Category Archives: Uncategorized

My main NY resolution is that I’m thinking of changing the topic of my book. Last semester, I gave a few public talks on particle physics to mark the opening of the LHC at CERN (see ‘My Seminars’ tab for slides). More used to giving talks on the Big Bang, I couldn’t help noticing that it is definitely easier to explain the physics of the universe than the physics of the sub-atomic. Also, there seems to be that bit more interest in cosmology..I guess this is because the study of the origin of the universe has implications for religion and philosophy and so has a wide appeal.

Everybody wants to know whether the Big Bang model is just theory or established fact. And what exactly happened at time zero? (good question). There are also all those sexy topics like Black Holes, Dark Matter, the Arrow of Time etc. Of course A Brief History of Time (Hawking) catapulted cosmology into the public imagination, but I think the interest was always there…

So possibly a change of direction in the New Year. Perhaps‘The Puzzling Universe”, a short, succinct book on the origin of the universe, might be a better seller than “The Story of Atoms”. (I have no interest in writing a popular book that is not popular). Also, I can imagine a spinoff newspaper column on the subject, always a good sign..It’s true there are now lots of books on this subject at the popular level, but that’s no harm. Anyway, many of them either cover far too much (Hawking, Bryson) or are by authors who have little experience of teaching the subject at elementary level. Must ask the students, see which subject they think will sell…

One thing that worries me is that some of the best science books for the public remain relatively unknown, not sure why this is.  For example, I really enjoy the books of Paul Davies, but they are not as wide selling as they should be. Another example is Marcus Chown – I read Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You over Christmas , a really excellent book. Really good explanations of quantum physics, general relativity and whatnot, all with highly original analogies. Hmm..we’ll see.

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?

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

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

I’m up to my tonsils in teaching this week, so no time for a proper post. However, over at Cosmic Variance there is a very interesting discussion of a recent paper by Geoffrey Burbridge on the Arkiv ;

A Realistic Cosmological Model Based on Observations and Some Theory Developed Over the Last 90 Years

Essentially, the author is defending the steady-state model of the universe (yes, he’s a member of the original Hoyle group). I wasn’t aware that anyone was still pushing this alternative to the Big Bang, I thought everyone had accepted the evidence was overwhelming. Sean Carroll has a very nice discussion of this point, i.e. the difficulty of ever settling a scientific dabate to everyone’s satisfaction. Every reader of this blog should read it carefully.

P.S. The basic idea of the steady-state model is that matter is continuously created – most physicists consider it effectively ruled out by the simple fact that our universe is clearly different now from what it was in the past. Not to mention the small matter of the cosmic microwave background, a clear fossil of the Big Bang

This week is Science Week in Ireland, a week of events designed to get schoolchildren and adults interested in the world of science. There are all sort of events, lectures and activities are going on all over the country – you can see a list on the website. Here in the southeast, CALMAST, the WIT Center for the Advancement of Learning of Maths, Science, and Technology, are doing their usual super job, with exhibitions, science shows and lectures…see the program above.

My own contribution was a lecture on the LHC for secondary schools this morning (you can see the slides here). I’m giving a similar lecture to the public in the neighbouring town of Dungarvan tomorrow evening , with one crucial difference. Dungarvan is the birthplace of Ernest Walton – as in Cockcroft-Walton, the team that built the world’s first successful particle accelerator and used it to split the atomic nucleus. Their accelerator was the precursor modern accelerators and is still used as a pre-amp today (I’m told there is a mock up of the original somewhere in CERN, must check this). Anyway, I intend pitching this particular LHC lecture as Walton’s legacy.

The Cockroft-Walton experiment  was a spectacular success, given that the energy they used was relatively low. Not only did it offer a nice verification of E = mc2, it was also a convincing demonstration of quantum tunelling – George Gamow had visited the Cavendish a few months earlier, and convinced Rutherford that they might succeed at low energy. There is a nice description of this story in the book ‘The Fly in the Cathedral’ by Brian Cathcart.

Ernest Walton: Ireland’s only Nobel in physics

In between these two lectures, I’m driving to Cork to catch the highlight of the week – Anton Zeilinger is giving a talk on quantum entanglement and its applications…wow. More on this tomorrow.

.