Swans

Let's start in familiar territory. In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking dragged God into the popularisation of Physics. In what was probably only ever meant to be a throwaway comment he suggested that success with a unified theory of the fundamental forces and particles would be equivalent to "knowing the mind of God". The G-word was invoked by more than one of the scientists involved in the COBE experiment. COBE measured the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation, the ripples in the early universe that eventually developed into the clusters of galaxies we see today; no stars, no planets, no us without those ripples. One of its Principal Investigators, George Smoot was (probably mis-)quoted: this discovery was "like seeing the face of God".

What would the face of God look like? (Atheists, please don't stop reading) I'm not convinced that sight of it would be pleasant.

You've lived for a few months in a huge, ancient, rambling house bought with the substantial wealth your mysteriously absent father somehow accumulates. You don't go to school. In the mornings, impatiently but with some flair, your mother teaches you mathematics, philosophy, history, some sciences, a couple of foreign languages, all of which you gobble up effortlessly, unaware you're years ahead of your contemporaries in attainment. In the afternoons Mum drinks sweet wine and watches DVD's of Doris Day movies. You're left to roam the house, to speculate on the functions of the peculiarly shaped furniture left in the upstairs rooms and the significance of the sombre grotesques painted on the wood panels of the less well-lit corridors.

One day at the end of an upstairs corridor you open a door you've ignored until now. You're surprised to find a previously unsuspected staircase, steep, narrow, uncarpeted, leading to a previously unknown part of the house. At the bottom of the stairs a few doors open off a corridor, empty, musky rooms with little interest. Under the stairs there is a small cupboard door which you open. After some moments peering into darkness you're astonished to see two large eyes looking back at you, solemn and expressionless. As you stare the face gets easier to see and you realise that it is shining more and more brightly itself. Your eyes start to hurt and you're aware of awful danger but it's too late. Brilliant mind is unprepared and body inadequate to deal with what happens next. The last episode of intolerable pain combines with an impression of incandescent beauty and you're grateful for the sense of transcendence that fills your last moments.

Last night I saw the American band Swans play live at the Arches here in Glasgow. Swans' fearsome reputation is nicely summarised in this review of a gig in Boston a couple of months ago. I was vaguely aware of their music but didn't know it well and had never seen them live before. As friends know I enjoy music that pushes at the edges in some way, technically, sonically, just emotionally. Although slightly wary, particularly of the stories of extreme volume, I thought I'd give Swans a go.

The opening number started slowly and quietly, with a sort of slow, psychedelic music. This is OK, like space rock but better, I thought; and of course the lyrics were more interesting, straight to some existential statement. "There are millions and millions of stars in your eyes," sang Michael Gira, a couple of times. His arms were outstreched in messianic style. I knew some upsurge was imminent but I was still shocked by the huge blast of sound that erupted, a furiously strummed chord, crashing drums, sustained without change for maybe a minute. My trousers flapped, maybe also my jacket. For a moment I thought I might throw up. The noise stopped, the space rock sounds resumed briefly and then the noise started for another minute or so; tens of seconds at least. This pattern repeated five or six times and the song came to an end. It struck me that these enormous blasts of noise were not just kids making a racket - these guys are my age and they've been doing it for decades - but a very deliberate reaching for a transcendent state through sheer volume and a sort of heavy metal minimalist repetition: what would it feel like with "millions and millions of stars in your eyes"?

(I shouldn't even mention heavy metal. Entertainment for kids. Cartoon music compared to this.)

Just a few songs kept this incredible, overwhelming racket going for a couple of hours. Early on I felt I might just leave but I resisted that urge; the point was to take the noise, to learn from it. I didn't feel physically sick again after the first song. I did wonder more than once if the bones of my ribcage might be shaken loose. Once I put my finger in my ear to see if there was blood (there wasn't).

Most of the intense music I enjoy reaches for transcendence by very technical means, playing fast, loud certainly, achromatic, building tension with odd time signatures and additive rhythms, exploring the extended possibilities of the instruments; free jazz starting from John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman for instance, or the "avant" end of progressive rock. Swans' music is not hugely technical. It struck me that this is deliberate, part of its mechanism. It would be wrong to put guitar solos in this music, or polyrhythms or cleverness, it would rob it of its sheer weight. It would be dishonest. Nonetheless there is a subtlety and art in it, because they are able to increase tension slowly, over say ten minutes, from a state already almost overwhelming in its intensity.

Towards the end of the gig I'd stopped thinking, waiting for something different to happen. I simply felt the sound and its changes from one moment to the next, lived in the middle of it. I was a recalcitrant child brought to heel, led to the correct behaviour by insistent repetition. I understood the look of ecstacy on Michael Gira's face.

It struck me that the Arches had become an extreme place, somewhere with a strange and terrible beauty, with amazing rewards for those with the stomach to tolerate it but a place that many would choose to avoid; maybe back to Herzog territory. Pals know that I've enjoyed a lot of gigs that would make most peoples' hair stand on end but this was still a stand-out of extreme intensity. Did I enjoy that gig? I'm still not sure. I'm also not sure if I would go to see them again but I'm glad I've been once.

"Spirituality" and "transcendence" are words often used in connection with Swans' music. I think that fearsome, repetitive noise aims to look on the face of God (although they might not say it that way). I also think these transcendent experiences enrich life whether or not you consider yourself religious. Many of my fellow scientists have had interesting, thoughtful things to say on religion (a wee example). Before they drag God casually into science popularisation, however, I think they should experience Swans live.

Phew

busy, busy weeks. Seven hours of teaching per week, all squeezed into a 26 hour period that starts at 19.30 on a Wednesday. Two more hours will be added soon (I know, from outside academia seven hours may not sound like a lot, but each hour of face to face contact needs more hours of preparation). Also:

• a school pupil spent a week doing work experience with me. Very rewarding for me, I think new and exciting for her
• we had our first Cosmic Way public event, a mix of cosmic ray and subatomic physics, solar-terrestrial interactions, and Scottish science history, hopefully made accessible for all sorts of people. Watch that website, by the way - more to come. Special mention for the music by Drew Mulholland.
• we were visited by Christian Monstein, from ETH Zurich, who helped us to establish a wee radio telescope looking for bursts of radio waves from the Sun. Our telescope uses Christian's Callisto receiver, and contributes its data to the e-Callisto network. Here's our first solar radio burst - doesn't look like much, I know - we'll open it up in other blog postings. Here is Christian's report of its setting-up
• the Centre for Open Studies had its official launch event, a very nice day with taster sessions on many of our subjects (yes, including Astronomy), and with representatives from many of friends in other organisations, like the Astronomical Society of Glasgow
• I took a couple of posters to the Royal Astronomical Society discussion meeting on solar radiophysics, one on our e-Callisto node and the other on the work Aline Dinkelaker and I carried out together, asking: "do solar flares behave like avalanches or cascades?"

And of course all the other jobs that go with the start of the teaching year and with keeping the research going, some just as interesting as those I've listed. Too much blogging - back to work.

Solar flare prediction?

Maybe I lost some friends with the Spice Girls blog. Let's turn to more familar topics.

Solar flares, the subjects of my own research, were in the news recently. A group of scientists in the USA believe they have a new solar flare prediction technique. I thought I'd discuss this new idea here, mostly because it was in the news but also because it's pretty wild! If correct - and that's probably a big "if" - its implications go a long way beyond satellite engineering to genuinely new physics.

A solar flare is an explosion on the Sun, a sudden release of energy from the Sun's magnetic field. Patches of the Sun's surface brighten up briefly, typically for some minutes, and radio waves, X-rays and ultraviolet light are emitted. A big flare is usually accompanied by a cloud of material expelled from the Sun into interplanetary space: a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). When a CME arrives at Earth it can trigger the sort of magnetic storms that give us beautiful displays of the Northern Lights, but may also shut down power lines and electronic communications. CME's can be a threat to satellites and technologies that rely on them: telecommunications, GPS, etc.

A group of American researchers in Purdue University have announced a possible new method for predicting flares, maybe more than a day before they actually occur. Our technologically sophisticated society is more and more reliant on satellites and telecommunications so there is a lot of interest in flare prediction. So far such forecasts are of the "20% chance of an X-class flare in the next 24 hours" type. You can find examples at e.g. the Solar Influences Data Center in Brussels. It would be extremely useful if there was a technique that could say, "there will be an X-class flare 24 - 28 hours from now".

Professors Jenkins and Fischbach, the Purdue researchers, have been studying radioactive decay. Suppose we have a lump of a radioactive substance, say 1 kg of silicon 32 (which we write ³²Si - not the usual sort of silicon found in bathroom sealants and breast implants, but a radioactive isotope). We switch on a Geiger counter, a radiation detector (for younger readers: here's a great video demonstrating a Geiger counter in action. They were often seen in Cold War era science fiction, e.g. when the scientists in The Thing from Another World find the crashed alien spaceship). Normally the counter goes 'click' roughly 10 times per minute (on average; some minutes it will be 8, or 9, or 11, or 12; more rarely 3, say, or 20; much more rarely 0 or 30; etc.). This represents the normal, 'background' level of radiation, due mostly to tiny quantities of radioactive substance found everywhere. If we bring the counter near to the ³²Si it starts to click more rapidly. This tells us that this substance is radioactive, possibly dangerous if we get too close. We can go further and count the clicks. Then we can calculate how rapidly nuclei of ³²Si change into something else, i.e. decay. Different substances decay more or less rapidly. Some are gone in microseconds, some last for billions of years. ³²Si decays rapidly enough to give reasonable numbers of clicks in the counter, but not so rapidly that it's all gone before the experiment is over.

The rate of decay is a property of the nucleus of the atom of the particular isotope. We believe it doesn't depend on anything else: how hot the stuff is, presence of other substances, magnetic fields.... We don't expect the decay rate ever to vary. We believe it will be the same, for the same substance, everywhere in the Universe. Professors Fischbach and Jenkins find that the rate of decay of certain substances seems to vary during the year. The number of clicks per minute in the Geiger counter (for example) varies very slightly, at about the tenth of a percent level; slightly greater than average in January and slightly less in July. More than one group of scientists has made this discovery so it looks like it's real - but it's definitely unexpected!

Earth's distance from the Sun is not quite constant, varying by about 3% over the course of a year. Fischbach and Jenkins note that the decay rate of ³²Si is greatest when Earth is closest to the Sun: could radioactive decay on Earth be influenced by something to do with the Sun? They go on to speculate that almost massless, subatomic particles called neutrinos might be the means for the Sun to influence radioactivity here on Earth. Vast numbers of neutrinos continually escape from the nuclear furnace of the Sun's deep core. They are detected - with difficulty - here on Earth, allowing us to confirm our ideas of what happens deep inside the Sun. Neutrinos would have to behave in ways we don't presently know about for slight variations in their numbers to have such effects on laboratory radioactivity. So this is either wrong, or extremely interesting!

Maybe the rate of decays is actually constant - as almost all nuclear scientists would expect - and the detectors, rather than the ³²Si itself, behave slightly different in winter and in summer. Some scientists have proposed detailed explanations along these lines. It seems to me that this might be checked by making measurements north and south of the equator. We might expect them to be six months out of phase. I don't know if anybody has done this.

Fischbach and Jenkins go further, speculating that it is solar magnetism - sunspots and flares - that influences radioactive decay rates here on Earth. On a couple of occasions they claim to have seen a decrease in the rate of decays starting 39 hours before a major flare and this is what they think could give an early warning of flares. Suppose the neutrino mechanism is correct. Some neutrinos would indeed be produced in a major flare, at the same time as the gamma-rays that can be detected by spacecraft near Earth. Their numbers would be absolutely tiny, however, compared to the number continually being produced in the Sun's core. A solar flare is a huge event by earthly standards, but it involves a miniscule portion of the Sun's enormous bulk.

(Reuven Ramaty was the guru of nuclear processes in solar flares. I was once at a meeting where Reuven was very scornful of suggestions that neutrino rates on Earth were being influenced by flares, for exactly this reason - not nearly enough neutrinos ).

To make neutrinos we would need energetic ions. In flares, ions do indeed gain high energies and some neutrinos would result. But the same ions would definitely make gamma-rays as well (very energetic, penetrating radiation like X-rays). We would detect this gamma-radiation at the same time as we think the neutrinos are being produced, at the moment with the NASA Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Anybody can look for gamma-rays before big solar flares with the RHESSI data broswer. They aren't there, at least not easy to see in these measurements. This is even interesting: it lets us rule out some ideas for solar flares that involve accumulating energy in the form of energetic ions before the flare happens.

There are some other comments that might be made about predicting flares a day and a half before they happen, by any means at all. Flares result because the turbulent flow of gas in the Sun's outer layers twists and stresses the magnetic field. This is a noisy process with random elements; I'm not convinced that even big flares are inevitable this far in advance. But there are other people who could comment more expertly then me.

I think the measurements these gentlemen start from are really interesting, because diferent people have obtained similar results at different times. They may be pointing to a matter of detail in how radioactivity is measured, technically interesting but little more. They might be pointing to some aspect of radioactivity, neutrinos etc. that hasn't previously been properly understood. This would be very exciting! I'm very sceptical about the suggested connection to flares and magnetic activity, however. I'll be keeping an eye on this topic to see how it plays out.

Spice Girls

vacation blog no. 3 (although I'm back at work):

Is music like wine or malt whisky? Leave it out of sight for a decade or two and something intolerable becomes great. I wasn't in the room for the Spice Girls' appearance last night but from upstairs I could hear my daughter's squeals of delight. They may have caught her eye at age three but they're not consistent with her teenage taste: Radiohead, Beirut, P J Harvey (some overlap with my own tastes, actually).

The point of the Spice Girls was never musical, no more than the point of the Bay City Rollers was, or the Osmonds (with the notable exception of Crazy Horses), or Rick Astley. But people my age now talk enthusiastically about all of these.

Does music improve with the passing of years, in a near-magical process akin to the effects of sherry casks on new whisky spirit? Or do most people view crap music through the leavening haze of nostalgia? It's still crap - musically banal, even inept; peddling easy and valueless sentiment - but they come to love it anyway.

Bogs and hags

Vacation blog number 2:

The Campsies are a long line of low hills (500 m scale) that run east-west to the north of Glasgow. For a long time I've thought a walk right across the Campsies might be fun. From the Crow Road above Lennoxtown one could walk right across the summits of Holehead and Earl's Seat to Dumgoyne and Strathblane. The end point of this walk would be a long way from the start but buses serve both ends so it could be a nice expedition by public transport, leaving the car at home.

I'm on vacation this week and decided to give this expedition a go. I was amazed to discover that First bus combine a requirement for exact change with a reluctance to tell you fares outside Glasgow, at least on their website. Fortunately I had enough change when I boarded the X85 bus to Campsie Glen.

Campsie Glen is a bit of a beauty spot with its little waterfalls and shady spots along the burn, and an interesting geological excursion from Glasgow. From there I made my way via the Crow Road onto the hill to its west and up to the trig point and radar station on the summit called Holehead. I'd been there before, but in winter. By this point I was beginning to realise why nobody ever talks about this obvious cross-country route. The terrain of the Campsies is boggy, tussocky, very rough. Progress is painstaking and slow. To these unappealing features we can add in summer swarms of black flies whose only saving grace was the lack of a bite.

Holehead marked only the start of the intended high traverse, but Earl's Seat, after which I could expect easier ground and better-trodden paths, looked many slow, boggy miles away.

Nobody ever does this route because it's pretty unpleasant.

However the beautiful views among these hills, over their rolling plateaux to all the familiar, bigger summits to the north, or to Glasgow to the south, are a big compensation.

Most of the named hills among the Campsies - Hog Hill, Hart Hill, Holehead - barely deserve to be called "summits". They're more like the highest swellings of a gently undulating plateau. Just north and east of Hart Hill I came across the roughest terrain of all: peat hags as high as yourself embedded in bog. To traverse this area you have to climb over or round the hags while avoiding the really wet boggy bits; the sort of bogs that wobble if you stand on them, into which you can disappear if you're not careful. Desperate. Wild. However I was most of the way to Earl's Seat before I finally, inevitably, stepped into a hidden, boggy hole up to my thigh.

The distance is not huge and there is little descent and re-ascent but the terrain is so demanding that my arrival at Earl's Seat's grassy summit felt like a real achievement, with the continuing views along the Campsies' northern escarpment a further reward. A few more bogs still had to be negotiated but progress from here was mostly much more civilised.

A descent by Dumgoyne followed by the charms of the "water road" led me to Strathblane and the bus back into Glasgow (another fare mystery until I actually spoke to the driver, but at least he was ready to give change). Eager thoughts of beer came to nothing in the face of the "closed for refurbishment" signs on the Kirkhouse Inn; seemed appropriate somehow.

If you know Glasgow you might have started this thinking, "right across the Campsies, what a great idea." It's not. If you do it it's against my advice. Enjoy the well-known walks from the popular car parks at either end. The middle of the Campsies is a crazy place, a land for masochists, neglected for good reasons. What does it say about me that, at least in retrospect, I enjoyed this day a lot?

Last week my wife and I spent in Amsterdam, very different surroundings. The summary of my day on the Campsies sounds like a firm of Amsterdam solicitors: Bogs and Hags.

Images are copyright A MacKinnon.

brambles

Holiday thoughts for a wee while now, possibly on different topics from the usual. Today I'm thinking about brambles. The days are slowly getting shorter. There's a coolness in the air sometimes now that prompts autumn thoughts. But shortening days and a lower sun don't have to be bad news, they can mean gold-coloured days and fruitfulness. And scoffing brambles just pulled from the bushes. I'm always amazed to see people in city parks, for instance, walking straight past this yummiest and healthiest of treats.

To see brambles in the supermarkets, sealed with cellophane into their plastic punnets, just seems wrong. Brambles are for picking and enjoying wild, and making your own jam, not for buying in supermarkets.

Ditch "lifelong Learning"?

sigh...another big delay, nothing since the anniversary of the 21 May 1980 solar flare. I'm blaming those people who said, "great idea, Alec, we'll all take a shot." Anyway, here comes another amateur intrusion into other peoples' disciplines:

Adult education, continuing education, lifelong learning ... what do we call it? Perhaps some of us asked this question recently as we pondered our rebranding to settle on Open Studies. A twisted desire for novelty wasn't our sole driver - although confusion with our colleagues across the city wouldn't have been good - but maybe we have avoided some of the baggage associated with those older terms.

Names are dangerous. I think we should regularly rename anything we think valuable. A name that attains weight and value will be appropriated to other ends. "Lifelong learning" is our phrase du jour, immediately recognisable even in its abbreviated form, LLL. But it's a soft target, even assuming it ever denoted the valuable ideas we think it did. So often now it means acquiring new computer techniques every year or two, or learning the new controls for the latest version of the assembly line; synonymous with "continuing professional development" if you're well-paid, "retraining" otherwise. We're keen to distinguish between "education" and "training" but "learning" can describe what happens to people in both cases. So "lifelong learning" is vulnerable from the outset.

A couple of weeks ago this year's Access programe came to an end with the presentation evening, when we hand our students certificates and wish them all the best for the future. The sense of achievement, of new vistas revealed, always leaves a warm glow for the mind to turn over afterwards; a wee bit like that glow you get from fine malt whisky, but without the danger of a hangover.

Access is not part of "lifelong" learning for many of our customers; what's lifelong is the opportunity, the possibility. It's there whenever you decide to take advantage of it, even if you go twenty years before you want to. For many of them it is the first formal learning experience they've been involved in for a long long time - they have certainly not been "lifelong learners", although they might be from now on. There are lots of people who come to adult education courses year after year, deepening their understanding of some particular subject or broadening their knowledge of many. But there's no doubt a very valuable part of what we do involves not a sustained and consistent approach to learnimg, but a step change for the person involved. It's this transformative potential that makes it so rewarding for us to teach. It has particular value precisely because it's not "lifelong".

So, the more I reflect on the end of another year of Access, the more I like our new name. We're "open" whenever people feel the need for us, whether it's an ongoing need regularly satisfied, or something that's been nagging more and more insistently for many years.