Recently in Miscellanea Category

The astronomy community in the UK and beyond suffered a terrible blow last week with the passing of Steve Rawlings, Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford. I spent quite a lot of time in Oxford a few years ago, and was lucky to get to know Steve a bit. He had spent the last several years working on the Square Kilometre Array, the massive next-generation radio telescope being developed in the UK and internationally.

The detailed circumstances of his death aren’t yet known, and I hope that they remain irrelevant except for their tragic untimeliness. Much more important is that we remember his contributions and his friendship. My condolences to his wife, his family and his friends in Oxford and throughout the world.

It’s been a busy few weeks, and that seems like a good excuse for my lack of posts. Since coming back from Scotland, I’ve been to:

• Paris, for our bi-monthly Planck Core Team meetings, discussing of the state of the data from the satellite, and of our ongoing processing of it;

• Cambridge, for yet more Planck, this time to discuss the papers that we as collaboration will be writing over the next couple of years; and

• Varenna, on Lake Como in northern Italy, for the Passion for Light meeting, sponsored by SIF (the Italian Physical Society) and EPS (the European Physical Society). The meeting was at least in part to introduce the effort to sponsor an International Year of Light in 2015, supported by the UN and international scientific organizations. My remit was “Light from the Universe”, which I took as an excuse to talk about (yes), Planck and the Cosmic Microwave Background. That makes sense because of what is revealed in this plot, a version of which I showed:

This figure (made after an excellent one which will be in an upcoming paper by Dole and Bethermin) shows the intensity of the “background light” integrated over all sources in the Universe. The horizontal axis gives the frequency of electromagnetic radiation — from the radio at the far left, to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the Cosmic Infrared Background (CIB), optical light in the middle, and on to ultraviolet, x-ray and gamma-ray light. The height of each curve is proportional to the intensity of the background, the amount of energy falling on a square meter of area per second coming from a particular direction on the sky (for aficionados of the mathematical details, we actually plot the quantity νI_ν to take account of the logarithmic axis, so that the area under the curve gives a rough estimate of the total intensity) which is itself also proportional to the total energy density of that background, averaged over the whole Universe.

Here on earth, we are dominated by the sun (or, indoors, by artificial illumination), but a planet is a very unusual place: most of the Universe is empty space, not particularly near a star. What this plot shows is that most of the background — most of the light in the Universe — isn’t from stars or other astronomical objects at all. Rather, it’s the Cosmic Microwave Background, the CMB, light from the early Universe, generated before there were any distinct objects at all, visible today as a so-called black body with temperature 2.73 degrees Kelvin. It also shows us that there is roughly the same amount of energy in infrared light (the CIB) as in the optical. This light doesn’t come directly from stars, but is re-processed as visible starlight is absorbed by interstellar dust which heats up and in turn glows in the infrared. That is one of the reasons why Planck’s sister-satellite Herschel, an infrared observatory, is so important: it reveals the fate of roughly half of the starlight ever produced. So we see that outside of the optical and ultraviolet, stars do not dominate the light of the Universe. The x-ray background comes from both very hot gas, heated by falling into clusters of galaxies on large scales, or by supernovae within galaxies, along with the very energetic collisions between particles that happen in the environments around black holes as matter falls in. We believe that the gamma ray background also come from accretion onto supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies. But my talk centred on the yellow swathe of the CMB, although the only Planck data released so far are the relatively small contaminants from other sources in the same range of frequencies.

Other speakers in Varenna discussed microscopy, precision clocks, particle physics, the wave-particle duality, and the generation of very high-energy particles of light in the laboratory. But my favourite was a talk by Alessandro Farini, a Florentine “psychophysicist” who studies our perception of art. He showed the detailed (and extremely unphysical) use of light in art by even such supposedly realistic painters as Caravaggio, as well as using a series of optical illusions to show how our perceptions, which we think of as a simple recording of our surroundings, involve a huge amount of processing and interpretation before we are consciously aware of it. (As an aside, I was amused to see his collection of photographs with CMB Nobel Laureate George Smoot.)

And having found myself on the shores of Lake Como I took advantage of my good fortune:

(Many more pictures here.)

OK, this post has gone on long enough. I’ll have to find another opportunity to discuss speedy neutrinos, crashing satellites (and my latest appearance on the BBC World News to talk about the latter), not to mention our weeklong workshop at Imperial discussing the technical topic of photometric redshifts, and the 13.1 miles I ran last weekend.

I’ve spent the last few days in the northern half of Great Britain. Wednesday, I was an external examiner for a (successful!) PhD exam at the Durham University. Thursday, I was at the University of Glasgow in service to the other end of the PhD experience in the UK, giving a one-hour lecture on the Cosmic Microwave Background at the STFC summer school for incoming students.

But after the summer school I woke up early for the Caledonian Sleeper up to Fort William in the Western Highlands. I rode through some of the UK’s most spectacular landscape, hills and lochs in the morning fog:

Once I got to Fort William (a typically characterless UK town, unfortunately), I hit the trail, walking along the last few miles of the West Highland Way, taking in some detours to the Cow Hill Summit and the iron-age Dun Deardail Fort. The local hills, including Ben Nevis, the highest peak in Britain, were nestled in low-slung cloud all day:

Along the way, I spotted flora and fauna

and the occasional designed object:
I thought this might be a not terribly well-hidden bird hide, but in fact it’s Outlandia, a treehouse artist’s studio suspended midway up a hillside forest. And I could feel the stress and cares (of my admittedly pretty easy life as an academic in a prestigious institution) fall away, mindful not of telecons, teaching and reports, but of just putting one foot in front of the other, and staring at those hills and lochs. Legend has it Macbeth lived on an island in this one:

More photos of my wandering, staggering, walking and ambling here.

And as an added bonus, here are the Mekons, with their own take on walking in the British countryside:

(Cockermouth is a town in Cumbria near the Lake District, although this was apparently filmed in Wales, Scotland and Leeds. And this being from the Mekons, it’s as much about armageddon and the Rolling Stones as walking in the countryside.)

I have just had the honor of celebrating the 100th Birthday of Dora Jaffe, my grandmother, born March 14, 1911 (a date she shares with Albert Einstein!), in Shepetivka, Ukraine (then part of Russia). Her father, Leib (Lewis) Greenberg, emigrated just before the war, stranding her and her mother until they could make it across Europe and the Atlantic to New York City. Speaking only Yiddish, a summer playing in the Bronx taught her enough English to start school in the Fall, and she’s been a proud American ever since.

So I know it was a pleasure for her to receive this (redacted) envelope and its contents: In fact, when I showed it to her, a good democrat and liberal for longer than I’ve known her — her father had been a union organizer in the Ukrainian orchards before emigrating — she said that it was a special honor for her to receive it from the first black President of the United States.

She spent much of the intervening century with her husband Aaron Jaffe, my grandfather, and we recently unearthed this fantastic picture of their young life in New York together:

Now, she’s the matriarch of our family, still sharp as a proverbial tack. Twenty-six of us, from the seven cousins of my generation on up, gathered this afternoon on Long Island, New York, coming in from London, Denver, and less exotic locations like New Jersey and Brooklyn to spend the day celebrating her life, telling stories, and eating. And, of course, kvetching and gossiping like any good family.

Happy Birthday, Dora!

Ok, the blog is back up. Disasters averted and the design is a little less ragged than before, but I’m not sure of the details.

I want to test that I can still post, and this seems a good opportunity to solicit comments to help me refine my aesthetic sensibilities. Are the sidebars over on the right too busy? Are the fonts legible? Does everything work?

I’ve recently “upgraded” my software which seems to be playing havoc with the format of the blog. The blog is visible, and in many ways nicer than before, but I’ve lost all of my lovely formatting… I hope we’ll be back to normal soon.

In any event, you can probably ignore this and read my post about Planck’s new results instead!

The Mekons are the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world. They started in the 70s as a punk band from Leeds but by the mid-1980s had picked up fiddles and mandolins to go with their loud guitars, and learned to love Hank Williams and Gram Parsons as much as they’ve sadly learned to hate the injustices meted about by the systems and people that run everything. Their “Mekons Rock’n’Roll” was a simultaneous eulogy and elegy to their loud and debauched chosen musical form, “capitalism’s favorite boychild” as they themselves described it. The followup, “Curse of the Mekons” is probably the best record made about the end of the cold war, lamenting not only their cursed bad luck, but refusing to see it even a defeat for socialism which they reasonably point out can’t “really be dead when it hasn’t even happened”. A decade later, they also probably made the best (if possibly unselfconscious) record about 9/11 and its aftermath, “Out of Our Heads”.

If all of this makes them sound dour and serious, they’re not. Or at least, they know enough to seize the day, to turn their amps up and party while they watch the decay of the world around them. Over the years, they’ve dispersed to Chicago, New York, San Francisco, London and England’s West Country — and still get together every once in a while to record, tour and generally raise hell without, as far as I can tell, increasing their income too much. And in the process, they’ve probably been responsible for two or three of the best rock’n’roll shows I’ve ever been to, in North America and in the UK.

To honor (or praise, or bury) their career, filmmaker Joe Angio has shot the footage for a documentary “Revenge of the Mekons”. But they’ve run out of money for editing, and have enlisted the internet to help: Kickstarter is a brilliant site which enables groups to find (financial) supporters from around the world (and reward them in kind). You can support the film — the project is more than halfway toward their $20,000 goal. Depending on the amount of the pledge, you can get various prizes, including records and artwork by members of the band as well as books signed by some of the Mekons’ more famous fans (including rock critic Greil Marcus, novelist Jonathan Franzen, and writer Luc Sante), not to mention your name in the credits of a film. So, keep the corpse of rock’n’roll limping along — donate what you can.

I try not to ask too much of my readers, but this post and the next are about a couple of worthwhile causes I’ve come across of late.

The first project is the BBC World Challenge competition, supporting “social entrepreneurs”, grassroots projects making an impact in the developing world. One of the twelve finalists, e.quinox, is an initiative founded by students from Imperial College. Along with students at the Kigali Institute of Technology, the team is developing solar-powered devices for rural electrification, “Electric Kiosks”, three of which have already been deployed in Rwanda.

Please vote for the team — the only one led by students — and support this fantastic project.

Last year, I ran for cats and dogs. This year, it’s a different half-marathon, Run to the Beat on September 26 (“London’s Music Half-Marathon”), with a less conveniently located course in East London, and I’ve shifted Kingdoms in my charitable support: I will run for “Trees for Cities”, “an independent charity working to improve the environment in urban areas by involving local people in community tree planting, training and landscaping projects”, in London, throughout the UK, and internationally. So if you like trees, and would like to keep me on the road for 13 miles, please give!

Two crucial figures from outside the mainstream of American culture have died.

Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010) has been hanging around, writing about and stirring up trouble in New York’s Greenwich Village since the 1950s as a writer, poet, occasional political activist and rock ‘n’ roller. First in the late 60s and early 70s and occasionally thereafter, he was one of the Fugs (named after the faux-expletive from Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead) singing both the poems of William Blake as well as “Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side”. Since then, he kept writing, occasionally reformed the Fugs with his partner Ed Sanders, but had suffered a series of strokes in the last year from which he never fully recovered.

Harvey Pekar (1939-2010) was a bit better known. For the last few decades, he had been writing a series of autobiographical comics, “American Splendor”, illustrated by some of the best comics artists of the last few decades, from R. Crumb and Alan Moore to Gilbert Hernandez, Chester Brown and Joe Sacco.They chronicled his life in Cleveland, Ohio, from the tedium of his day job as a hospital clerk, a bout with cancer (in the excellent graphic novel “Our Cancer Year”), and his occasional run-ins with fame — in the 80s, he was occasional guest on David Letterman’s late-night talk show (until he famously decided to use his slot to lambaste GE, the owner of the NBC television network), and in this decade was memorably played by Paul Giamatti in a movie, also called “American Splendor”, based on the comics. Only a couple of weeks ago, I discovered The Pekar Project, devoted to getting and keeping his newest works online. He was always surly, too high-maintenance for his own good, dependably dissatisfied with whatever his life threw at him. And will nonetheless be missed.