Happy New Year!

A new year, 2012, wahaay!

Maybe we should ignore the man-made transition of the New Year. Instead we could arrange our lives around the solstices. What better point in the year to pause and take stock than on the shortest day, with the poor, enfeebled Sun struggling briefly above the horison? (yes, I'm writing from fairly high latitude) On the other hand, maybe a week or two later, with the days beginning to lengthen, isn't such a bad idea: we wouldn't want our stock-taking dominated by the dark thoughts that feed on short days.

What does 2012 hold? Early 2010 brought a redundancy pool and early 2011 the proposal to close DACE. But let's go with the lengthening days and try to look past these bruising experiences. Our new location makes continuing education a matter of importance across Glasgow University, as it should be in every university. We'll have encouragement and support to look at new sorts of activity, which may make us useful to people we haven't met before. We may be encouraged to work more with external organisations (see for instance our upcoming series of Saturday morning Astronomy talks, offered with our friends at the Glasgow Science Centre in their marvellous planetarium).

UK higher education is in a state of rapid change, in a way that many find deeply worrying. Our experiences in DACE must be seen as a tiny, local aspect of much bigger trends that will not suddenly reverse. New sorts of rocky time don't seem so unlikely.

But for now we'll look to the north-heading Sun. Busy, exciting, challenging - and lengthening - days ahead.

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.

Mind-boggling things to see with your own eyes....

....possibly with some help from a small telescope.

The M101 supernova is harder than ever to see now. Let's emphasise just how mind-boggling several other, less elusive, maybe less hyped sky sights are.

1. Crab Nebula Quite a small telescope (e.g. 3" refractor) will show the Crab Nebula clearly, although it does suffer in light polluted conditions. Look closely at the ESO image. What is that strange blue glow it's shrouded in, that seems to overlay the coloured filaments? It's synchrotron radiation, the glow of electrons moving at 99.999999..% of the speed of light (i.e.with enormous individual energies) in the presence of a magnetic field. Synchrotron radiation seems to lack any sort of easy description on the WWW. Anyway here's the Wikipedia article, too technical for many but including a nice historical bit. Those electrons are so energetic ultimately because of the Crab nebula's pulsar; a routine kind of object to strophysicists but still, let's face it, extremely exotic. And this is some of the glow you see in a small telescope.
   
2. White dwarf A stellar ember, the mass of the Sun but the size of the Earth, glowing now only because it's still hot from its glory days as the core of a star. A spoonful does indeed weigh a ton. The white dwarf in the triple star system Keid is maybe one of the easiest to spot in a small telescope, as people in some of my DACE classes have seen.
   
3. The Andromeda galaxy Not immediately arresting, often hidden in urban light pollution, this enigmatic, elongated smudge is nonetheless quite obvious to the naked eye if you're somewhere reasonably dark and you look in roughly the right place. Who would have guessed, in the time before telescopes, that it represents the summed-up light of 100,000,000,000 stars? That had taken two and a half million years to reach us? And yet there it is in plain view.
   
4. The Milky Way that ethereal band of light, so familiar to people of earlier cultures, sadly now buried in light pollution for most Earthlings. Its appearance tells us we live in the middle of an enormous, disk-shaped system of stars, gas and dust; our own galaxy. Here's a fabulous panorama.
   
5. The darkness between the stars tells us that our Universe started at a finite time in the past. Really.
   

In small telescopes the Crab Nebula and Andromeda galaxy are just smudges, and any white dwarf just a wee faint star. It's looking at them in the knowledge of their natures that makes them really fascinating.

"German satellite hurtling towards Earth"

ROSAT, a German satellite is indeed "hurtling towards Earth", as the Guardian and many other news outlets have been telling us in recent days. Well, "hurtling" isn't quite accurate, but it'll reach us sometime in the next few days as its orbit gradually decays (in fact, since I typed this it looks as though it's come down).

I was slightly surprised to learn it hadn't come down a long time ago. It was a pioneering X-ray astronomy space mission of the early 1990s. When the first X-ray detectors were thrown briefly up above the atmosphere on rockets, there were no great expectations. This was in 1962 and imaginations stretched only to a faint glow from the Sun's million-degree outer atmosphere, or possibly from the Moon's surface as energetic particles in the solar wind smashed into it. As the world knows, the results were much more exciting: bright, point sources of X-rays beyond the solar system, among the stars of the Milky Way; a cosmic "background", X-rays coming from all directions on the sky; X-radiation from the Crab Nebula. A new window had opened on the high-energy universe of black holes and neutron stars; nobody thought much about X-rays from the Moon for a long time.

ROSAT closed this particular historical circle by detecting, for the first time, X-rays from the Moon. The ROSAT image of the Moon, illuminated only on its sunward side, looks so familiar that you might need to look twice and think about it to realise just how amazing it is. It is lit up only on the sunward side because the Moon's surface is reflecting X-rays from the Sun (strictly, scattering those X-rays, and apparently also fluorescing).

ROSAT was used to make many important advances in X-ray astronomy; a brief list is here. I always had a soft spot for it because it closed the lunar loose end. None of this prevented its fiery doom, however, which no doubt is as it should be. None of us escapes his doom, watery, fiery or otherwise, no matter what sort of songs we've sung in the meantime.

None of the news reports let us forget it was a German space mission, rather than, say an "X-ray telescope", "orbiting X-ray laboratory" or some such border-less phrase. I wonder why? If it had actually fallen on somebody's head, would the German nation have been held to account? Would we have seen invoked the ghost of Wernher van Braun? I'm really not sure what's behind this.

One of the best Universities in the world

I wanted to black out the room for the sake of my powerpoint slides but the blind was broken. "And this is one of the top hundred universities in the world!" I joked. The students laughed. None of them corrected me although the latest Times World University Rankings had in fact just placed us at 102 in the world.

Are these league tables useful? I don't know. I'm sure there are people who consider them to be useful if they seem to support decisions already made. Maybe extremely affluent parents will look closely at them before deciding where in the globe to dispatch their glittering young things.

Every university manager in the country will be staring at their own position, asking themselves, "What can we do to move further up next year?" They'll be looking at the Universities they regard as close competitors. Cal Tech people must be really worried: the best they can do is stand still. Although we moved up 26 places I'm sure our leaders will be cross we didn't break the top 100 (we were a top 100 university two years ago, I think - or was that somebody else's list?).

The Times are very proud of their table. I'm sure they have thought in advance of possible criticisms, probably had to meet them in previous years. They make use of 13 separate prefomrance indctors (sorry, I can't type those words spasm-free) under five headline categories. Because they "recognise that different users have different priorities" the tables can be manipulated and customised (to some degree - haven't tried to play with them myself yet).

We can't do better than quote Einstein: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." Numerical tables based on PI's inevitably focus on phenomena that can be counted. Inevitably these only capture part of the activity they're intended to describe. But they take on weight through the league tables so there will be good consequences for those who push them up and bad stuff is more likely to happen to those who don't - even if they contribute to their universities in ways that don't get caught in the PI's.

The choice of PI's and weightings represents a statement of values. Worst of all is the possibility that these values are formed by accident, rather than constituting the starting point for this exercise.

How should Principals and Vice-Chancellors respond? Well, they have presumably thought long and hard about what a University is, its function in society, and the means by which that function can be carried out. This should be their starting point and the extent to which the league tables support those values should be the starting point of their response. Anything less would devolve to the newspapers the job of leading the universities.

LabLit

I'm having a day off (is it sad that I do this sort of thing on a day off?). Via the familiar procrastinating internet directed random walk I came across this really interesting website: http://www.lablit.com/ "LabLit" aspires to be a literary movement rooted in the real lives of scientists. Its progenitor, Jennifer Rohn has written a couple of novels in exactly this spirit. One of them, for example, is an engaging romantic thriller set against the backdrop of contemporary scientific research. Sounds good. Even as ("just") a romantic thriller in an unusual setting it would be interesting, a way of illuminating the life of the professional scientist. But it goes further, apparently weaving science into the heart of the story, the resolution of the mystery; just as science tends to keep mattering in the lives of scientists after 5.30 in the evening.

LabLit sounds a great idea to me. "Scientists are humans" sounds trite but also goes to the heart of what science is and what it does, in a hundred ways: how it functions, how it impacts on society more widely, how the ideas current in society more widely feed into scientific discovery.... LabLit can only help this principle, and its consequences, to be understood.

Of course I'm thinking of astronomical LabLit examples. I haven't read the book, but Contact is one of the best science-fiction movies I've seen, partly because of its depiction of the life of the working scientist: the large facility locations, the collegiality that grows among small groups of people with shared aims and interests, the search for funding, for justifying your passions more widely, etc. I guess the movie is fairly close to the book in many ways and that it also does this job nicely. (Do I need to mention, however, that nobody I know has yet as part of their work traveled to the centre of the Galaxy or met aliens taking the forms of family members?)

My eye was caught by Total Eclipse when I spotted it in the Biblocafe. I liked its early chapters describing life in an Observatory: again a fairly realistic depiction of the community of researchers, mixed characters jumbled up together in their wee, closed world living a life both intense and dull at the same time. A total eclipse of the Sun is one of the most amazing sights possible in a human life, however, and the dismal account near the end of the book is just not on. There is a subplot involving accusations of data faking whose resolution, unfortunately, makes no sense in terms of actual research practice. This was the author's first novel and she may have fallen on the wrong side of the "building deliberately/boring" divide; my wife, who reads lots of crime fiction, ditched it after a chapter or two. Other people seem to have enjoyed it but as LabLit it's a bit of a mixed success.

Both of these examples predate Jenny Rohn's movement. There must be more I don't know about - maybe you could tell me in the Comments below?

Here's the usual DACE tie-in: in the adult education setting this human side of science comes out very naturally, the stories of personalities, arguments, how and where ideas developed, what it's like to spend time at CERN or big telescopes.... And it would come from the horse's mouth, maybe even better than from fiction. You all know this; we'll see you there.

Now, on a day off after several weekends of work commitments, I really should smell fresh air.

Can I see the M101 supernova?

The supernova in M101 is undeniably exciting, the nearest and brightest since SN1987a. What a COMPLETELY MIND-BOGGLING thing this would be to see with your own eyes! The media have, quite rightly, been encouraging people to go and look for it themselves. But I do think they're overstating how easy it will be to see. It's great that lots of people who don't normally look at the sky will be doing so. How likely is it that they will find and recognise the supernova?

Here's the bottom line: it can be seen in binoculars, but bigger, more powerful ones than most (non-astronomer) people will have handy. The supernova will be one of many wee, faint stars in the field of view; working out which one might need a wee bit of care and effort. It might not be as easy as it sounded on TV, but it's still more than worth the effort. The rest of the post fleshes out this view.

Astronomers use a funny system called magnitude to talk about the brightness of objects in the sky. Faint objects have large values of magnitude, bright objects have smaller values. The bright stars have magnitudes between 0 and 1. The brightest star, Sirius, has a negative magnitude, -1.4. The faintest stars you can see with the naked eye, in a very dark place a long way from street lights, will have magnitudes somewhere between 6 and 7, depending on exactly how dark it is. In my suburban back garden one can't usually see stars fainter than about magnitude 5. Sometimes it's worse than this. In the city centre light pollution will hide most stars, even those with magnitudes of 3 or 4.

The supernova has a magnitude of about 10, which means it is much too faint to be seen with the naked eye. You need some sort of optical aid, binoculars or a telescope. 10 is a lot bigger than 6, so tiny wee binoculars, like you might stick in your pocket to take to a big gig or the theatre, won't be big enough.

Two numbers describe your binoculars: magnification; and diameter of the lenses (in mm). So, 7 by 50 binoculars (for example) have lenses of 50 mm diameter and they magnify everything 7 times (i.e. make things 7 times bigger). If they magnify more than 10 times, or have lenses bigger than 50 mm, they're physically difficult to use without a tripod to steady them.

Here is a very detailed study of how faint you can see with binoculars of various sizes and magnifications. You probably won't want to trawl through it, so let me skip straight to the bottom line. 10 by 50 binoculars are the absolute minimum that might show the supernova. You will need to be somewhere that you can see stars at least as faint as mag. 5.5 with the naked eye - certainly not in a big town, or the poor wee supernova will just be lost in the general sky glow. If your binoculars need cleaned, or weren't high quality to begin with, they won't do the trick. You have a much better chance with e.g. 20 by 80 or 25 by 100 binoculars, big beasts that are too heavy to just hold without a tripod, and sufficiently specialised to be found in very few houses. Here I'm in complete agreement with the Berkeley Lab video about the supernova.

With my own 7 by 50 binoculars and in my suburban back garden, I know I will struggle to see things fainter than about magnitude 9. To see the supernova I will have to use a telescope, or borrow bigger and more powerful binoculars from somebody.

How would I know where to point the binoculars? That's explained quite nicely in this video, from the Lawrence Berkeley Lab in the USA. Actually what's explained is how to find M101, the galaxy in which the supernova has taken place. If your sky is dark enough and your telescope or binoculars big and powerful enough for M101 to be visible, a wee faint star amidst the glow of the galaxy will be unmistakable. If you have a telescope with "GoTo" technology - and you know how to use it - you can just tell the telescope to find M101.

But, as the Sky and Telescope article mentions, the galaxy M101 is quite large, as such objects go. Its surface brightness is low, even although its total magnitude is quite large, and it may be hard to see against the glow of the sky, especially if there is light pollution. In my back garden it is invisible in binoculars, and even with a very high quality 70 mm telescope (much more detail in this excellent book). So the galaxy may not be visible as a marker. Then the question becomes: "which of the several wee faint stars in my binocular field of view is the one I'm interested in?" In my opinion, this needs some preparation. You will not just point your binoculars in the right place and go, "oh wow, there's the supernova". One possibility is to study the Berkeley Lab Youtube video. Freeze it and practice recognising the stars immediately around M101 and the supernova. Stellarium is wonderful, free software that shows you what's in the sky. It will help you find M101 but I don't think it includes stars as faint as 10. Cartes du Ciel will do this for you, if you download all the possible star catalogues with it, but it is maybe not quite as easy to use as Stellarium. You could use the link to the AAVSO website in the Sky and Telescope article but the resulting chart is also a wee bit technical in nature.

I think TV and some newspapers have made seeing the supernova sound easier than it really is, at least for people who haven't previously looked much at the sky. If you're willing to point a (big enough) pair of binoculars to the right part of the sky and be happy that one of those little points of light is probably the supernova, that's not so tricky. Really finding the supernova and being confident that you have seen it is also perfectly possible, but needs more attention and probably a bit of preparation before you go outside. Serious amateur astronomers will know all this already, so perhaps the best solution is to get in touch with your local Astronomy society. There you'll find people who can do these things confidently.

It's great that people are getting fired up to look at the sky and that the phenomenon of the supernova has caught so many peoples' imagination. It may be harder to see than the media have suggested, but what more amazing incentive could there be for a little bit of care and attention?

I had useful discussions on Twitter with Robert Massey and Pete Lawrence.

(added the summary paragraph near the top, 9 Sept)