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 I remembered a book I liked by an Italian astronomer, Paolo Maffei, called Monsters in the Sky (a nice book but a bit out of date now).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.