Celtic Connections

Celtic Connections is Glasgow's annual, winter festival of "roots music", Scottish and Celtic certainly but also genres like Country and Western that have some kinship, and indigenous musics from across the globe. Most music that still retains some element of "authenticity", according to some criterion or other, can turn up there. I don't enjoy only "clattery, atonal music" so there are always many more appealing gigs than I have time or money for.

My wife and I looked through the 2017 programme together. It's always a pleasure to find musical common ground. Both of us laughed out loud, involuntarily when we saw Olivia Newton-John's name among the headliners. Ms Newton-John started in country music, she's had a huge, starry career in popular music, she'll sell out at Celtic Connections and her audience will be ecstatic. So why did we laugh? Perhaps even the organisers expected some people to laugh when they wrote: "It might seem a startlingly long way from Sandy in Grease to Celtic Connections." Or perhaps the alternative version, "Olivia Neutron-Bomb", hybrid of 1980s headlines, popped up unbidden in both our minds. Pesky neutrons, there's so much to say about them, even before thinking of Ronald Reagan and the French nuclear weapons programme.

Amusement passed and attention moved on. I blogged about the famous photo of the 1927 Solvay Conference. I did not expect Olivia to pop up again so soon but she did. My mind is still slightly blown by the discovery that she is the granddaughter of Max Born, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Love song pop music bumps up randomly against the fundamental nature of reality.

Here's the Solvay Conference picture again. Born is second from right in the second row, with Niels Bohr on his left-hand side at the end of the row. The Scot CTR Wilson is just to his left in the front row.

Born recognised that matrix algebra lay at the heart of Heisenberg's weird new view of inside the atom. Born was the man who saw how to use the wave in Schrödinger's wave equation to calculate the probability of finding the particle. No more little billiard ball particles ever again, but an elusive cloud of possibility. His contributions were recognised in the 1954 Nobel Prize for Physics.

I've been scouring - well, glancing at - Olivia Newton-John's discography. Can we find traces of fundamental physics? I'm afraid I struggled. Those country songs about home towns and true love, Banks of the Ohio, Take Me Home Country Roads, If You Love Me Met Me Know, there's not much traction there. But here she is singing, Let Me Be There: an impossible request. When the listener carries out that experiment that reveals exactly where Olivia is, there is no way of telling where she will be found. There is a most likely position, and a region around that where she has, say, a 90% chance of being found but we can never say exactly where she will be. "Let me be there" is a plea that might be satisfied, by chance, but there is no agency that can see to it for her; no hidden variables that can be manipulated to her advantage.

"This is nonsense," you say. "If Olivia wants to be in Ohio, or Carradale, or in her lover's arms, of course she either will or won't be." In practical terms this is true. Quantum effects play no role in predicting positions on the scale of everyday life. But if Planck's constant were bigger, we would have to think about these possibilities and they are an essential part of understanding the subatomic world.

I doubt I'll be be there myself - sorry, too far from my musical comfort zone - and I don't expect any of this will trouble very many others in Olivia Newton-John's Celtic Connections audience. But really, if she sings Let me be there, feel free to ask her what her grandfather would think.