As part of the festival, we’re organising Quest for the Grail: An International Adventure Game, later this month: from noon to 5pm in London and right afterwards, noon to 5pm in Manhattan, New York.

The London teams will “hunt for objects in Clerkenwell hotspots…from the Order of St. John to Blackfriars Bridge to the International Magic Shop. You may be looking for a charm against the Plague, a tombstone or a silver goblet. Your team may be asked to invent something - the holiest of drinks.” The game continues with New York teams searching in “Manhattan hotspots…from Clinton Castle to the tombstones of Trinity Church to the Grand Lodge of the Masons. You may be looking for a marker of a headless ghost who haunts Wall Street, a symbol of George Washington or a troll in the East Village”, aided by London players and puppetmasters overseeing the games.

Unfortunately, I’m in sunny California recovering from my winter (and many years) of Planck work, but if you’re in either city and would like to play, you can join as an individual, a half-team of five, or a full team of ten players. There’s more information on the site, or you can contact the organisers directly at grail@timewavefestival.com.

The reporters tried to keep us honest, asking us to keep simplifying our explanations so that they — and their readers — could understand them. We struggled with describing how our measurements of the typical size of spots in our map of the CMB eventually led us to a measurement of the age of the Universe (which I tried to do in my previous post). This was hard not only because the reasoning is subtle, but also because, frankly, it’s not something we care that much about: it’s a model-dependent parameter, something we don’t measure directly, and doesn’t have much of a cosmological consequence. (I ended up on the phone with the BBC’s Pallab Ghosh at about 8pm trying to work out whether the age has changed by 50 or 80 million years, a number that means more to him and his viewers than to me and my colleagues.)

There are pieces by the reporters who asked excellent questions at the press conference, at The Guardian, The Economist and The Financial Times, as well as one behind the (London) Times paywall by Hannah Devlin who was probably most rigorous in her requests for us to simplify our explanations. I’ll also point to NPR’s coverage, mostly since it is one of the few outlets to explicitly mention the topology of the Universe which was one of the areas of Planck science I worked on myself.

Aside from the press conference itself, the media were fairly clamouring for the chance to talk about Planck. Most of the major outlets in the UK and around Europe covered the Planck results. Even in the US, we made it onto the front page of the New York Times. Rather than summarise all of the results, I’ll just self-aggrandizingly point to the places where I appeared: a text-based preview from the BBC, and a short quote on video taken after the press conference, as well as one on ITV. I’m most proud of my appearance with Tom Clarke on Channel 4 News — we spent about an hour planning and discussing the results, edited down to a few minutes including my head floating in front of some green-screen astrophysics animations.

Now that the day is over, you can look at the results for yourself at the BBC’s nice interactive version, or at the lovely Planck Chromoscope created by Cardiff University’s Dr Chris North, who donated a huge amount of his time and effort to helping us make yesterday a success. I should also thank our funders over at the UK Space Agency, STFC and (indirectly) ESA — Planck is big science, and these sorts of results don’t come cheap. I hope you agree that they’ve been worth it.

There were only two specific questions, rating each of the following from “Very Good” through “Poor” (there’s a “no response” off to the right, as well):

1. The structure and delivery of the teaching sessions
2. The content of this module

The numerical results (at right) were pretty good. Note that 114 students — about half — responded.

The rest of the results are free-form comments. With such a big class it’s very difficult to find a style of teaching that suits everyone. Hence, the comments showed a split between the students who enjoyed the very mathematical approach of the course and those who wanted more physical examples from the beginning (not that easy in the context of an axiomatic approach to quantum mechanics — but there are a few simple system like quantum dots that exhibit some of the properties of the simplest systems we study in class; it’s clear that these should be highlighted more than I have). Similarly, some students wanted a more step-by-step approach to the mathematics, whereas others would prefer just a sketch of the proofs on the board (“put the algebra in the notes and let students work through it”).

But one set of comments especially hit home. Here’s a good example:

Frankly, I think that Prof. Jaffe has the potential to be an outstanding lecturer, one which he wastes by not being properly prepared. Just showing up to lectures and writing down on the board what was in (the previous lecturer’s) notes without thinking much about it in advance results in time spent staring at notes and board which could otherwise have been used to face the audience and explain what it is we’re doing. Maybe that sounded harsh, but he really is very good and could be outstanding if he put a little more into preparing for lectures and didn’t stick to his notes quite so much… If you actually perform the calculations, and think about the various steps yourself, then it all happens in a way, and at a pace, which suits us as students and allows us to follow.

(OK, I picked one that made an effort to heap on some praise along with the criticism.) I have to admit that this point, repeated by several students, seemed right on, for at least some of the lectures. I did always make an effort to go over the notes in detail beforehand. But these were notes indeed written by the previous lecturer, and this gives a few problems. Yes, I probably wasn’t always careful enough to go over the details of the mathematics beforehand. So sometimes I did spend too much effort trying to puzzle out exactly what I wanted to say (some students also complained about the occasional mistakes I made on the board, perhaps related to this). But sometimes the problem is more subtle: I might not always want to explain the concepts in the same way as the previous lecturer — and sometimes I might only realise this when actually doing the explaining! Either of these can happen in any lecture, but the combination of teaching this course for the first time, and doing so from someone else’s notes, certainly made it worse.

Next year, things will at least be different: I’ll be teaching for the second time, and so have some idea of the pitfalls from this past year. Moreover, our department is making some significant changes to the overall structure of the curriculum, phasing out our system of tutorials and so-called classworks for a series of three medium-sized (20 student) group sessions each week. This is happening alongside some specific changes to the quantum mechanics curriculum, with more material in the first year (happening already). My course will be shortened by a full five lectures, but I suspect that this combination of changes will give me a bit more breathing room, as well as a few different ways to make sure the material gets said in different ways, appropriate for different students.

Further criticism, comments, ideas, etc., are always welcome.

Over the course of the term, the class builds up the machinery to predict the properties of the hydrogen atom, which is the canonical real-world system for which we need quantum mechanics to make predictions. This is certainly a sensible endpoint for the 30 lectures.

But it did somehow seem like a very old-fashioned way to teach the course. Even back in the 1980s when I first took a university quantum mechanics class, we learned things in a way more closely related to the way quantum mechanics is used by practicing physicists: the mathematical details of Hilbert spaces, path integrals, and Dirac Notation.

Today, an up-to-date quantum course would likely start from the perspective of quantum information, distilling quantum mechanics down to its simplest constituents: qbits, systems with just two possible states (instead of the infinite possibilities usually described by the wave function). The interactions become less important, superseded by the information carried by those states.

Really, it should be thought of as a full year-long course, and indeed much of the good stuff comes in the second term when the students take “Applications of Quantum Mechanics” in which they study those atoms in greater depth, learn about fermions and bosons and ultimately understand the structure of the periodic table of elements. Later on, they can take courses in the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, and, yes, on quantum information, quantum field theory and on the application of quantum physics to much bigger objects in “solid-state physics”.

Despite these structural questions, I was pretty pleased with the course overall: the entire two-hundred-plus students take it at the beginning of their second year, thirty lectures, ten ungraded problem sheets and seven in-class problems called “classworks”. Still to come: a short test right after New Year’s and the final exam in June. Because it was my first time giving these lectures, and because it’s such an integral part of our teaching, I stuck to to the same notes and problems as my recent predecessors (so many, many thanks to my colleagues Paul Dauncey and Danny Segal).

Once the students got over my funny foreign accent, bad board handwriting, and worse jokes, I think I was able to get across both the mathematics, the physical principles and, eventually, the underlying weirdness, of quantum physics. I kept to the standard Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics, in which we think of the aforementioned wavefunction as a real, physical thing, which evolves under that Schrödinger equation — except when we decide to make a measurement, at which point it undergoes what we call collapse, randomly and seemingly against causality: this was Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” which seemed to indicate nature playing dice with our Universe, in contrast to the purely deterministic physics of Newton and Einstein’s own relativity. No one is satisfied with Copenhagen, although a more coherent replacement has yet to be found (I won’t enumerate the possibilities here, except to say that I find the proliferating multiverse of Everett’s Many-Worlds interpretation ontologically extravagant, and Chris Fuchs’ Quantum Bayesianism compelling but incomplete).

I am looking forward to getting this year’s SOLE results to find out for sure, but I think the students learned something, or at least enjoyed trying to, although the applause at the end of each lecture seemed somewhat tinged with British irony.

Ryan sees this period [the 1940s] as the point of triumph of liberal democracy against its Fascist and Stalinist opponents. Closer attention shows this decade was instead a moment of what physicists call dark energy: the universe of meaning of democracy underwent a dramatic expansion, in defiance of the cosmic gravity of contemporary events. The ideal of monitory democracy was born.

Not a bad metaphor. Nice to see that the author, a professor of Politics from Sydney, is paying attention to the stuff that really matters.

For no literary reason at all (I’m the proud godparent of someone who works for the prize’s sponsors), I was able to make my way into this year’s ceremony for the Man Booker Prize, held in the rather splendid Guildhall in the City of London. (That’s the hall at right, being addressed I think by the chairman of the Booker Prize Committee, Sir Peter Stothard).

This year’s winner was Hilary Mantel for Bring Up the Bodies, the second volume in her fictionalisation of the life of Thomas Cromwell. I admit I haven’t read that, nor its also-prizewinning predecessor Wolf Hall (nor in fact any of the rest of this year’s crop). And I was sort of hoping to hear Will Self give a speech or, better, a rant.

The ice sculptures at the center of even our low-rent table on the outskirts was evidence of the luxury of the event, as was the remnant of my outfit (why else wear a bow tie unless you can flaunt the louche look at the end of the evening? Although alas the picture wasn’t taken on my ride home in an appropriate chauffeured limo, nor even a black cab, but the Central Line on the London Underground…).

Slightly closer to my usual bailiwick, earlier this week I went to see the award of this year’s Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, organised by Britain’s Royal Society, and sponsored by Winton Capital:

Those are shortlisted authors Steven Pinker, Brian Greene, host/comedian (and former Cambridge physics PhD student) Ben Miller, James Gleick, Lone Frank and Joshua Foer. Again, I’m behind on this year’s selections, and enjoyed all of the authors’ readings — though I found Foer’s bit from his Moonwalking with Einstein especially compelling. But Gleick’s The Information triumphed (and his previous books, from Chaos to his biography of Richard Feynman, have shown him to be an excellent writer and communicator, so I am sure it was well-deserved).

After the award, standing around the Royal Society’s digs, swigging the obligatory (and appreciated) champagne, we realised something strange about this year’s shortlist: no British authors. One Dane (Lone Frank) and five Americans (the fifth, Nathan Wolfe, couldn’t make it).

This has re-inspired me to go to the next level up from these monthly posts (and more frequent tweets) and think about writing that book that they say we all have in us. Let’s try a little crowdsourcing: what book should I write?

Ten one-way trips in six weeks is too many; the Eurostar makes it about as pleasant as it could possibly be: 2 1/4 hours from central London to central Paris by train (a flight from Heathrow to de Gaulle is faster, but the airports are less convenient and much more stressful). Most of my time in Paris was for Planck Satellite meetings, mostly devoted to the first major release of Planck data and papers next year — of course, by The Planck rules, I can’t talk about what happened. At least I have no more trips to Paris until early December (and only four or so hours a week of Planck telecons).

But in addition to three Planck meetings, I also helped out in my minor role as a member of the Scientific Organizing Committee of the Big Bang, Big Data, Big Computing meeting at the APC, which was an excellent gathering of cosmologists with computer scientists and statisticians, all doing our best to talk over the fences of jargon and habit that often keep the different fields from having productive conversations. One of my favourite talks was the technical but entertaining From mean Euler characteristics to the Gaussian kinematic formula by Robert Adler, whose work in statistics more than thirty years ago taught many in cosmology how to treat the functions that we use to describe the distribution of density and temperature in the Universe as random fields; he discussed more recent updates to that early work for much more general circumstances, the cosmological repercussions of which have yet to be digested. Another highlight was from Imperial’s own Professor David Hand, Opportunities and Challenges in Modelling and Anomaly Detection, discussing how to pull small and possibly weird (“anomalous”) signals from large amounts of data— he didn’t highlight many specific instances in cosmology, but rather gave examples with other sorts of big data, such as the distribution of prices of credit card purchases (with some particularly good anecdotes culled from gas/petrol station data).

Finally, in addition to those many days of meetings — and yes, the occasional good Parisian meal — there were a couple of instances of the most satisfying of my professional duties: two examinations for newly-minted PhDs from the Institut d’Astrophysiques de Paris and the Laboratoire Astroparticule et Cosmologie — félicitations aux Docteurs Errard et Ducout.