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I always enjoy the start of the second semester. There’s usually a great atmosphere around the college – after long weeks of quiet, it’s great to see the students back and all the restaurants, shops and canteens back open. The students themselves always seem to be in good form too. I suspect it’s the prospect of starting afresh with new modules, one of the benefits of semesterisation.

I’m particularly enjoying the start of term this year as I managed to finish a hefty piece of research before the teaching semester got under way. I’ve been working steadily on the project, a review of a key paper published by Einstein in 1917, since June 1st, so it’s nice to have it off my desk for a while. Of course, the paper will come back in due course with corrections and suggestions from the referees, but I usually enjoy that part of the process.

In the meantime, I’d forgotten how much I enjoy teaching, especially in the absence of a great cloud of research to be done in the evenings. One of the courses I’m teaching this semester is a history of the atomic hypothesis. It’s fascinating to study how the idea emerged from different roots: philosophical considerations in ancient Greece, considerations of chemical reactions in the 18^th and 19^th century , and considerations of statistical mechanics in the 19^th century. The big problem  was how to test the hypothesis: at least until a brilliant young patent clerk suggested that the motion of small particles suspended in water might betray the presence of millions of water molecules.  Einstein’s formula was put to the test by the French physicist Jean Perrin in 1908, and it is one of Einstein’s great triumphs that by 1910, most scientists no longer talked of the ‘atomic hypothesis’, but of ‘atoms’.

In 1905, a young Albert Einstein developed a formula describing the motion of particles  suspended in a liquid, based on the hypothesis that the liquid was made up of millions of molecules. In 1908, the French physicist Jean Perrin demonstrated that the motion of such particles matched Einstein’s formula, giving strong support for the atomic hypothesis.  

For more on Perrin’s exeriment see here

It’s hard to believe we have almost reached the end of the second teaching semester. I’m always a bit sorry to see the end of classes, but I accept that it’s important that students are given time to reflect on what they have learnt. With that in mind, I don’t quite understand why exams start in early May rather than June.

As regards research, I can now get back to putting the finishing touches to a review paper I have been trying to finish for months. Mind you, thanks to the open-plan layout of offices in our college,  there will be more – not less – noise and distraction for the next few months as staff are no longer in class. Whoever came up with the idea that open-plan offices are a good idea for academics?

On top of finishing off my various teaching modules, I agreed to give a research seminar this week. The general theory of relativity, Einstein’s greatest contribution to science, is a hundred years old this month and I couldn’t resist an invitation to give a brief history of the theory, together with a summary of the observational evidence supporting many strange predictions of the theory – from black holes to the expanding universe, from the ‘big bang’ to gravitational waves. The talk took quite a bit of prep, but I think it went well and there were plenty of questions afterwards – a nice way to finish off the teaching semester.

The slides for the talk are here. Now the excitement is over and it’s back to the lonely business of writing research papers…

Update

I gave a similar talk in University College Dublin yesterday. A tiring trip, but it’s always very satisfying to give a repeat performance.

In December, I attended a wonderful conference celebrating the centenary of the general theory of relativity, hosted by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. The meeting, which took place in Berlin’s splendid Harnack Haus, was a  feast for anyone with an interest in Einstein’s theories or indeed the history of 20^th century science.

Harnack Haus in Berlin

There were many talks by historians I have long admired, such as Helge Kragh,  Jurgen Renn, Jean Eisenstaedt, Hannoch Gutfreund , Daniel Kennefick, Chris Smeek and Dennis Lehmkuhl, to name a few. Topics covered included the genesis of general relativity in the 1910s, the low watermark of GR in the period 1940-1960, the history of gravitational waves, the renaissance of GR in the 1960s, the history of gravitational lensing, the history of the black hole information paradox and the history of relativistic cosmology. As regards the latter, I was delighted to give a talk on our recent work concerning Einstein’s cosmology. The program for the conference can be found here and videos of all the talks will soon be available . You can download the slides for my own talk here.

The conference room in Harnack Haus

Best of all, the history conference took place immediately after a conference on general relativity in the same venue,  organised by the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics. Many delegates chose to attend both conferences , a double feast. It included  talks by noted researchers such as Rai Weiss, Paul Steinhardt, Joeseph Polchinski, Eric Adelberger, David Gross and Alexander Blum. Topics covered included black holes, gravitational waves, quantum gravity, the cosmological constant and tests of the equivalence principle. Many of the talks, although technical, took a historical approach: you can find the program here. I was particularly chuffed that Paul Steinhardt discussed my own group’s work on Einstein’s cosmology.

All in all, a superb week in Berlin, where it all started. I found the combination of a conference on physics with a conference on the history of physics very satisfying. It  fits very nicely with my conviction that the study of the history of science isn’t really a branch of historical study in the normal sense –  it’s more the study of the evolution of science. .

The Einstein biographer Andrew Robinson, author of Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity , recently reminded me of the saga of Einstein’s blackboard. The blackboard, a well-known exhibit at the Oxford Museum for the History of Science, was used by Einstein in the second of three lectures he gave at Oxford University in 1931.

An image of the blackboard used in Einstein’s 2^nd Rhodes lecture at Oxford in April 1931 (reproduced by permission of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem). The analysis is taken from Einstein’s 1931 model of the cosmos.

I came across Einstein’s blackboard during the course of our first Einstein study, a translation and analysis of Einstein’s 1931 paper on cosmology. Although the paper is not very well known in the English-speaking world, it is a work of historical importance, as it constituted the first scientific publication in which Einstein formally rejected his static model of the universe and embraced the possibility of a cosmos of time-varying radius. In the paper, Einstein adopts Alexander Friedman’s 1922 analysis of relativistic cosmic models of time-varying radius and positive curvature, but sets the cosmological constant to zero, predicting a cosmos that expands and contracts over time (the model is sometimes known as the Friedman-Einstein model and should not be confused with the later Einstein-deSitter model of the cosmos). With the use of Edwin Hubble’s redshift/distance graph for the spiral nebulae, Einstein extracts estimates from his analysis of ρ ~ 10^-26 g/cm³ , P ~ 10⁸ light-years and t ~ 10¹⁰ years for the density of matter, the radius of the cosmos and the timespan of the cosmic expansion respectively. However, our analysis of the paper indicated that Einstein’s estimates contain a systematic numerical error.

Before submitting our paper on this to a journal, I discovered to my great surprise that Einstein’s 1931 paper is neatly summarized on the Oxford blackboard (see above). Although the blackboard is quite well known as an intriguing museum exhibit, it seems no-one had made the connection with a published paper. Even better, one extra line on the blackboard, not included in Einstein’s published paper, makes clear the source of the numerical errors in the paper.

The analysis is quite easy to follow: for a cosmos of radius P, the quantity D is defined on the top line of the blackboard as D= (1/c). (1/P).(dP/dt): essentially the Hubble constant divided by the speed of light. From his earlier analysis, Einstein has developed two independent relations from the Friedman equations that relate D to the radius and density of the cosmos respectively:  D² ~ 1/P²  and D²  ~ 1/3 kρ, shown as equations (1a) and (2a) on the blackboard. Using the contemporaneous Hubble constant of 500 kms^-1Mpc^-1, he thus extracts estimates of cosmic density, radius and timespan of expansion respectively,  displayed in the last three lines on the blackboard. However, these estimates contain errors as noted above, and the fourth line on the blackboard (not shown in Einstein’s published paper), makes the source of his error clear. Where Einstein obtains a value of 10^-53 cm^-2 for the quantity D², simple calculation shows that this quantity should have been D² ~ 10^-55 cm^-2 (or 10 ^-51 m^-2). It appears that Einstein stumbled in converting the Hubble constant to his customary cgs units, resulting in a density of matter that was too high by a factor of a hundred, a cosmic radius that was too low by a factor of ten, and a timespan for the expansion that was too high by a factor of ten (although the units of measurement are not specifically stated for the density estimate, cgs units are implied by the other calculations).

Thus Einstein’s blackboard helped us to solve the riddle of the anomalous estimates of his 1931 paper! Our paper on this made the cover of the European Physical Journal and you can read more about Einstein’s blackboard on this blog here and on wikipedia here.

Update

All of the above was interesting and good fun. However, I should say that our translation and analysis of Einstein’s 1931 paper yielded another, rather more serious result – namely that the 1931 paper is NOT a cyclic model, although it is often cited as the first cyclic model of the expanding universe. Einstein specifically rules out this possibility, pointing out that the model breaks down at the endpoints of the single ‘cycle’.

The birth centenary of the noted British astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle was celebrated on Friday at the Royal Astronomical Society with a one-day meeting of talks describing Sir Fred’s many contributions to 20^th century physics. While he is chiefly remembered in some quarters as the physicist who was ‘wrong on the big bang’, Sir Fred in fact made a number of seminal contributions to modern physics in several fields. Indeed, it was a treat to witness former collaborators and students recall his contribution to stellar evolution, stellar nucleosynthesis, astrobiology and cosmology, to name but a few.

I hadn’t been to the RAS before although I was elected a Fellow a few years ago, and I was stunned by its fantastic location in central London. It is housed in the famous Burlington House on Piccadilly, sharing the premises and courtyard with the Linnean Society, the Geological Society and the Royal Academy of Arts, a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus. As luck would have it, the Royal Academy are currently hosting a show of the work of the Chinese artist Weiwei, and his striking ‘Tree Sculpture’ filled the Burlington courtyard.

Burlington house on Piccadilly, housing five learned London societies, including the Royal Academy of Arts

Weiwei’s exhibit ‘Tree Sculpture’ in the Burlington courtyard. The RAS is located on the west wing of the courtyard.

The meeting opened with an introduction by Lord Martin Rees, who gave a comprehensive overview of Sir Fred’s works in a short, a ten-minute talk. This was followed by a description of Hoyle’s contribution to accretion physics by Professor Andrew Fabian of the Institute for Astronomy (IOA) in Cambridge, and talks on Hoyle’s work on nucleosynthesis by Professor Lynden-Bell (IOA) and Professor Malcolm Longair, Director of the Cavendish laboratory.

Professor Jayant Narlikar of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (Pune, India) then gave the talk ‘Fred’s theories and ideas about gravity’. This was a rare treat – as a long term collaborator, Jayant made several important contributions to the development of Hoyle’s steady-state model of the universe (including the development of a new version of the model based on the principle of least action, and the development of the later ‘quasi-steady-state’ model), so it was most interesting to hear his take on the genesis of the steady-state cosmologies of Hoyle and Bondi and Gold.

Hoyle and Narlikar in 1966

Another treat was a talk by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of the University of Buckingham, ‘Fred Hoyle and the foundation of astrobiology’. This presented interesting insights into Chandra’s long collaboration with Sir Fred, from their early work on interstellar dust to their famous hypothesis that life on earth was seeded by comets. The latter work essentially founded the modern field of astrobiology, although they are not always credited for this.

Jayant’s talk was followed by a talk on Hoyle’s cosmology by Professor John Barrow of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge. John gave a superb overview of Hoyle’s steady-state model of the universe, and of the battle royale between Hoyle’s theory group and Martin Ryle’s astronomy group at Cambridge during the 1950s. Most members of the audience were familiar with this story, but John brought out many points that are not well known – not least that the widespread skepticism concerning Hoyle’s hypothesis of the continuous creation of matter was something of a moot point. As demonstrated by Bill McCrea in 1951, a viable steady-state model can be constructed without this assumption. John also reminded the audience that today’s models of cosmic inflation are effectively steady-state cosmologies, and, if the eternal inflationary scenario is right, it is possible that the observed universe is a locally evolving patch in a global ensemble that is in a steady state!

Eternal inflation could give rise to evolving universes embedded in a global steady-state ensemble

I touched on both these points in my own talk ‘Steady-state cosmologies in context‘, although my main aim was to remind the audience that Hoyle’s steady-state model was a reasonable hypothesis at the time – and that the notion of a steady-state universe surfaced in cosmology on many occasions, from Arrhenius to Nernst, from Holmes to MacMillan. Further, not many people know that soon after the emergence of the first evidence for an expanding universe, several physicists considered the possibility of an expanding universe that remains in a steady state due to a continuous replenishment of matter, from Tolman to Einstein, from Schroedinger to Mimura. That said, my main focus was to discuss Einstein’s abandoned attempt at a steady-state model , an unpublished work discovered 2 years ago. (You can find more on Einstein’s attempt at a steady=state model here and here).

Between the two talks on Sir Fred’s cosmology, Nicola Hoyle gave a fascinating description of her personal recollections of her grandfather. It included many intriguing photos and pieces of information I hadn’t seen before. The meeting ended with a talk by Professor John Faulkner of the University of California at Santa Cruz on Sir Fred’s contribution to our understanding of stellar structure and evolution, after which we all trooped off to the beautiful library of Geological Society on the other side of the square for coffee.

All in all, a superb conference in memory of a superb physicist. The meeting was organized by Simon Mitton of Cambridge University. You can find the programme here and slides for my own talk on the ‘Seminars’ page of this blog.

After the meeting, speakers were treated to dinner at the famous RAS Dining Club, and I rolled back to my hotel through the gardens of Buckingham Palace. On Saturday, I took a hop-on hop-off open bus tour of London and it was a great success. In particular, I caught a young string orchestra rehearsing Correlli and Vivaldi concerti in St Martin in the Fields, and a superbly talented string quartet playing Brahms’s Hungarian Dances in Covent Garden, not to mention a relaxing stroll  along the Embankment in the afternoon sun. I’d forgotten what London can be like on a Saturday afternoon, must visit the RAS more often!

The best way to see London

Update

There is a detailed summary of the meeting in this month’s issue of Astronomy and Geophysics

I  had a most enjoyable day on Friday at the mathematical physics department of Maynooth University, or NUI Maynooth, to give it its proper title. I was there to attend an international masterclass in particle physics. This project, a few years old, is a superb science outreach initiative associated with CERN, the European Centre for Particle Physics particle in Geneva, home of the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC). If you live on planet earth, you will probably have heard that a famous particle known as the Higgs boson was recently discovered at the LHC. The idea behind the masterclasses is to give secondary school students the opportunity to “become a particle physicists for a day” by performing measurements on real data from CERN.

The day got off to a great start with a lecture on “Quarks, leptons and the forces of nature” by Dr. Paul Watts, a theoretical physicist at Maynooth. An excellent introduction to the world pf particle physics, I was amused by Paul’s cautious answer to a question on the chances of finding supersymmetric particles at the LHC. What the students didn’t know was that Paul studied under the late Bruno Zumino, a world expert on supersymmetry, and one of the pioneers of the theory. Paul’s seminar was followed by another lecture, “Particle Physics Experiments and the Little Bang” , an excellent a talk on the detection of particles at the LHC by Dr Jonivar Skullerud, another physicist at Maynooth. In between the two lectures. we all trooped outside in the hope of seeing something of today’s solar eclipse . I was not hopeful, given that the sky was heavily overcast until about 9.30. Lo and behold, the skies cleared in time and we all got a ringside view of the event through glasses supplied by Maynooth physics department! Now that’s how you impress visitors to the college…

Viewing the eclipse

After lunch we had the workshop proper. Each student was assigned a computer on which software had been installed that allowed them to analyse particle events from the ALICE detector at the LHC (lead ion collisions). Basically, the program allowed the students to measure the momentum and energy of decay products of particles from the tracks produced in collisions, allowing them to calculate the mass of the parent particle and thus identify it. As so often, I was impressed how quickly the students got the hang of the program – having missed the introduction thanks to a meeting, I was by far the slowest in the room. We all then submitted our results, only to find a large discrepancy between the total number of particles we detected and the number predicted by theory! We then all returned to the conference room, and uploaded our results to the control room at the LHC. It was fun comparing our data live with other groups around Europe and discussing the results. Much hilarity greeted the fact that many of the other groups got very different results, and the explanation for that (but what many groups really wanted to know was  whether we got a good look at the eclipse in Ireland).

Uploading our results via a conference call with the contol room at the LHC, CERN

All in all, a wonderful way for students to get a glimpse of life in the world of the LHC, to meet active particle physics researchers, and to link up with students from other countries. See here for the day’s program.

I spent most of the bank holiday weekend at a conference in beautiful Castletown House in County Kildare. Castletown House is well-known as a venue for classical music concerts but I had never been there for a conference before!

Castletown House in Co. Kildare

The conference was Irish Quantum Foundations, this year’s meeting of the Irish Quantum Field Group. Organised by Eoin O’Colgain of the University of Oviedo in conjunction with theoretical physicists at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, the National University of Ireland, Maynooth and Trinity College Dublin, it was most enjoyable.  Of course,  I’m not a quantum theorist (or any other sort of theorist) but as well as many talks on quantum field theory and string theory, there were seminars on recent advances in experimental particle physics and cosmology. You can find the programme and abstracts here – highlights for me were  a seminar on the recent results from the Planck satellite by Steven Gratton of Cambridge University and a talk on recent studies of the internal structure of the proton at LHCb by Ronan McNulty of University College Dublin.

The conference also featured a public science lecture on the Higgs boson by Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University. Yes, the man himself! Peter’s visit to Ireland received quite  bit of media attention and his lecture certainly didn’t disappoint. About 400 young people turned up in Maynooth University late on Friday afternoon to hear him describe how his work in quantum theory led him postulate the existence of the Higgs boson in 1964. Younger colleagues from Edinburgh then described the successful search for the Higgs at the Large Hadron Collider and how the discovery fits into modern physics. It was a very enjoyable outreach event and I think the point, that what once seemed an abstruse piece of theoretical physics went on to become a major lynchpin of modern physics , was well-made. A nice touch was that Professor Higgs was introduced by Dr Brian Dolan, a quantum theorist at Maynooth who informed the assembled students and visitors that he had studied under Higgs as a student at at Edinburgh!

Peter Higgs being congratulated by Dr Fabiola Gianotti of the ATLAS experiment at CERN , on the day of the announcement of the discovery of a Higgs-like particle at the LHC

The last talk of the conference was a memorial lecture in honour of my father, Lochlainn O’Raifeartaigh. The lecture was given by Professor Nathan Seiberg of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, a very appropriate choice – Nathan is a world-renowned figure in quantum field theory and string theory, particularly for his work in supersymmetry. This work is closely related to that of Lochlainn, in fact several of my father’s last papers were on the Seiberg-Witten model. Nathan gave a superb overview of some new advances in supersymmetry, carefully drawing out the connections between his own work and that of Lochlainn in many instances. Dad always said that he thought his work on supersymmetry breaking was probably his best and it’s good to know that scientific work can live on, just as music and literature do.

At question time, I asked Nathan about his thoughts on the lack of evidence for supersymmetry at the LHC so far (a lack of evidence that is leading some commentators to declare supersymmerty dead in the water). Like so many theorists, he had a very general overview:

“Even if supersymmetry is not realized in the energy range explored by the LHC, it is still and will always be important.  The impact of supersymmetry on theoretical physics and on mathematics has already been huge and it will continue to be essential…there are many parallels with other theoretical ideas that did not solve the problems they were designed to solve but turned out to be crucial in other contexts.”

Of course this is true – gauge theory in particular is full of examples of  advances that seemed to run into a wall, and were later found to be extremely important in other contexts. (Yang-Mills theory is a good example).

All in all, a superb conference – photos will be available on the conference website soon.

Update

I had a very nice conversation with Peter Higgs on Friday about Lochlainn, he remembered him well and was very complimentary about his work. He also pointed out that Irish students, physicists and engineers were losing out by Ireland’s non-membership of CERN, a point he also made on national TV (see link here, the interview is 20 mins in). I got my photo taken with Peter, but it came out looking like Jackson Pollock painting!