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.

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.

Things are not what they seem

This morning I dropped my wife off for the parkrun in Pollok Park and spent the next forty minutes exploring the Park's quieter corners - which means most of them at 9.30 AM on a damp Saturday morning. I was reminded of the first time I ever visited Pollok Park. I was in the last year of my Bachelor's degree. Finals were a few months away and everything was beginning to feel a little bit tense. A few of us made plans to visit Pollok House and get away from everything for an hour or two. We took the train to Pollokshaws West station and walked along the road and into the Park. All of a sudden we were away from traffic and city noise. I felt like I was exhaling fully for the first time in months. I realised I'd been tense for weeks or months or maybe since coming to Glasgow; maybe the tension of a country boy living in the rush and noise of the city.

The Park was beautiful and relaxing but what really struck me, what stayed with me, was this sudden realisation of part of my day-to-day life, evidently ever-present but somewhere below conscious awareness.

Walking around the Park, on a pretty dreich morning, prompted by this memory, thoughts turned to how much else of the world might be lurking somewhere beyond conscious awareness; a very natural topic for a physicist, maybe, but there are many, various, baroque versions of this thought.

Here's the "sound shadow" passage in Gravity's Rainbow:

...Suppose They don't want us to know there is a medium there, what used to be called an "aether," which can carry sound to every part of Earth. The Soniferous Aether. For millions of years the sun has been roaring, a giant, furnace, 93millionmile roar, so perfectly steady that generations of men have been born into it and passed out of it again, without ever hearing it. Unless it changed, how would anybody ever know?

Except that at night now and then, in some part of the dark hemisphere, because of eddies in the Soniferous Aether, there will come to pass a very shallow pocket of no-sound. For a few seconds, in a particular place, nearly every night somewhere in the world, sound-energy from Outside is shut off. The roaring of the Sun stops...

Are there good consequences from the resulting moment of revelation? Doesn't seem very likely. Anyway it's Gravity's Rainbow so the focus moves on.

Towards the end of Stanislaw Lem's Futurological Congress the main character sees a world of luxury dissolve to something very grim and grimy. A world on its way out is made bearable for most of its inhabitants only via mass administration of hallucinogenic drugs. How could we know if this were the case? And which is worse, the miserable state of full knowledge, or the happily deluded state?

After a few Philip K Dick books, for instance, we're no longer surprised when the rug of reality is pulled from under the main characters. This is a recurring theme in philosophically inclined science fiction, in movies just as much as books. The Matrix is an obvious example. They Live is a personal favourite, darkly satirical, pulpy to the core (underlined by the casting of an ex-pro wrestler in the title role). The main character comes across a pair of sunglasses that reveal the world as it truly is, a totalitarian state run for the benefit of hideous aliens, bedecked in subliminal messages: "Obey Authority" "Have Children" etc.

Could any of these entertainments be hinting accidentally at a true, hidden state of affairs? It would be fun (of a sort) but doesn't seem too likely. Nonetheless we are led, possibly willingly, possibly kicking and screaming, but inevitably nonetheless, to some very strange understandings or theories via a road that starts not at the feet of some 60s guru, nor in the glare of the psychedelic light show with the reek of pot in our nostrils, but with hard-nosed laboratory experiments. In this fundamental case what we can't know can't be fixed, however; there are no scales that can fall from our eyes.

I thought about related questions not so very long ago, in conversation with a fellow redundancy pool member. She reminded me of the frog in the pot of boiling water. Throw it in and it jumps straight back out. But sit it in a pot of cool water and heat it up gradually and it will just sit there, possibly not even remembering a time without pain.