Pesky exams

Since Christmas Day I’ve been busy correcting exams, but I just finished today yipee! I like to get them out of the way early so I can get back to the snow-world for a few more days before college starts up again…

Most academics hate correcting exams more than anything, but I don’t really mind that much – it always takes less time than expected (unlike research) and I like any job that has a definite beginning, middle and end (with room for targets, breaks and treats along the way). I also learnt years ago that it’s easier to stay focused if I correct exams script by script. Some lecturers dislike this method and claim it makes more sense to mark in parallel – i.e. correct all the first questions, then all the second the questions etc. I have never adopted this method as I’m terrified of making a mistake when the marks are totted up at the end. I feel there’s much less chance of this happening if one goes through the script question by question, as you get a feel for how a particular student is getting on…

Anyway, I finished at midday today and celebrated by going shopping. First thing I saw was a good skisuit for €99 and snapped it up (I used to be so proud of my ski instructor jacket, but have finally tired of being slagged over my gimpy outfit!). So it’s not all work and no play. Oh no. How’s this for cool – I’m off on Wednesday to some posh hotel in Montreux (Swiss riviera) to join friends from the Frankfurt Ski Club for their annual New Year’s Ball – after which we’re all staying over for a few days’ skiing in the nearby resort. Yipee.

Lake Geneva in winter- Viola Stockinger

And yes, I’m flying into Zurich again (see post below), more gorgeous train journeys through the snow..

That said, I do feel a bit guilty about all this flying, the main reason I hope one day to convert from being a good skier to a good surfer (a sport I can do at home). Unlike Lubos Motl, I don’t have the excuse of being a global warming skeptic – I find it hard to believe that the majority of the world’s climate scientists are fools or knaves. So sorry about those polar bears…

Winter wonderland

Last week was exam week for our students, so I took the opportunity for a week’s skiing in St Anton in the Austrian Alps. The snow conditions were pretty good as winter came early this year. I also got plenty of off-piste skiing as I was staying with a ski crony who is a guide for the Ski Club of Great Britain. That said, I find a week’s skiing more than enough these days – although I love the snow and the winter atmosphere, skiing itself doesn’t really give me the same rush as surfing, even off-piste

St Anton am Arlberg

As ever, what I enjoyed most was the travel. I flew into Zurich and took the train along the main Zurich-Innsbruck route. You simply haven’t experienced the beauty of winter until you’ve taken this train. The spectacular route through the snow-laden alps has few equals and should be listed as one of the wonders of the world. In fact, it still forms part of the route of the famous Orient Express. If that weren’t enough, I got 3 hours of uninterrupted conversation in my school German with a lovely young Austrian returning from Switzerland to visit her family. That’s why I love to travel in Europe, it’s the people you meet, the languages you hear and the places you see…

Ein Zug im Winter

Even Zurich Hauptbahnhof was a sight to behold, with snow falling heavily outside and the famous Christkindlmarkt in full swing in the great hall. I managed to get quite a good bit of present shopping done before boarding the train.

I read somewhere that the whole White Christmas thing in fact comes from the Alps, got imported to the United States by European immigrants in 19th century, and then got redistributed all over the planet like most American culture. It makes sense, as no-one does Christmas carols, Christmas trees and snow like the German-speaking countries!

After all that, St Anton could only be a let down and it was in a way. There were so many British tourists, I heard remarkably little German. Still, the skiing was good and the journey back a pleasure. Now, I’m back in rainy little Ireland and getting ready to start exam corrrections…groan

P.S. Lisa Lorenz has a nice description of a similar week in St Anton over at her blog Happy Hour. However, I was fascinated to read that she and her party had a totally different experience of the Zurich-St Anton journey. I guess travelling alone is always that bit easier…or maybe I’m the sort of sad person who is never in a rush to arrive at the destination.

New evidence on black holes

This week, the media are giving great coverage to a study that confirms the existence of a super-massive Black Hole at the centre of our galaxy. The 16-year study has given new evidence of the size and distance (from us) of the BH, by tracking the movement of stars circling the centre of the Milky Way.

“Undoubtedly the most spectacular aspect of our 16-year study is that it has delivered what is now considered to be the best empirical evidence that super-massive black holes do really exist,” said Professor Reinhard Genzel, head of the research team at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany.

The black hole is 27,000 light-years from Earth and four million times more massive than the Sun, according to a paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. Observations were made using the 3.5m New Technology Telescope and the 8.2m Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Both are operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

According to Dr Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society, the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit.

Black holes  may have a role in helping galaxies to form

You can read more on this story in today’s Irish Times or on the BBC website.

Interestingly, the BBC originally ran the story as ‘BH found at center of the Milky Way, and have now changed it to ‘BH confirmed at centre of Milky Way’, reflecting the fact that the new study presents new evidence rather than first evidence of the phenomenon.

In any case, it’s exciting news – yet another phenomenon that was once thought to be a totally unrealistic prediction of theory (general relativity in this case).

P.S. It should be pointed out that Ireland is not a member of ESO – between that and CERN we’re not doing too well are we?

Outside the universe

What is outside the universe?

A colleague asked me this question on Friday. Good to see college leaders take the time to ponder the important questions.

The stock answer is nothing – or rather, there is no outside, simply because the technical meaning of the word ‘universe’ is  all of matter, energy, space and time. So ‘outside the universe’ is a bit of an oxymoron – like asking what is north of the north pole, or what happened before the beginning of the universe.

It’s an important question and at the root of many misconceptions in cosmology. Consider for example the expansion of the universe. There is very strong evidence that our universe is expanding (see post on Hubble graph). However, this expansion is not really like the expanding balloon so beloved of science writers, because the universe is not expanding into space in the manner of a balloon inflating in a room. Instead it is space itself that is expanding (really spacetime). This is also why the theory of cosmic inflation can posit an exponential expansion of the universe (many times faster than the speed of light) in the first fraction of a second, without contradicting relativity (which forbids travel faster than the speed of light in space).

That said, the question has got more complicated recently. If inflation is right, it seems we have to accept the possibility that a great many universes may have been spawned in the first fractions of an instant – the multiverse. Hence might one ask about ‘outside a particular universe’? I think this is essentially the same question, except it is now ‘what is outside the mulitverse?’. A question which has the same answer, which is nothing .Or better, there is no outside. We think. So far.

Artist’s impression of the mulitverse

Scientists are dull

Modern scientists are ‘dull and getting duller” according to Bruce Charlton, Professor of theoretical medicine at the University of Buckingham. His views have been summarized in the Times Higher Education Literary Supplement, or you can read the original article on his blog here.

Essentially, Charlton’s thesis is that the selection and training process of science weeds out any interesting people. In his own words

“In particular the requirement for around ten to fifteen years of postgraduate training before even having a shot at doing some independent research of one’s own choosing (but more likely with the prospect of functioning as a cog in somebody else’s research machine) is enough to deter almost anyone with a spark of vitality or self-respect.
…nowadays there is an always-expanding need for advanced planning, committee permissions, and logistical organization; combined with a proliferation of mindless and damaging bureaucracy. The timescale of scientific action and discourse has gone up from days and weeks to months and years.”

The result of all this is plain to see according to Charlton:

“The editors and journalists running even the premier journals – those having the pick of modern science – themselves find science too dull to bother writing about. And they are too often correct. We can only conclude that science is dull mainly because its requirements for long-term plodding perseverance and social inoffensiveness have the effect of ruthlessly weeding-out too many smart and interesting people.”

Hmm. Some of this is undoubtably true. In a profile of yours truly in SPIN Science magazine (due next month) I myself comment that I eventually found the business of communicating scientific ideas a lot more fun than the actual getting of results, mainly because of the specialisation and patient measurement required to achieve anything specific  nowadays.

However, I disagree with Charlton in his deification of journalism:

“The smart and interesting people instead gravitate to fast-moving fields like journalism (or finance, or management, or entrepreneurship of many types) where they get hourly or daily stimulus, and have a chance of following their own inclinations and making their mark before reaching their mid forties”.

Except that a lot of journalists are irritating opinion merchants who care not a jot whether they are right or wrong. Which would you prefer -  a dull plodder who considers the evidence carefully before reaching a tentative conclusion , or a loud attention-seeker wedded to his own opinion and oblivious to scientific evidence to the contrary? There are plenty of such journalists, with opinions on everything from climate change to stem cell research and all they do is add noise to important debates.

Give me a dull plodder any day. Indeed, this is the great fallacy of the great climate change ‘debate’. Politicians and journaists state their fixed opinions on both sides with great passion, while scientists quietly go on gathering evidence. As a result, the population at large imagines there is a great debate that in fact is long over.

Finally, Charlton concludes with

“One thing is for sure, the answer is not going to come from within science.”

I disagree. I like to think the only hope is that we scientists  can persuade young people that science asks the right questions about the world, and seeks answers in the most logical manner…if that means changing the way we do research, let’s do it.

Meanwhile, me and my surfboard are off for a dull weekend on Inch beach in Co. Kerry. Wonder what excitement Professor Charlton has lined up?

That’s me in the corner – finding my religion

Last week of term!

There’s a great atmosphere around the college this week as it’s the last week of teaching term for the first semester. As one who strongly opposed the introduction of short semesters, I have to admit there’s a great sense of closure as staff and students  reach the end of taught courses.

This morning I finished the course with 1st science and went through last year’s paper with 1st engineering. This afternoon it’s the turn of 3rd year solid-state physics – a lot more serious as we revise all the major concepts the hapless students will need to know for their exam.

Meanwhile, I’m preparing yet another public lecture (slides here) on the LHC, this time as the keynote address for our careers day in physics at the college tomorow . What careers? Well, mathematicians and theoreticians have been kept busy calculating collision events and decay schemes. Engineers and experimentalists designed the detectors and experiments. Civil engineers build the major construction projects. Last but not least, computer scientists and software engineers have been working hard on constucting new methods for dealing with the petrabytes of data – not least the latest in distributed computing – the GRID. There’s a great article on this, the Large Hadron Computer, in the November issue of Physics World.

The GRID – National nodes at tier 2, universities at tier 3.

It’s often forgotten that the world wide web was orignally developed at CERN in order to facilitate the analysis of data from particle experiments at CERN . It’ll be interesting to see if the GRID has similar application to the world at large.

P.S. No teaching next week, and I can finally get down to some writing. After, that I’m going skiing yipee.