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.

From Bern to Solvay

I spent last week at the International Space Science Institute (ISSI), Bern, Switzerland. I was there with a team of scientists aiming to understand better the role of energetic ions in solar flares.

Our team went really well, excellent discussions, progress on our key questions, but by Friday afternoon everybody else had left. I worked for a little bit on the team website before skiving off to become a tourist for a few hours. (Complete aside: let me mention how surprised I was by the etymology of skive. As one of those few thousand words we all had in common in school, and a very important one, I always assumed it was a Scots word; not according to the Oxford English Dictionary).

Albert Einstein lived in Bern for a few years at the very start of the 20th century, famously working as a patent clerk at the same time as puzzling over questions like, "how would the world look to somebody travelling with a beam of light?" A scientific paper he wrote in 1905 earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics and it probably isn't even the most important paper he published that year. The time he spent in Bern represents an extremely important episode in the history of science and it's no surprise that the apartment he lived in is now a tiny museum, the Einsteinhaus.

On Friday afternoon I visited the Einsteinhaus. There are nice displays on his family life, his career, his fame. Among them my eye was caught by a mounted print of the photo at left, showing attendees at the 1927 Solvay conference. It's a very famous photo, showing many of the biggest names in 20th century physics all together at the same meeting. Like most physicists I've seen it often, in various places, and noted for example CTR Wilson, our great Scottish genius of experimental physics, second from right at the front.

In the Einsteinhaus I took some minutes to look again at this picture. It's amusing to see the faces that go with those famous names. Who looks confident, bold, who shy and diffident? At the far left-hand side I was slightly surprised to spot two gentlemen almost side by side whose names are often met together in the textbooks, Messrs Peter Debye and Irving Langmuir. Langmuir is right at the left end of the front row, with a rather natty cane. The moustachioed Debye is peering over Langmuir's right shoulder.

In very hot gases, like those met in the outer layers of the Sun, collisions between atoms are sufficiently violent that they completely remove electrons; ionise the atoms. The constituents of the gas are electrically charged. We call the gas a plasma - a term first used by Langmuir, apparently. Plasma behaves in all sorts of new and interesting ways compared to the ordinary, neutral gas we're surrounded by here at sea level on Earth.

The Debye length is the greatest distance over which an electric field can persist in a plasma - because its constituents are electrically charged, if we try to impose an electric field the charges will just move to short it out. Langmuir waves are something like sound waves but with electric fields playing a central role. Their natural frequency, the plasma frequency, is one of the basic numbers that describe a plasma. The Debye length is another. In the first few pages of any book on plasma physics we meet the names of Langmuir and Debye so it tickled me to find the two of them side by side in the 1927 Solvay Conference picture.

Both were Nobel Prize winners, for Chemistry rather than Physics. Langmuir later became rather notorious for attempts at rain-making. The great German scientist Arnold Sommerfeld was once asked what was his greatest discovery. "Debye," he replied.

A maths problem

A very rare sort of alfalfa sprout is highly valued in the health food shops of the world. We discover that it grows wild on a remote, uninhabited Scottish island and set out to make lots of money. On our first visit we harvest one tonne. However the sprout population does not completely recover from harvesting and we soon discover that each harvest yields only 96% of the mass of the previous one, so that the second harvest gives us 0.96 tonnes, the third one 0.96² = 0.9216 tonnes, etc. Supposing we could go on indefinitely, what is the maximum total amount of sprout we could ever harvest from this island?

I look up

A smartphone makes it so easy to look at email. No dismal slow boot process; I can get straight to the latest spam, grumble, exciting research news. It's so easy to just deal with simple emails over the morning coffee, maybe also glance at news, Twitter, etc. All of a sudden it's time to rush out.

Last Thursday went exactly like this. Noticing the clock I rushed around, pulled on my bike gear, shot out to the garage where my bike is; helmet, bike lock, backpack pulled on, lock the garage again, time to zoom off to work.

The weather here has been cloudy and grey for a couple of weeks. Last Thursday was different. As I turned from locking the garage door a seagull caught my eye, brilliant white drifting leisurely across a featureless blue sky. Higher up two swallows darted about. It struck me that they'd probably been here since April or May without catching my eye until now, at the start of July. I wondered why I don't pause and look up more often.

Consume Red

As a young fellow I formed a rather definite view of university. One went there to learn from people who had worked over many years at understanding their chosen subjects, at developing their own sophisticated understanding and, in most cases, going beyond the books to contribute new ideas and knowledge. Often these people were strong, distinctive characters with broad interests. They WERE the university - not the buildings or the history - and one learnt so much from them, not just about their subjects but about being a person.

The original conception of this blog involved several authors, colleagues in the old DACE. Our several disciplines would bump up against each other and all sorts of conversations would take place, a virtual mirror of those that happened spontaneously in the corridors, or especially in some of the day schools when we took pleasure in mixing up different academic disciplines. That hasn't worked out so instead you get just me. If you're looking for a blog purely on astronomy, adult education, politics or whatever, you'll be disappointed. What's here is my own, personal jumble of interests. "How to build your blog" websites will tell you this is not how to build an audience. Sorry. Me is what's here.

There's been Astronomy, adult education and universities but the promised "clattery atonal music" has been gravely lacking. I've let the reader down badly - no Henry Cow, Derek Bailey, John Zorn. So here in seriously belated recompense is a link to Ground Zero's Consume Red. It starts with the shrill, piercing sound of the Korean hojok, played by Kim Suk Chul, 82nd valuable intangible cultural asset of the Republic of Korea; "brilliant music sacred enough to blow away any puny ideas about copyright." Over the next minutes the musicians of Ground Zero start to join in, scratchy, electric improvisation over the keening cry of the hojok, getting more coherent and louder until a huge, monolithic noise develops over a brutal, thumping rhythm section. It's intense, claustrophobic but fantastically invigorating; I know of few other recordings quite so crushing. I love it!

I don't think it should be freely available on YouTube like this but you wouldn't get to hear it if it wasn't. I bought a legit copy from ReR Megacorp - it's only £5.00 at the moment.

If you meet me in Glasgow University it may be in the hope of learning something about Maths, Physics or Astronomy. Perhaps there will be some illustration or remark based on a book, a film, music I've enjoyed; maybe less overwhelming than Consume Red but I hope they add to the experience anyway.

Tycho Brahe, Great Britain, internationalism

Last week we marked the end of this year's Access programme in the normal way, with a "presentation evening". We invite everybody who's completed Access to come along, with pals, parents, partners, children if they wish. There is a little ceremony in which they are each presented with a certificate testifying to their completion of Access and the grades they achieved - one of this year's students has shared a photo of his certificate on Instagram. At the end I made just a few concluding comments, leading to the most important points: "well done, and good luck for whatever comes next!"

To fill out the concluding comments I drew on some tales of Tycho Brahe, the 16th century Danish astronomer. These tales are not in short supply. Tycho must be the prototype of the gothic horror movie philosopher wizard in his castle, surrounded by an array of lurid courtiers. The real castle was called Uraniborg, designed according to thoroughly thought-out philosophical principles and constructed on the island of Hven, in the Øresund between Denmark and Sweden. It no longer exists but woodcuts and prints from the time show a most amazing building. He maintained a substantial household there, assistants and visiting students, as well as cooks, servants, estate workers, a lutenist and indeed a dwarf jester called Jeppe. Some more of the more lurid Tycho tales are recounted here.

The Brahes were one of the ruling families of Denmark and Tycho was born to power and influence. Most Brahes became soldiers or statesmen; the Church would have been a more normal route for an intellectually inclined child. Clearly Tycho was a strong character who forged his own path, but his high birth meant that no path was closed off to him. Now many, many more people are able to work at studying, understanding and advancing knowledge.

In 1590 the histories of Scotland and of Astronomy collided briefly when King James VI sailed across the North Sea to collect his new bride, Anne of Denmark. During his stay in Denmark he visited Uraniborg, "the spot to which the eyes of all the learned men of Europe were directed", and took great delight in the intellectual discussion he enjoyed there. Tycho corresponded regularly with other learned men across the continent, exchanging and developing ideas, and his name was widely known (and yes, they were "men" - sorry, that's the way it was). Scots visitors to Uraniborg were not so terribly unusual and Tycho knew people in Scotland. Before he left Denmark King James granted Tycho a 30 year copyright on his works in Scotland, and presented him with two large guard dogs.

I wanted to use this story to illustrate the international character of academic research, and in particular to emphasise that this has been the case for hundreds of years. I wanted also to make a further point about the value of meeting people from other countries and cultures, as one will in higher education, and the importance of making them welcome, irrespective of one's voting preference in the EU referendum. I was happy that everybody in the room, as far as I could see, wanted to applaud at this point.

King James VI, of course, also became James I of England shortly, although it took a further century for the Parliaments to follow where simple heredity had first led. With the integrity of the United Kingdom once again up for discussion, this incident from four centuries ago seems to resonate in several respects with the worrying modern world.

Scotland

"....Scotland as a damp, brooding place in which man's nobler instincts are invariably forced to confront a recurring cycle of evil brought on by politics and financial gain. Even the Christian institution of marriage is portrayed as a breeding ground for insanity and death,....." I edited out the word "medieval" at the beginning. Didn't seem necessary, really. Naughty me. These words are from http://www.mondo-digital.com/tess.html, by the way.