A farewell to a bookshop

Looks as if Borders UK is really on the way out. I can’t say I’ll miss Borders itself – they’ve never seemed quite in love enough with books to be a good bookshop. But I will miss the Books Etc. chain that they ate some years back. I have fond memories of their outlets oh Charring Cross Road and elsewhere.

Mobile blogging!

Thanks to the Apple Store I now have an iPhone again at no extra charge. At least that reduces some of the financil injury from the incident back in the summer.

Anyway, since I last had an iPhone Worpress has launched an app that allows blog posting and maintenance from an iPhone. This is my first post using it. Semms good so far! it’s yet to be seen if this means I’ll post here more often, but it reduces my excuses for not posting…

Ultimate limit to speed of computation?

If this paper is right, then a lot of singularitarian ideas, especially Tipler’s Omega Point theology as featured in The Physics of Immortality is going to go away.

Slashdotted again…

I should be used to this now, but I continue to be amazed at the power of ‘aggregator blogs’ like slashdot.

Just today one of the satellites I work on, Planck, put out a press release. I of course wrote something on the Planck blog about this and then proceeded to pimp the whole story to slashdot with links to the blog and other online Planck resources.

The story got taken up and put on slashdot’s front page and the mission blog has had over 1500 hits in the last few hours – not bad as it had only had about 6000 hits in total since I set it up well before launch. The blog is already number 30 on today’s WordPress ‘fastest growing blogs’.

I still haven’t managed to pimp anything to boingboing though. They’re meant to be even more powerful than slashdot at getting people onto your website…

ETA: Now up to number 6 in the fastest growing blogs with over 4000 hits today!

Science at the Worldcon

I’ve been on holiday. It’s been a sort of working holiday as I’ve been at the World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal. I’ve been coordinating the science programme for this worldcon for the last couple of years, and I have to say that things have gone really rather well. Amongst other personal highlights for me was a talk I gave on Herschel and another series of small talks that I and my co-panelists gave on recent developments in astronomy. I was very impressed to hear what the Chandra X-ray satellite has been doing over the last decade on this panel – while I’ve used Chandra myself, I’m not an x-ray astronomer so haven’t seen all the great things it’s been doing.

You can get some idea of what was going on more broadly at the convention from the programme guide. There was a lot going on!

I also did a reading of my story from Footprints and got confirmation that my story in Analog will be coming out in the January/February double issue.

Noe I have a few days in montreal to recover from the con, then it’s back home for more work on Herschel, some of which you can read about on the Herschel Mission blog.

[This post is a modified version of a posting to the Herschel Mission blog.]

Physics For Fiction

I spent the first two days of this week running a workshop on physics – mostly astrophysics – for a group of writers – mostly SF writers.

It all seemed to go very well, and was much appreciated by the attendees. You can read a report on it by Jaine Fenn here.

Now to start thinking about what to do with the next such event, as there seems to be pent up demand for such a thing!

Thoughts after the launch…

Today we launched Herschel and Planck.

It’s easy to say. The two satellites are now on their way to L2 after what was, as far as I could tell, a picture perfect launch.

Today we launched Herschel and Planck!

But it’s not so easy to understand. I’ve worked on these projects for the last 8 years. I’ve been aware of them in development for nearly 20 years.

But today we launched Herschel and Planck.

Until now they’ve been intellectual ideas, problems to sort out, puzzles to solve. How would we work with the data, what might we see.

And today we launched Herschel and Planck.

We celebrated. We watched the video, we drank champaign, we ate cake, we drank the wine.

Because today we launched Herschel and Planck.

And yet, coming home tonight, far later than I should, far drunker than I should, I still didn’t realize what we had done.

Then I looked up, through the cloudy, London sky, the yellow glowing backsides of clouds glaring back at me. And I knew they were there, on the dark side of the Earth, heading towards L2 to start telling us about the universe. Then, even though I hadn’t seen anything, I’d just looked up, it began to feel just a little bit real.

Because today we launched Herschel and Planck!

A new redshift record!

A new record for most distant object* seems to have been claimed for the gamma ray burst GRB_090423. The burst, a brief flash of gamma rays and associated afterglow, was first detected by the SWIFT satellite, and then ground based telescopes followed up these observations with imaging and, once the optical/near-IR counterpart was found, spectroscopy. In this case the object proved to be very red with essentially no emission in the optical. This is a clear indicator for high redshift. The surprise was just how high – a redshift of 8.1, corresponding to just 630 Million years after the Big Bang.

The burst will have now faded so the likelihood of seeing anything more from this particular spot on the sky is probably low, but these observations push back still further the point at which we know condensed objects to have formed. They’ll also have something to say about the reionization of the universe which should have been happening around the time this gamma ray burst went off.

All rather exciting!

As a further footnote I am impressed that the wikipedia page for GRB_090423 is already up containing clear links to all the GCN circulars on the object. An impressive example of rapid online publication.

* This means most distant collapsed object as opposed to the cosmic microwave background which is more distant, coming just about 100000 years after the Big Bang, but isn’t a collapsed object like a star or black hole since it comes from the opacity of the entire universe.

Fine tuning or not?

The issue of the suitability of the universe to life, and the fine tuning of physical laws that this seems to require, is a long running one in cosmology. It’s led to the Anthropic Principle, something often misunderstood and misinterpreted, many worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics and, probably inevitably, to theology.

But does the existence of life really require physical laws to be fine tuned?

A new paper preprint on the arXiv suggests this might not be so. The authors looked to see what the consequences would be of a stronger strong nuclear force. The conventional argument goes that protons would bind strongly to other protons early in the universe, so you end up with most of the universe being helium and you get no chemistry.

However, it turns out that in this new universe neutrons still bind more strongly to protons than protons. The new two-proton nuclei would thus decay into something like deuterium and you still get something like hydrogen chemistry.

There are a lot more steps from hydrogenic chemistry to life, but this analysis shows that some of the conventional ‘fine tuning’ arguments might not be as solid as they appear. Quite where that leaves the many worlds anthropic or theological arguments remains to be seen.

Sad News: John Maddox RIP

Nature announced today the death of John Maddox at the weekend. John was the editor of Nature for two long stints and was largely responsible for making it one of the prime scientific journals in the world today. I well remember his editorials when i was a graduate student.

I remember more, though, his time on the BBC Radio 3 programme ;Scientifically Speaking. I don’t know if Radio 3 still has a scientific spot, but in my school days SS was a highlight for me. Unlike Radio 4’s Science Now it covered one subject per programme and it covered it in depth. I still remember Maddox speaking at length about QED as I lay listening to it on my parents’ bed.

John Maddox had a very distinctive voice, one that worked well on radio. I wish he had done more on radio, and maybe television as well, but then we would have lost his role in making Nature what it is today. I suspect I’ll be looking at his book What Remains to be Discoevered at the weekend.