Archives

I spent 90 minutes in the University Archives. While I was inside the pavements turned white. I trudged and slid back across the campus to the St Andrews Building. Don't think my glow of excitement actually melted the snow but you never know.

I'd spent my 90 minutes looking through some of the material donated to the University by Jessie Wilson, daughter of the Scottish physicist and Nobel Prize winner CTR Wilson. In a few weeks' time I'm giving a Hunterian Museum Insight talk about him. It was quite a privilege to handle some of his original cloud chamber photos and select a couple that will accompany the talk.

I've been interested in Wilson's story for years now. While I'm suspicious of personality cults around scientists I think we should celebrate our great scientists' achievements as we celebrate those of musicians, writers, sportsmen and women. A man who found his inspiration in the first place in the Scottish mountains offers an appealing way into stories of fundamental science, of subatomic particles and supernova explosions. I've given my "Lochaber to the Cosmos" talk to many different kinds of group in very many different places - and will do so again tonight, at the Scottish Dark Sky Observatory (sold out, apparently - I'm excited to be visiting it for the first time, by the way).

There are some other reasons for spending time with this tale. It's often been commented that the cloud chamber would have waited a long time for its invention had it not been for a very particular combination of events, people, coincidences of place and personality. So this story underlines that it's people who do science, not machines or robots or faceless organisations. That often comes up in discussion when there are professional scientists in the audience.

Maybe you and I will meet soon to talk about Wilson, Ben Nevis, the cloud chamber and the origins of cosmic ray science, tonight at the SDSO, on 17 March at the Hunterian - with a couple of Wilson's original pictures to hand - or somewhere else. Hope so!

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.

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.