Telepathy

David T Lykken was Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota. He became very famous, far beyond academia, for his studies of identical twins separated at birth. In 1991, in an article reflecting on the practice of psychological research, he wrote these words:

Just as there are few hypotheses that we can claim as proven, so there are relatively few that we can reasonably reject out of hand. Extrasensory perception is a good example. Having worked for years with hundreds of pairs of adult twins, hearing so many anecdotes of apparent telepathic communication between them, which usually occur in moments of stress or crisis, I am inclined to believe in telepathy - as an individual but not as a scientist.

Brazil (4) "From a land of monsters to monsters in the sky"

A year or two into my PhD I started to work with colleagues in France. I learned lots from them, scientific and otherwise. In particular I learned the defining features of Scotland, as viewed from the rest of Europe: the Loch Ness Monster, and haunted castles. Nessie didn't surprise me but I hadn't been aware we were particularly haunted. The existence of a dedicated Wikipedia article seems to offer definitive confirmation, however (***FOR THOSE WHO DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW ME: IRONY ALERT!!!***).

I thought again recently of these defining characteristics. In São Paulo I'm a pretty exotic specimen. I thought I should offer a little bit of my exotic self to the city so we discussed a talk for the public, on a Scottish science story I have told often at home: CTR Wilson, the Ben Nevis Observatory and the origins of the study of cosmic rays. Lots of people, apparently, have found my webpages on these topics, come across one of the many appearances of the Cosmic Way roadshow, or heard me give a popular talk on these topics. Thinking of a title that would scream, "Scotland!!!" I mulled over the monster and the castles. I remembered a book I liked by an Italian astronomer, Paolo Maffei, called Monsters in the Sky (a nice book but a bit out of date now). The "monsters" of his title are the exotic objects of modern astrophysics, the black holes and exploding stars that are studied via the X-rays they emit. Some of the pioneers of X-ray astronomy, like Bruno Rossi, started out as cosmic ray scientists and adapted their expertise to this new subject. We know now that these same objects play major roles in the origin of the cosmic rays. Scientifically, we can indeed trace a line from CTR Wilson and the very beginnings of cosmic rays to the study of these outrageous objects, "monstrous" both in scale and in the challenges they present to our everyday ideas of the world. So the theme of "monsters" seemed to tie together all the strands of my talk together: "From a land of monsters to 'monsters in the sky'" was the title of the talk.

If I'd thought just a day or so longer I might have kept "ghosts" too. Wilson's Nobel Prize (still the only Physics Nobel for someone born Scottish) was for the invention of the cloud chamber, the device that brought electrons and ions, "phantoms" of the subatomic world, into the realm of the visible. "Monsters and ghosts: a Scottish tale of fundamental physics" might have been an even better title. Maybe next time.

We all thought this public talk was a nice idea but the timing was not good, there was no big high-profile event to attach it to, and a lot of end-of-teaching-year activities complicated finding a room for it. Anyway there was a nice audience for the talk, many familiar faces but at least one member of the public because I brought her with me. I enjoyed augmenting this familiar tale for a southern hemisphere audience, using MacKinnon tartan, Victorian paintings of highland cows crossing cloudy mountain passes, etc.; generally wallowing in cheesy Scottishness as well as, for instance contrasting the roughly 5 million population of Scotland and the 22(?) million of the São Paulo urban area.

Perhaps this was also a wee subconscious device to start turning my thoughts to home. I have only a few more days here until I swap fejoiada for black pudding, cachaça for whisky, temperatures between 20 and 30°C (not always with clear skies, to be fair, or even dry) for wind, rain, snow and short days. Home to a land of ghosts and monsters.

Brazil (3): A solar physicist takes a taxi ride

On the day I arrived a colleague kindly met me at the airport. On a Tuesday he could not bring his car (traffic congestion control measure) so we took a taxi to my new lodgings. I guess the phrase "South American big city taxi ride" will conjure up a particular, hair-raising image. Stereotypes concocted from a great distance so often turn out to be wrong; not this time. I'm sure we travelled at 60 miles an hour through dense traffic in busy streets. Over and over again we cut in front of other cars at what felt like well after the last possible minute to take some sliproad or junction. Our driver's eye and reflexes were fantastic. We'd have been in ten crashes at home but nobody even tooted their horn. Evidently drivers expect such craziness of each other. I said out loud, "this is exciting".

Here's a São Paulo taxi crossing the Avenida Higienópolis not far from Mackenzie University. The camera has frozen it but I expect it was travelling at high speed and dodging from lane to lane. I actually took this photo because I like the name, "Higienópolis". It also applies to the whole area: "hygiene town" and reflects how nice and clean it was, compared to Downtown, when they started expanding the city in this direction. It's still appropriate.

Much later it struck me that the taxi is a nice metaphor for some of the science that triggered my visit. The gas of the Sun's atmosphere is sitting quietly, atoms moving around randomly in all directions, with a range of speeds but none of them going too much above the average speed. Then from somewhere above them comes an electron or an ion at enormous speed, like one of those São Paulo taxis heading from the airport into the city centre. Unlike the taxis it has no skilful driver, only speed, and it just crashes into all the rest of the traffic, sending them flying in all directions with much greater speeds than they had before; heating them up and making them glow in various ways. Exactly why they glow holds our detailed attention. But of course we'd really like to know, "who ordered the taxi?" And why was it moving so quickly?

If a taxi crashes into a car all that happens is car and taxi get mangled and some fragments go flying off in all directions. When we look more closely at the collisions in the Sun's atmosphere things get a bit stranger. Most of the time no actual damage is done. A very fast-moving proton crashes into a slow-moving proton. Afterwards the slow-moving one is going faster than before, because it's had a big dunt, but both protons are still protons. No lumps are knocked off them, both are still intact. But if the incoming proton is going fast enough, things get weirder, a bit like a surreal, Looney Tunes version of such a car-crash. The two protons crash into each other, there's a bit of a blur, but afterwards, different stuff comes out and moves off. It's as though the taxi crashed into the car and then, afterwards, the car shot off in a new direction and not just the original but two new taxis also get spat out the far end of the collision, only different sizes and maybe colours from the original (protons don't have a "colour". But in the "Big book of science" type books I read as a kid they were always drawn as little red billiard balls, red for positive electric charge. Electrons were blue (negative) and neutrons were green.)

Let's stick with the taxi metaphor. A fast red taxi crashes into an identical, slow-moving red car. Afterwards we'd expect a red taxi and a red car to come shooting out of this collision. Instead we get a red taxi, a green car and a funny wee yellow, sort of half-size taxi. Before our eyes, the funny new car travels a short distance then changes into something else different again.

The taxi metaphor's running out of steam. Here's what happens: accelerated to very high energy by an uncertain process, a proton collides with another proton. After the collision some of the energy of the proton has been transformed into a new particle, called a pion. After about one hundred millionth of a second the pion changes into a different, less massive particle called a muon, and finally the muon decays and spawns an electron or a positron (the antimatter counterpart of the electron). The electron or positron emits gamma-rays (like X-rays only even more penetrating) which we detect with instruments above the Earth's atmosphere on satellites. Once we detect those gamma-rays we can follow this sequence of events backwards to learn about the protons that were accelerated in the first place.

My colleagues here in Brazil lead the world at observing very short wavelength radio waves from the Sun. Recently they've begun to explore the wavelengths between radio and infra-red, what is called Terahertz radiation. This is a frontier and they have made some discoveries that we don't completely understand yet. The stories I've described above might be part of understanding Terahertz radiation in solar flares and that's a big part of why I'm in Brazil.

Since arriving I've had other taxi rides that were not nearly as exciting as that first one. Was the driver thinking of proton-proton collisions and pions? That question will probably go unanswered but we can be more optimistic about the reasons that solar flares glow in Terahertz radiation.

Brazil (2)

When everything is different you're much more likely to experience those moments when you wake up to something you've been taking for granted, that has become part of life, that you stopped thinking about a long time ago. I've used Sao Paulo's excellent Metro system a couple of times now but it will take me some time to switch off that "what the hell" moment of irritation, when you don't get your ticket back. It's such a trivial thing, knowing that the barriers for the trains and the underground at home give you back your ticket, and you should keep it until you leave the train system through another barrier. When did any of us last give it a thought? But it's obviously more deeply engrained than I'd realised because I don't like it when it doesn't happen here.

It's not just the being away that's good, it's coming home again more awake.

Brazil (1)

I've been thinking of renaming this blog. It hasn't worked out as I originally planned (and as other people assured me it would - I was always awake to the danger of creating one more of those little unvisited internet graveyards of good intentions). Instead of a multi-disciplinary conversation it's just me sounding off about whatever comes into my head; and not terribly regularly at that. All on my own I can be as multi-disciplinary as the next guy or gal, but with wildly varying degrees of expertise and effectiveness. Laying personal claim to the spirit of DACE would be hubris on an impressive scale, and unjustifiable in dozens of ways. I think maybe the name should change but I have no idea to what. Anyway it seems likely I'm going to touch on all sorts of topics over the next couple of months so maybe I'll give in to hubris for a wee while longer. Any new name suggestions will be more than welcome - even although I'll probably ignore them (already I like "The unvisited graveyard of good intentions" but I suspect Bob Drake already has a song with that title).

I'm spending most of the rest of this year in Brazil, on study leave, working with colleagues here. I have a visiting position at Mackenzie Presbyterian University in Sao Paulo. The name of this university has caused some amusement among friends from the Western Isles but: (1) Mackenzie himself was an American (2) it is a very serious institution of 40,000 students, with possibly the best Law School, for instance, in Brazil.

Mackenzie's compact Sao Paulo campus is guarded and policed in a way that would be alien at home. There's a big high wall around it. Each of the entrances is controlled via the sort of barriers we know from railway stations and you need a magnetic card to come and go. Uniformed guards keep a close eye on the barriers and are stationed round the campus. This might sound intimidating but it's not. They just keep an eye on things. I don't think I've actually seen them speak to anybody. Their uniforms are not remotely military, more like janitors, and they're unarmed. It's worth noting that there are parts of the city not that far away that you wouldn't walk around after dark. On Sunday the entrances to the campus are all shut up, as in the picture (I'll post another showing it busy, if I can do that unobtrusively).

Mackenzie is a private university. I was curious about this. I was told that 75% of Brazilian Higher Education is private. The state universities are the most competitive to get into. The kids who go to expensive schools have a head start and are more likely to meet the entrance requirements. So poorer people are more likely to have to spend more money, maybe work at the same time as study, if they aspire to higher education. If this is correct Brazil has some way to go down the Widening Participation road. Of course there is also the possibility that this is a glimpse of our future.

I was also fascinated to learn that Mackenzie incorporates secondary and primary school provision. If you can afford it, you can send your kids to schools that are part of a University. I have no idea how integrated primary and secondary provision is with the rest of the university, if some people teach both degree level students and younger people. I don't think anybody I know has anything to do with the school level provision, however (seems like a missed opportunity - how exciting for school age kids to meet people who are leading edge researchers in subjects like astronomy, that grab the imagination). But it's quite likely I don't know lots of what goes on here yet.

This ingredient of Mackenzie really caught my attention. It's quite unlike anything that happens in the UK. But this might not always have been the case. It reminded me of the young William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, attending Glasgow University at the age of 11. This wasn't, apparently, a consequence of unequalled brilliance but just something that wasn't unusual for bright children of affluent families, in a time of much less formally organised education. I don't know if Glasgow University offered classes specifically for such young people or if they just sat in lectures and took in whatever they could. There probably isn't much similarity between Kelvin's 1834 experience and that of young Mackenzistas, even allowing for the radically different worlds around them. Nonetheless I was intrigued by something Brazilian universities do that ours stopped contemplating a long time ago. Probably somebody reading this knows more - please comment!

That was the first Brazilian bulletin. Everything here is different so I'm bound to touch on all sorts of topics before I go home; a tiny wee, inexpert DACE.

500 years of Astronomy in Glasgow

In this year's Open Studies programme we have a day school, Saturday 5 October, 10.00 - 13.00, on the history of Astronomy in Glasgow. I know lots of people would find this day school fascinating, even if they think they're not interested in Astronomy. People who come to Astronomy courses sometimes say they want to hear about new discoveries, not history: black holes, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, dark energy, etc., so some of them might need a little persuasion too. We can Tweet about this, or post on Facebook but I'd like to use a few more words to try to persuade lots of people that they should come. Here we are - please read on!

The tutor for the day, Dave Clarke, has just published Reflections on the Astronomy of Glasgow which tells the story of 500 years of Astronomy in the city. Dave is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy and was Director of the University Observatory when he retired just a few years ago. In the Preface he writes about his successful interview in 1966, the old astronomical clocks that caught his eye that very day, and how his attention returned to them much later in his career, leading almost inevitably to this detailed history. So he is THE authority on this subject at the moment, with a wealth of detailed information and stories at his fingertips. In the day school Dave will lead a wee walk around the university campus, looking at these same clocks - which are very old, and extremely interesting - as well as portraits of some of the key characters and other relics. But before this there will have been a fascinating look at the succession of - very varied - Professors of Astronomy in Glasgow, the development of the subject in the University and its relationship to the history of the city more widely.

Most people nowadays have a clock built into their mobile phones and all of us are locked into a single, global standard of time via wireless telecommunication. GPS tells us where we are on the surface of the planet. Things were of course not always so simple (they're not simple now! But most of us can just use them as though they were). Astronomy played an essential role in the regulation of time, and in navigation, all through the 19th century when Glasgow's wealth was being built on global trade. So the Professors of Astronomy had vital jobs to do and their stories at various points illuminate the development of the city. They're closely tied to the growth of the port, the development of the harbour and the city centre along the river, the story of shipping on the Clyde. You can still set your watch by Edinburgh's famous one o'clock gun; Glasgow's is mostly forgotten but provides one amusing incident in the middle of these tales.

Alexander Wilson was the first Professor of Astronomy in Glasgow, from 1760-1784. Here's a nice, modern perspective on the feature of sunspots that still bears his name. A fascinating array of characters succeeded him. I've always had a soft spot for J P Nichol, a hugely successful populariser of Astronomy, pal of poets and literary types (like Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas de Quincey), teacher of Lord Kelvin.

The Dowanhill Observatory is long gone but its memory lives on in the name of Observatory Road, just off the top of Byres Road. The now-bustling West End was still green fields when it was established in 1845. Like so many city observatories, Glasgow's have been pushed further and further out by burgeoning populations but the physical move of the university from the Old College in the city centre to Gilmorehill was also part of the story.

So: the growth and development of Glasgow and its place in the Empire, the evolution of scientific knowledge and ideas and their relationship to wider currents in society, the evolution of the fourth oldest University in Britain, both physically and organisationally; all of these strands and more are viewed through the particular, illuminating lens of Astronomy's history in the city. Dave is a a warm, enthusiastic speaker. This day school was in our programme last year and Dave also gave a wee talk on these lines as part of our contribution to the West End Festival. Each time people came out saying, "that was excellent. There should have been ten times that number of people." I know if you come along you'll agree with the first of these statements. And I hope the second won't be necessary.

I linked to details of Dave's excellent book above and you can get it from Amazon.

Raspberry Pi

Really just a few notes, mostly for my own benefit; like the MOOC post. I might not even click "post".

The Raspberry Pi is the hardware core of a small computer. It was conceived primarily as a sort of sophisticated, educational toy that kids would learn to program, gaining basic skills of programming and computer systems in the process. You buy a board with a processor and some memory. The board has interfaces so one can attach a keyboard, video display device (a TV - HDMI not VGA) and various other sorts of device. There's a USB socket. It's just credit card sized, so it's great for all sorts of physically small projects that need some computing power, flying a webcam on a balloon to take aerial photos for instance. The teddy bear that repeated Felix Baumgartner's amazing leap from the edge of space was Raspberry Pi-powered.

The Raspberry Pi and some other bits of hobbiest scale electronics form the heart of the AuroraWatchNet magnetometer design, for monitoring geomagnetic activity (manifested visibly as the aurora).

Various enthusiasts are thinking about radiation detectors based around raspberry Pi's. Here's a forum discussion. A simple radiation detector kit built around a photodiode rather than a Geiger tube might be a good starting point.

Don't know how many people read these; probably more than find them interesting! If you find this and know something about these topics, any comments will be read eagerly.

Added next day: you run Linux on these. The preferred flavour is Debian. Ubuntu and no doubt others cannot support the Raspberry Pi.