Chris Lintott’s Universe

I wanted to share this snippet from Sebastian Faulke’s Engleby, a novel set in the Cambridge of the 1970s.

Heisenberg and Bohr and Einstein strike me as being like gifted retriever dogs. Off they go, not just for an afternoon, but for ten years; they come back exhausted and triumphant and drop at your feet … A vole. It’s a remarkable thing in its way, a vole - intricate, beautiful really, marvellous. But does it … Does it help? Does it move the matter on?

When you ask a question that you’d actually like to know the answer to - what was there before the Big Bang, for instance, or what lies beyond the expanding universe, why does life have this inbuilt absurdity, this non sequitur of death - they say that your question can’t be answered, because the terms in which you’ve put it are logically unsound. What you must do, you see, is ask vole questions. Vole is - as we have agreed - the answer; so it follows that your questions must therefore all be vole-related

Powerful stuff, and I suspect many of the people who ask questions after my cosmology talks go away feeling short changed by their helping of vole. I suppose I can only say that we try as hard as possible to get what we can from the Universe; and if it only gives us voles then, to mix metaphors horribly, we have no choice but to make vole-ade and ask voley questions.

Have I mentioned how much I liked this month’s Sky at Night episode (even if I look like I could do with a week or so of sleep)? Yes? Well, let me point out anyway that it’s now up on our watch again page so those of you beyond these shores can listen to our discussion of cosmology and what we don’t know about the Universe.

There are times when blogging is a way of spreading news or sharing experiences, and there are times when it feels more like extended therapy. In the latter category lie my attempts to come to terms with manned spaceflight. I’ve always wrestled with this; I believe in the inspirational power of rising above our atmosphere and I’d go like a shot if you asked me - even if all you were offering was a one way ticket to Mars with my name on it. As a scientist, though, it’s difficult for me to justify the return. (There’s a case to be made for non-astronomical science, I admit, although I’m still not convinced by that).

On top of that existential dilemma is added the problem of assessing NASA’s current plans, which call for a rapid retirement for the shuttle and the development of a new set of launchers (as anyone who watched March’s Sky at Night will know (link opens in Realplayer).

I embarked on the round of interviews that became that program as a sceptic as to whether any of these ambitious plans, including a return to the Moon, would ever come off, but returned believing that NASA were playing a clever game. The political issue is the ‘gap’ - the time between the retirement of the shuttle and the launch of the first of the new generation. Whatever the attitudes of the new president, it doesn’t seem politically viable to me that the US would abandon all hope of a manned space program at a time when the Chinese in particular are increasing their presence in space.

This is a gamble, though, and the decision to demolish the shuttle program as quickly as possible, designed partly to make sure the commitment to press on is absolute (I think we may already have passed the point where it’s more expensive to build new shuttles or renovate the existing ones than to build Orion, at least on paper). The point of bringing this up now is that three posts from three different blogs yesterday illustrate the nature of the gamble we - or rather NASA - are taking.

First, Universe Today reported on John Glenn’s criticism of the current plans. Glenn - Apollo astronaut, the oldest man to fly on the shuttle and once a US senator - argues for a longer term investment and criticises the decision to rely on Russian vehicles to travel to and from the station.

That concern is underlined by the recent Soyuz landing, carrying three crew members down from the ISS. As James Oberg explains, something went badly wrong, sending the crew onto a ballistic trajectory (which is as scary as it sounds) and landing 400 km or so off course. The cause is still unknown, but Oberg’s conclusion is worrying :

After decades of service, it’s hard to imagine that the Soyuz has a design flaw of any significance, so the issue here may instead be fabrication quality. This is a frightening possibility, since the Soyuz manufacturer, the Energia Korolev Rocket and Space Corp., in Moscow, has had to double its Soyuz production rate in preparation for the increase of the space station crew from three to six people next year. .

Is it me, or would that make you think twice about relying on Soyuz for roughly five years worth of trips to and from the ISS?

Where does this leave us? With a sense of frustration, perhaps, because it’s the 21st century now and it’s supposed to be the future. Whatever you think of the ISS - and it’s an impressive piece of kit whatever it does - it’s hard not to echo Phil’s response to comparisons between real 2008 and fictional 2001.

For those of us who want to believe in making fiction reality (and ‘wanting’ is about as sophisticated an analysis as I’ve ever come up with), there’s an overwhelming desire to just shout ‘GET ON WITH IT’. That wouldn’t help, and if blogging about this really is therapy then I have, as usual, talked myself into a corner.

P.S. ESA are looking for astronauts, although it’s not clear what they’d be doing for the next ten years or so - or if the worst happens and funding gets cut across the board what unemployed astronauts do.

I’m rather proud of May’s Sky at Night; with a more informal format than usual, we used the excuse of it being program number 666 to look at the devils haunting modern cosmology, the things that we don’t yet know. Our guests, Gerry Gilmore from Cambridge and Kate Land from Oxford did a fantastic job, Patrick stirred things up as usual and I hope it will give a different perspective on what exactly the state of play is.

If you’re in the UK you can watch it on the BBC’s iplayer, otherwise I’ll post a link when it’s on our website. Or, of course, you could just watch BBC2 on Saturday at the later than usual time of 2.40 pm.

As of today, Bang! is officially available in an American edition, published by the good people of Johns Hopkins Press. If you happen to be in and around LA, Brian is signing copies at Book Soup on the 6th May, but everyone else can now pick up a copy via Amazon for less than $20. This is the Bang! up to date edition, so you should get a copy now before anyone discovers dark matter.

My column describing the May night sky is up over at the Times. Please click through if you have a chance. I was genuinely in two minds about what to write about the Eta Aquarid meteor shower; there’s a complete division between those predicting an excellent shower (60-80 ZHR*) and those expecting more normal rates (20-30). In either case, the low radiant doesn’t help, but in the end I decided that uncertainty just provides more of an incentive to go and look. I shall be getting up early on the 5th anyway as I’m heading down to Devon for Torquay United’s crucial play-off game, so I’ll report back.

* ZHR - Zenith Hourly Rate - the number of meteors an observer would see if the radiant were directly overhead.

I’ve now worked my way through the DIUS select committee report (not with a fine toothcomb, though), and there are some extremely interesting conclusions. You can find the whole thing here, or just trust my reading of it.

The meat starts on p20, which discusses the budget left to STFC from the two councils which preceded it, CCLRC (large facilities) and PPARC (particle physics and astronomy). It is true that neither council had a budget deficit when the merger happened, but the committee remind us that

STFC has been left with a bill for the operating costs of Diamond and ISIS that is £75 million … above the sum that was allocated in its budget following the merger.

Diamond and ISIS are large facilities at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, which are used by scientists from almost all disciplines (but have very little relevance to astronomy). Where to find the money to pay for these operating costs? Back to the committee

it is the former PPARC programmes that have been cut rather than the former CCLRC programmes. In other words, the former PPARC community is being penalised by the merger with CCLRC. This is a situation that the Government had promised would not come about.

But wait, why didn’t anyone notice? Oh…

This was noted by the National Audit Office in January 2007, and therefore the Government should have known and should have acted upon it. The fact that it did not has had unfortunate consequences. We believe that the Government should ensure that its original commitment to leave no legacy funding issues from the previous Councils is honoured.

Moving on, past headline stuff including a description of the Gemini confusion, we come to the part that resonated most with me. Over to the report again:

Given the anxiety that grant cuts are causing to the physics and astronomy community, we are dismayed that STFC has been attempting to play down the effects of the cuts on the grounds that reductions in future grants are not problematic. We consider cuts to grants that had already been promised a major problem. We urge STFC to take immediate steps to communicate clearly and comprehensively to its research community the impact of its grant cuts.

which echoes what I’ve said before. Those of us in the UK astronomical community are big enough and, god knows, ugly enough to deal with the situation as is if only someone would tell us what was going on.

I wrote earlier about the issue of waiting until the government’s Wakeham review of physics was published in September. The committee were told this was pointless but

We recommend that STFC wait for the results of the Wakeham review before implementing the cuts proposed in the Delivery Plan and that it use this time to consult with its stakeholders.

And that’s it; the conclusion is nasty - calling for substantial changes in the way the STFC is run, and questioning Keith Mason’s ability to carry out these changes. I know that others will jump on these, and who knows, they may be right to do so. It’s a difficult call from my position, but to be honest I don’t care who is in charge. If we can just hang on until the Wakeham review, then the report would have done a great deal of good.

In theory, I’m pleased with the report. It says clearly a lot of things that needed saying, and should help make the picture clearer. But I’m also an hour or so away from the start of my last night on a telescope on Kitt Peak, an observatory I’ve wanted to visit since a trip here helped inspire me to chose an astronomical career, doing excellent science based on the participation of the Galaxy Zoo volunteers. So you’ll forgive me if I stop letting this distract me and get back to what I want to be doing - it is, afterall, what any of us involved in the argument want to be doing.

(Science available at the Galaxy Zoo blog.)

The report by the Science Select committee on funding for STFC is to be released at midnight tonight, BST…more as soon as I’ve had a chance to read it.

Update : Here’s the press release. While the Times focus on the threat to Keith Mason, the head of the STFC, to my mind the Guardian are closer to the mark in concentrating on the reaction to the cuts themselves.

To recap slightly; as part of their reaction to the budget cuts, the government set up the Wakeham review of physics funding. While I think many of us saw this as our saviour, it’s not due to report until later in the year. The most important line in the release, therefore, is the call for no decision on where cuts should be taken to be made until after the Wakeham review reports. That’ll need some extra cash, I imagine, but it offers to my mind the best hope for a way out of this.

More when I’ve finished reading the report itself.

…is the excellent title of this post by someone with the delightful name of Clay Shirky. The nub and, indeed, the crux of it is as follows

For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time. And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV … And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

This is true. And important. And you should read the article, but not before you’ve finished catching up with the progress of our observing run over at the Galaxy Zoo blog.

Hat tip : Pamela.