Dissipation and Ruin

It's the annual Department Christmas lunch today, from 12 noon 'til 2pm.  Based on previous experience, I blocked out the afternoon in my calendar with an event entitled "Dissipation and ruin."  However, I have since changed that to "Finish writing the Physics Annual Programme Review," which is probably a more sensible course of action.  We'll see.  There's always tomorrow...

The demise of co-operation

I received an email from a friend and scientific collaborator of mine who works at the University of Frankfurt.  By chance, he happens to live in the town, Friedberg, near Frankfurt, that was twinned with my home town of Bishop's Stortford.

He wondered if I had heard that Bishop's Stortford had unilaterally decided to break off its town-twinning arrangements with both Friedberg, and Villiers-sur-Marne, near Paris.  I hadn't, and a quick bit of research reveals an article in the graun about it.  According to my friend, it has caused quite a stir.  Not so much that the Conservative council would countenance breaking away per se, but that they would do it unilaterally, sending a letter informing the other towns of the decision, without so much as a farewell party, looking back at the good times.

Frankly, I think it's embarrassing, but I'll carry on working with my colleague.  Next time I visit him, perhaps I can take a trip to Friedberg and send some personal greetings from Bishop's Stortford.  There's only so much I can personally do to help our continental neighbours think well of us...

News of the Higgs

There will be a seminar in a few hours hosted at CERN to give the latest results in the search for the Higgs boson.  I'm sure it will be interesting, but I'll be at my daughter's first ever Christmas play, which I'm sure I'll enjoy even more.

I'll take a look at the announcement afterwards, and try to write a sensible post about it (and why the Higgs is important to our understanding of nature), but to pre-empt anything too exciting being announced, the following text appears on the CERN home page as I write:

A seminar will be held today at CERN at which the ATLAS and CMS experiments will present the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson. These results will be based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs.

Paul Dirac Talk at Surrey

Not being very good at saying "no" to things has its upsides.  For example, I agreed to organise a series of evening lectures at the University of Surrey on behalf of the Institute of Physics South Central Branch.  I've been doing this for a few years now, and it gives me an opportunity to invite people that I'd like to hear talk to give a lecture, suitable for the physics-interested general public.

Sometimes I invite people with little hope that they will really come, because they are too in-demand to consider a feeless (apart from a nice meal afterwards) gig with an audience of 100 to be a sensible use of time.  I invited Andre Geim from Manchester, Nobel Laureate from 2010, to come this year, but unsurprisingly I got an automated response, which was very courteous, and gave instructions for how to contact him in different ways depending on the nature of the email, but pointing out that he is unable to accept most invitations to talk.  Fair enough.

It was with a similar spirit more of hope than expectation that I invited Graham Farmelo to come to talk about Paul Dirac.  Graham's book about Dirac, The Strangest Man, has been lauded widely, winning prizes along the way, and I figured our evening IoP talk might be too small a gig for him.  I was delighted then, when he said yes.

He'll be here, at the University of Surrey, on 23rd November, talking from 7 to 8pm in the Griffiths Lecture Theatre in the Lecture Theatre Block (see campus map).  Please feel free to come along.  No booking is required, and the event is free.  You can register interest, if you want, on the event's facebook page.

The nuclear physics link (since this is ostensibly a nuclear physics blog) is that, aside from laying down much of quantum physics, and its relativistic counterpart, which paved the way for the quantum field theories that underlie theoretical nuclear physics, he was the first to write the time-dependent Hartree-Fock equations, which are the basis of quite a bit of my research.  It is not uncommon for me to cite the paper, from 1930, in which he laid down the theory.

Approximation Theory

I spent three hours of this afternoon in a church hall in Guildford. I haven't found religion - far from it. I was there on purely secular matters, taking an exam for an Open University module on Approximation Theory. A few years ago I decided to start an MSc in Mathematics to learn more about various topics that I've never formally learned before. At the time, I approached my head of department to see if the University would part-fund, and he said no. Why couldn't someone like me with a PhD just pick a book to learn a new topic? A good question, but the answer is that without the rod of the assignment deadlines, I'd never in practice get round to learning the material.

So, today was the culmination of the year of learning all about different ways of approximating functions - polynomial approximations, splines, all that kind of stuff. As ever, I didn't revise perhaps quite as much as I should have (here I am learning about all the things my students understand very well), but it was okay. The exam was fair, especially after I asked the invigilators to turn the speakers off so that I stopped hearing them cut up paper with scissors next to the microphone (I have no idea what they were doing to bide the time). I'll find out the results in December, but I'm happy with how the course went, and there are even a few ways I might bring some of what I've learnt in to my research.

It's a shame the OU are putting up their fees so highly. It's not a good time to be a player in the HE market, but I can't see that their new fee regime will be good for them. Fortunately for me the existing MSc fees will be held for current students.

Bananas!

There's a nice article on the BBC News website talking about the Banana Equivalent Dose as a measure of radiation. It's a kind of nice idea, since it's motivated by the desire to point out that everyday objects are radioactive. Bananas are more radioactive than most things since they are high in potassium, which has a radioactive primordial isotope, Potassium-40 (K-40). K-40 is also responsible for the last item in the table in the BBC article - sleeping with someone is equivalent to half a banana's worth of radiation dose, because your bed partner is partly made of potassium, as are you. Around 5000 radioactive potassium decays occur every second in a typical adult.

Spot the difference

With due deference to Private Eye, and Peter Coles's Astronomy Look-a-likes, I must say that I have been struck (as pointed out by Kate Lancaster), by the similarity between neutron discoverer James Chadwick, and Old Vic artistic Director Kevin Spacey:

Spacey

Chadwick