Open Studies Astronomy bulletin

A few times a year I send out a wee email bulletin for people who come to some of our courses (let me know if you'd like to get these). The aim is to let them know - or remind them - of Glasgow University Open Studies Astronomy and Physics courses and day schools, and to highlight other interesting events in the Glasgow area. Here's the latest:

1. IMMINENT

   I've only just heard that the Scottish Dark Sky Observatory is hosting a visit from the science writer Stuart Clark, TOMORROW, 10 May. Stuart Clark is an excellent writer on Astronomy and Physics topics ("The Sun Kings"; "The Sky's Dark Labyrinth"; regular pieces in the Guardian). You may also have seen him interviewed by Philomena Cunk on the subject of "time" on Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe - clearly a man who doesn't take himself too seriously. I haven't heard him speak but I've heard good things. See http://www.scottishdarkskyobservatory.co.uk/events/dr-stuart-clark-lecture-and-stargazing/

2. The Institute of Physics are now hosting a series of talks here in Glasgow, aimed at a very broad audience. The titles so far have been really interesting, to my eye, including both pure and applied topics. The next of these will be given on Thursday 15 May, 19.00 in the Kelvin Building here in the University, by Dr Stuart Reid from the University of the West of Scotland: "Giving stem cells a good nano-kicking". More details at http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/martin/ioplect/
3. Glasgow City of Science has a new website to showcase the city as a leading international destination for scientific discovery and innovation. Their words: "A diverse range of influential, partner organisations with local, national and international reach have come together through the Glasgow City of Science initiative to leverage our scientific potential as a major driver of sustainable economic development and to demonstrate the importance of communicating science as part of the region’s wider heritage and culture." So the City of Science project is about industry and companies, but also education and outreach. You'll find lots of interesting events on their Events page, and you might like to subscribe to their e-bulletin.
4. We ourselves have a couple of Astronomy events in the summer programme:

   Astronomy when the skies are bright, ideas and activities to stay involved with the wider universe even although it's difficult to see in Scotland in the summer. Douglas Cooper, Andrew Conway and myself; Saturday 24 May, 10.00 - 15.00

   Weighing the Earth on Schiehallion, Perthshire, recalling Nevil Maskelyne's fundamental experiment to determine the mass of the Earth, and taking a day to actually visit the mountain. With Andrew Conway, who in 2005 was involved in an attempt to repeat this experiment with modern equipment. Evening of 18 June and all day 21 June.

Mercury

One Sunday in the winter of, I guess, 1990, I set out for a day in the hills with my pal Douglas. We set out to climb Ben Ledi, that bold, conspicuous mountain near Callander. It was one of those warm, windy winters we were seeing then and the hills were not enticing but I was going stir crazy in the city.

The day was very windy. I think there were 80 mph gusts. At least one stride was thwarted completely because the wind blew me backwards as far as I would have stepped forwards. Douglas thought this was hilarious: "that's the first time I've seen somebody actually blown backwards through the air!"

Bizarrely for that time of year there was almost no snow. The ascent was hard work but we reached the top and made it back to the car without any undue occurrence. Then things got slightly weird.

There is a fairly big parking space at the bottom of Ben Ledi, at the Callander end of Loch Lubnaig. I had borrowed my wife's car, a white Vauxhall Astra with a great big, blue and black letter "M" on the side, logo of her employer at the time, Mercury Communications. We walked across the park towards it, past a minibus into which several men were climbing. They paused and glared at us as we walked past. There was some muttering and nudging. They didn't speak but their faces told a definite story: they hated us. Two of them were getting into another car nearer us. One of them said, "you're lucky your car's still here, mate." I peered at them, reading their tee-shirts: "British Telecom hill-walking club". "It's the wife's," I said - truthfully, although I doubt they believed me. Everybody laughed and the moment passed but for a few minutes those BT employees wanted to kill us. At Margaret Thatcher's bidding, Mercury was going to rob them of their jobs. Anybody in a Mercury car was their class enemy.

Mercury symbols on manhole covers still decorate the streets. This one is on Eldon Street, just along the road from my office. Each time it catches my eye I remember that grey, dreich winter day when the BT hillwalking club wanted to beat me up. Then I was newly married; now my children are in university. That brief moment of tension captured a larger moment in British social history but nonetheless still resonates, particularly as I cross the campus of Britain's fourth oldest university.

The processes set in motion then are still in play. The current government seems to place a religious faith in markets, that kind of faith which evidence leaves unshaken. That the state should be almost the only provider of higher education is intolerable to them, so they are determined to "bring greater diversity to the higher education sector". Companies, the entities that make up markets, do not exist to nurture fully informed citizens capable of thinking critically and playing a full role in society; nor to curate and transmit existing knowledge and create new. Companies exist to maximise profits. We only have to look at for-profit higher education in the USA to see how badly things can go wrong, how completely the profit motive can undermine any value that higher education could have had for students and the rest of society. It's extremely disappointing that our government seems to be encouraging companies linked to bad practice in the USA. It's almost as if big companies are automatically a Good Thing, no matter how they actually behave. I'm glad to see our union opposing this trend. Unfortunately all the media now relegate such discussions to the Politics or Education sections, well away from the eyes of anybody who's not already interested. See "NHS privatisation".

You thought this was going to be about Mercury, didn't you, planet closest to the Sun, smallest of the terrestrial planets, whose orbit evolves in a way that needs General Relativity for its complete explanation? Possibly the very exciting MESSENGER mission? Sorry. But as I criss-cross the campus between my various roles, those little souvenirs of Margaret Thatcher's Britain keep reminding me of a windy day on Ben Ledi.

Roped Santas and Schrödinger's Cat

On the wall of my sister-in-law's very hospitable house in Aberdeen were several Santas on a string, reminiscent of a roped-up party of mountaineers. "What do you do if you and your climbing partner are walking along a ridge, roped together, and your partner falls off?" A discussion of the correct course of action (leaping off the other side of the ridge) led fairly quickly to Touching the Void and the awful decision faced by Simon Yates. On the end of the rope, was his climbing partner Joe Simpson alive or dead? As the world knows, Yates eventually had no option but to cut the rope and Simpson's subsequent survival forms the incredible heart of the book.

Already leaning to the tortuous, the conversation then got bendier: "like the cat in the box," said my daughter. She was drawing a parallel between the mental state of Simon Yates, not knowing if Joe Simpson was alive or dead on the end of the rope, and the hypothetical scientist of Erwin Schrödinger's famous thought experiment.

I guess most people reading this will have heard of Schrödinger's Cat. Here's a quick recap, just in case. Schrödinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, was seriously unhappy with its implications. To highlight what he felt to be their absurdity he devised the thought experiment involving the cat in the box. The box is sealed and we can't see inside it. There is a jar containing poison gas and a mechanical device which will break the jar and kill the cat, if a radioactive atomic nucleus decays and makes a Geiger counter type device go, "click". Before the box is opened the cat is in a superposition of dead and alive states. Only the opening of the box, and the act of observation, forces one of these outcomes or the other. The decay of the atomic nucleus is a quantum event which has to be understood in this way. The ingenious, if brutal experiment allows the strangeness of the quantum world to have consequences in the macroscopic world of living things. The idea of a superposition of living and dead cats appears so contrary to sense that Schrödinger hoped to persuade people it couldn't possibly be correct.

Joe Simpson, on the end of the rope, was alive. Simon Yates didn't know this but any "superposition" of a dead Simpson and a living one existed only in Yates' mind. The whole point of Schrödinger's Cat is that the cat is genuinely in a mix of alive and dead states until the intervention of an observer "collapses the wavefunction" and forces one or other of the two outcomes. It's about much more than just the state of knowledge of the experimenter. But we had quite a conversation about this point, subtle or possibly even daft to somebody who hasn't spent some time getting familiar with the background to quantum mechanics.

I was impressed that my daughter had heard of Schrödinger's Cat, an amusing diversion for students of physics. I guess this superposed pussy has earned Schrödinger much more fame than his formulation of wave mechanics, the starting point in the serious study of the quantum world, and the computational tool that underlies so many everyday devices in this era of digital, semiconductor electronics.

But don't worry, festive bloggees, it wasn't all quantum mechanics and gazing into the abyss until it gazes back. Under the watchful eyes of the roped-up Santas we also played Cluedo and the board game version of Pointless, ate and drank too much, inflicted Xmas pressie CD's on each other and went outside very little. Soon be Hogmanay.