Lunchtime recitals & Evening talk

I've only been working here for a mere 12 years, and during all that time, I had never been to one of the weekly lunchtime recitals put on by the music department.  I managed to remedy that today by making the two minute walk from my office to the performing arts studio and listening to final year students perform.  It was heavily flute-themed, beginning with a piece by Carl Reinecke, accompanied by piano, another accompanied piece by Ian Clarke, dating from 2007 (and rather good, I thought), then a Rachmaninoff piano piece, which started off quietly and ended with a loud crashing tempestuous finale, and then back to a calmer flute solo piece by Telemann.

It is easy to forget that there still survives an aspect of University life which is about very highly-educated people sharing a communal experience of being amongst other very highly-educated people and engaging with each other.  So often it feels like I am here to do a job, to make bosses happy, to satisfy various metrics, but every now and then a glimpse of some crazy idealistic view of the academy peeks through.

So, more fool me for waiting so long before attending... and really, there is so much else going on that one can attend, but I rarely do so.  I even organise one series of events here, albeit under the cover of the Institute of Physics.  In fact, tonight we kick off this (academic) year's programme of evening public lectures on physics (and related topics), with Jon Butterworth of UCL (and Horizon and the Guardian, etc.) talking about a euphemistic "discovery" at the LHC earlier this year.  If you are a reader of this blog (if there are any) and you are in Guildford, feel free to come along this evening.  It should be a great talk, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Flora and Wagner

This morning, when driving my daughter Flora to school, I felt in a kind mood, and offered that we could stop listening to radio 4 (which she professes to hate, but still asks things about what they say) and suggested radio 2.  She gladly said yes, hoping for music, and indeed we were treated to The Fog on the Tyne (Lindisfarne version, thankfully - though she didn't say anything about the "we can have a wee-wee" line).  After a while she got tired of Chris Evans talking, and asked what was on radio 6 and radio 5, and I tried to explain (and that we couldn't listen to radio 6 or 5 in the car).  I then mentioned radio 3 and that it played classical music, and asked if she wanted to listen.  She said yes. 

It is now her favourite radio station.  When we turned it over, the music playing was Huldigungsmarsch by Richard Wagner.  She was absolutely delighted (having spend the journey thus far complaining about the traffic and how boring the journey was and how long it would take).  "Daddy!  It's like a carousel!  It's like a carousel, isn't it Daddy?" she said,  and we spent the rest of the journey listening to Radio 3.  Every time I turned it down to hear what she was asking, she forgot her question and just told me to turn it back up.  Hopefully this is going to make car journeys more enjoyable for all of us!

Edit: Here's Lindisfarne's Fog on the Tyne:


and here's Wagner's Huldigungsmarsch:

How many naturally-occurring elements are there?

The editor of Nature Chemistry, @stuartcantrill and I follow each other on Twitter.  If memory serves, that followed from a quick exchange about the correct value of the number of naturally-occuring isotopes between us.  The subject has come up again, with Stuart (correctly) correcting the value given in a blog post he tweeted about.

The question is not at all easy to answer.  It depends what you mean by naturally-occurring.  I think the common meaning is "can be dug up from the ground but didn't come from man-made sources such as weapons fallout."  So, how many is that?  Well, definitely any element with a stable isotope can be included there.  How many elements have stable - i.e. non-radioactive - isotopes?  If you look at a table of isotopes, such as this one you can look for the squares shaded in black, which is the usual notation for a stable isotope.  That gives us everything from Hydrogen (element 1) up to Bismuth (element 83) with gaps for Technitium (element 43) and Promethium (element 61).  The complicated thing is that really, everything heavier than around Nickel or Iron (around element 26) is know to be theoretically unstable, and in fact the decay of the only "stable" Bismuth isotope has been observed.

Still, it turns out that all the isotopes listed as "stable" in the chart can be dug out of the ground, and trace amounts of Technetium and Promethium are found in nature, because Uranium can be dug out of the ground, and though all isotopes of it are radioactive, they sometimes decay by spontaneously fissioning into lighter isotopes, which include Technetium and Promethium.

It is for similar reasons that some other radioactive-only isotopes can be found on the Earth, and this includes isotopes of all the elements heavier than Bismuth but lighter than Uranium (things like Polonium and Radon).  It seems that a bit of Neptunium and Plutonium (elements 93 and 94) can be found in Uranium ores, too.  According to this page found by Stuart, the number may be even higher, though I'd like to see the references to the papers where the things heavier than Plutonium were observed in non-man-made matter.

In some ways, though, the question is a bit academic.  If we extend our remit to the stars, where all elements heavier than lithium are made, then surely even heavier elements than those that can be dug out of the ground are found - at least fleetingly during novae and supernovae.  Stars are part of nature, after all.  What is clear is that we know that at least 118 elements exist in isotopes for long enough to say that they exist.  We also know, or suspect, that there will be an upper limit to this number, but exactly where that is, we're still trying to work out.

Sea U, Jimmy.

Every quarter, I get sent a copy of Nuclear Connect, a kind of trade journal for the nuclear industry.  There was one particular news story that interested me that I thought I'd pass on.  It concerns a recent announcement at an American Chemical Society, reported by them in a news story here.

The short story is that there is supposed to be at least 4 billion tons of uranium dissolved in seawater.  That's a staggering amount, but of course there is a lot of seawater out there, and even a low concentration of uranium could still amount to an overall huge weight.  Wikipedia seems to think there is about 10⁹ billion tons of water on the Earth.

Apparently a technique, developed in Japan, has cut the cost of extracting uranium from the sea to around $300 per pound of uranium.  That would be at the natural isotopic abundance, presumably, so would need to be enriched for fuel. But still, to know that there is a huge reserve of uranium that can be extracted is useful.  It can always form a backup in case we don't come up with something better.

Sex, drugs and nuclear physics

Thanks to @scamperscamper and @thisiswilton for sharing the following on Facebook.  Nuclear Physics is getting some of the glamorous status that it clearly deserves at long last.

Bosons for free, and the golden 30.

A couple of interesting open-access things came to my attention in the last couple of days.  Firstly, and tangentially, a tweet that I saw retweeted pointed out that the articles that appeared on the preprint servers recently announcing the discover of the Higgs boson (or at least of a boson consistent with the Higgs) have now been published, free for all to read in Physics Letters B.  Of course, it was known at the time of the preprint appearance where they had been submitted, but it's certainly a win for the publishers and the proponents of "gold" open access that such a high-profile series of papers has gone this route.  According to the journal website, it costs $3000 of taxpayer gold for gold open access for each article.  I wouldn't be surprised if Elsevier subbed this one, though, given how cited these articles are going to become, but likewise I would not be surprised if CERN (i.e. CERN-subscribing governments) paid.  Anyway, the edition of Physics Letters B with the articles is here, and unlike most other issues, you can read some of the articles for free (and you can note the charges for the non-LHC articles in the same issue).

The other thing, and probably more consequential, is the announcement that the funding councils in the UK have top-sliced £10,000,000 of gold from their budgets and decided to give it to 30 particular universities in the UK so that they can give it to publishers to publish their research as gold open-access.  This was sort-of inevitable, given the Finch report.  From my point of view, this is somewhat problematic.  I am in one of the UK's 1994 group universities, but not one that made the 30 university shortlist.  It has the biggest theoretical nuclear physics group in the country, and is the obvious place for me to work.  It's a good place and has a good Physics Department (along with many other good departments).  It seems perverse to me, though of course I have a vested interest, to cut off funding like this on an institutional basis, irrespective of size of institution and so on.  A fermi function at absolute zero, where the energy levels are universities is not a sensible profile making use of any kind of logic.  Lazy expediency, perhaps.  To paraphrase a recent post on impact factors, distributing money in this way is mathematically illiterate.  Us little people, apparently, will be able to apply for money later, with some hoops the 30 golden boys can ignore.

Anyway,  none of this news should be surprising to anyone.  The HE sector is very innovation-shy from a management point of view.  Perhaps management is always small-c conservative.  The Finch report is quite a "no-one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft" outcome, where the solution is to give money to established successful (by some measure) business, rather than seek innovative solutions. And on the preferred 30, the funding councils (EPSRC more so than STFC, where I sit) have been moving to a preferred university status for a while.

Anyway, I don't suppose either of these things will affect me greatly.  I continue to submit work to the open-access arXiv before sending them off to journals. If you fancy reading it, my last one appeared yesterday.  It's open access :-)

Brazil and Moseley, Mostly

The view from the hotel

I have the pleasure of being at a conference in Brazil.  It's at a lovely location on the coast, by a nice beach, which is something of a surfers' haven.  I've never tried surfing, and I'm not about to start, at least not given the size of the waves here.  It's nice just being by the sea, though, and winter in Brazil is not a bad sort of climate to spend a few days in.  I attach an obligatory picture of the sea, taken a few steps from my hotel room.

As well as giving a talk, I've learnt about much of the nuclear physics research that goes on in Brazil, spanning experimental work, partly carried out at the São Paulo Pelletron, to theoretical stuff, to quite a lot of applied areas, like environmental radiation monitoring and cancer therapy.  All interesting stuff, but I just want to mention one interesting fact that I learned in a talk by Navin, a physicist working at GANIL in France, this morning.  He was talking about Moseley's Law, an empirical relation between the frequencies of X-rays emitted from atoms and the nuclear atomic number.  It did much to cement the Rutherford model of the atom in the earliest days of nuclear physics.  Moseley was British, and worked at Oxford and Manchester in the years preceeding the First World War.  If I remember rightly, there was a plaque dedicated to him outside of one of the lecture theatres in the Clarendon Lab at Oxford.

I already knew about Moseley's Law, but one thing that Navin mentioned in his talk was news to me.  I did know that Henry Moseley signed up to fight in World War One, and was killed by a sniper in Gallipoli.  The death of anyone is, of course, a personal tragedy to friends and family, but Moseley's death was also a loss to the physics community.  He was a first-class scientist, who would most likely have been considered very seriously for a Nobel prize in the years shortly after his death (they are never awarded posthumously).  What I didn't know was that, apparently, Moseley's death caused the British government to stop sending leading or promising scientists to the front line in wars.  I did not know that this was a policy and that it was caused by this single event.  I wonder if the rule still applies now and how they judge who is sufficiently good not to be conscripted (or even allowed to volunteer).