the next.

You would think that cases 2 and 3 would occur at pretty much the same rate. If the bus is somewhere near, either it's just ahead of me or just behind me and if I and the bus are arriving randomly at the bus stop it should be 50/50 which actually happens. But it doesn't feel like this is the case. The punishments seem to occur much more often than the rewards.

Now these words seem like a silly little boy with a persecution complex. It seems possible that the frustrating days strike the harder blow so that they loom more numerous in memory. But I wonder if there might be some mechanism that would in fact make them more frequent? For example, my presence at the bus stop in advance of its arrival will make it slow down. If I'm running towards the bus stop with the bus in front of me, however, the oblivious driver will keep it travelling at a constant rate so the same interval of time between me and the bus will result in a bad consequence more often. That might not be right but I'm trying to imagine how this might be a real effect. I'd love to hear thoughts, by email, or in the comments below; and especially to discover that somebody else has already asked this question.

Even the most frequent and apparently straightforward occurrence, a bus still minutes away, is not unattended by mysteries. Our super-high-tech Glasgow bus stops include a digital display that shows the timings, updated apparently in real time, for the next few buses (I don't have a picture. Let me warn avid readers that I will edit this text and add a picture when I remember to make one). Perhaps this notice board tells me that the next No. 6 bus is five minutes away.

When I came to Glasgow as a student it struck me that Great Western Road resembled what it was, for me: the road home. An attractive, broad, straight thoroughfare, it rolls for miles and seems to lead inevitably and unavoidably out of Glasgow all the way to the small communities of the West Highlands: Oban, Campbeltown, Lochgilphead, Fort William. Standing at that bus stop on Great Western Road I can see about a mile along it to the west. I can see easily that no bus is five minutes away. Nonetheless that digital sign at the bus stop gets automatically updated. It tells me that the next No. 6 bus is three minutes away. Then one minute. Then it is "due", an acknowledgement that no bus has arrived and in fact none is yet visible. The same bus shows on the display as "due" for a few more minutes, then simply disappears. Another bus, previously 5 or 7 or 10 minutes away, moves to the top of the display.

Do these buses exist? Although we never lay eyes on them the digital sign tells us they move around the city, pass our particular bus stop, and move on. Where are they actually doing this? Maybe it's we at the bus stop who don't really exist. We're just brains in vats being fed fake sensory information that says, "a bus arrives and leaves again". Except it's bogus, incomplete, allowing us to pierce the veil. Just like The Matrix.

Or perhaps there's a slightly less baroque explanation: a bus service that runs according to its own internal bureaucracy of timetables and electronic notice boards and does not allow itself to be distracted by the reality of whether the buses actually exist or not. Nowadays it's easy to operate such a service, for example in a FirstBus digital simulation of Glasgow. Sort of a Kafka Bus Service.

Mumford and Sons

Last week I was in Prague, attending the 2013 CESRA Workshop; a super meeting, providing lots of fodder for future blog posts. Since I was co-leading one of the Working Groups there was little time for tourism but I was able to relax, in one of my favourite cities, for a while on Sunday. Passing the old Jewish cemetery I recalled the dark tale of the Golem, creature of dirt animated by arcane knowledge.

Back home I saw my brother, on Facebook, ask, "what do people like about Mumford and Sons?" I could reply only, "beats me". But I thought a bit more about Mumford and Sons.

You look so edgy walking down Byres Road in your Che Guevara t-shirt; but which shop did you buy it in? Who gets the money when you buy a Rage Against the Machine poster? All the symbols of protest and even the ideas behind them are vulnerable to commodification. Capitalism clasps its enemies to its breast and adds them to its product range. This is certainly one ingredient of the current "there is no alternative" mentality.

Since the 1950s popular music has been a mixed blessing for capitalism: a focus for dissent and a fabulous commodity at the same time. We see those tensions from day one in the desperate tale of Elvis, Colonel Tom Parker and Hill and Range (I've really enjoyed Peter Guralnick's two-volume Elvis biography, by the way). Music's never got very far out of control but it's been a troublesome little commodity from time to time, all the same. How much better if we could have the commodity without the possibilities for dissent, for "consciousness-raising" (sorry!).

My little theory is that this is where Mumford and Sons come in. Real folk music is risky. It deals in eternal truths, death, passion, archetypes. It makes you think about who you are and how you fit into the world (as long as you don't treat it as wooly-jumpered nostalgia); subversive stuff. How will we deal with this? We'll produce a bland, neutered commodity music that does none of this but has the visual trappings of folk music, clothes, acoustic instruments, and deals in a non-threatening sort of fake, overwrought emotion. We'll market it intensively and people will forget about the scary stuff. They'll feel cool because they're into "folk music", and they'll be happily surprised how little it distracts them from their roles as producers and consumers. This is what "folk music" will become, just as "rhythm and blues" has gone from John Lee Hooker to Beyoncé - who needs no weblink from me (a fact underlined as I type by the automatic appearance of the acute over her last "e"; BlogSpot has Beyoncé in its spelling dictionary!).

So I think this is how to understand Mumford and Sons: a sort of golem, animated by capitalism, set going to defend the established order from folk music. A Capitalist Folk Golem (and yes, isn't that a great band name? It's mine. You can't have it).

Of course this is nonsense. Capitalism doesn't "do" things, perceive enemies, animate golems. What on earth are we talking about? And while we're at it, could we really animate a man of mud in some moment of magic? Funnily enough I think the answers to these odd-looking questions might be connected, via ideas closer to my usual territory. Maybe we'll tackle those another day, if there is sense to be made of them.

Another, final little aside: the experimental music record label RER Megacorp is having a summer sale. Many of its titles are going for a fiver a shot. Do yourself a favour: take a chance on some of these, try some sounds like you never heard before, music permanently immune to commodification. Play them when you're doing other things around the house and see how these new sounds seep into your brain and what they do to you, happy in the knowledge that any profits are going to the musicians and the handful of people who keep the record label afloat.

Archie Roy

Archie was a great man. We shall not see his like again. I was honoured to speak for a few minutes, describing his contribution to adult education in Glasgow University, as part of a public tribute. When planning for this event started, I expressed the hope that his stalwart 50+ years of Glasgow University Continuing Education would be remembered. Such a view, voiced, means you get fingered to say something yourself and I was happy to do so.

I started with a little bit of history, partly re-used from a previous talk. Archie started teaching for us in 1951, when university continuing education sat on the crest of a wave. It seemed important to provide some context, especially in describing a sort of provision which is certainly now in decline, irrespective of any absolute value it might have. Also, academic colleagues from other European countries might have been mystified; the "extra-mural" tradition is a particularly British phenomenon. I was struck, again, by how Scottish physicists played such significant roles in this history, even at its earliest origins.

Archie was a man of some eminence, globally, with genuine achievements to his name. Many colleagues, sympathetic in principle, now have no time for continuing education. There's always another paper to be finished, a grant proposal deadline to hit. That Archie always found time for those people outside the academic mainstream says something important about the man: a great scientist and a polymath but one for whom people and community never lost their importance.

MOOCs

What's a MOOC? "Massive open online course"; a course offered online that anybody can take, and delivered in a way that should make it possible for people to sign up in huge numbers at a time, even 10s of 1000s. Without having studied any of the detailed literature on MOOCs, I don't believe they involve any radical new development in online pedagogy, just a sort of package that aims to use some of the existing methodology in a way that people can take advantage of, townloads at a time. I think the biggest development is in the thinking of administrators: the idea that traditional universities might find it useful to make these things available, completely free and accessible to anybody with a computer and internet access.

We had a bit of a conversation today about MOOCs. It made me talk to one or two other people. I learned some things:

• some big universities have already got together to form MOOC delivery consortia: Coursera, edX, Udacity
• Edinburgh was the first university in the UK to become seriously involved in MOOC delivery, but with results that should be classed as "mixed", and a range of student experiences
• one key, maybe the most important, to making these "massive" is that they're free. This also means it's easy to drop out again, no matter how good your intentions, if the rest of your life gets in the way. If completion rates reach 50% my feeling is they're doing really well
• mixed experiences continue, I think maybe mixed both in the experience the institutions provide and the expectations students bring
• we're absolutely on trend, man (well, late getting there): there is a MOOC hashtag in Twitter

You can see the appeal to us in what-used-to-be-DACE: the walls of the academy not just surmounted, but dissolved. There are so many reasons this won't happen, some obvious, others needing more digging out. But lots of them are there. Millions of comments will, I know, appear immediately below. For now let me conclude by noting my inordinate pride in the neologism, "townloads".