Royal Institution Shoots Itself in the Foot

May 21, 2013 by davecl | Leave a comment

I had been working up to a further post on the death of Herschel and it’s eventual long goodbye as it drifts away from the Earth in its new graveyard orbit. But I have yet to pull the details together from ESA press releases etc.

Instead, and rather differently, we have a ‘how are the mighty fallen’ post about the Royal Institution’s idiotic attempt to trademark the term Christmas Lecture.

This has been covered in blogs elsewhere, but I thought I should add my name to the chorus of criticism.

The RI and their Christmas Lectures are a part of my childhood. I even went along to a few in addition to watching them on TV. In those days they were broadcast on the BBC and were a season of 6 lectures. Things have shrunk rather since then with, IIRC, last year’s series just being 3 lectures broadcast on BBC4.

At the same time the RI has gone through a financial crisis. It is now emerging from this, something I for one was happy to see, but it’s attempt to trademark Christmas Lecture, official statement here, now leaves me wondering whether the place was worth saving.

I hope this is a momentary aberration, to be abandoned, along with those who suggested such a hugely damaging move, as a response to the inevitable barrage of complaint. I’m not even sure that they can trademark the term, since it is in widespread use across the world.

If it turns out that they can trademark it, then there will be a large number of Lectures At Christmas in 7 months. I may even contribute my own RI Scrooge Lecture if anybody asks me.

There’s also the issue of reputational infection since one of the current leading lights of the RI is Sir Richard Sykes, once Rector of Imperial College, and this idiotic move might reflect back on us at Imperial.

My own contribution to what will hopefully be a very worrying set of messages at the RI today is appended below:

 

Dear Olympia,

When the news of the RI’s financial problems arose last year I was saddened. I was once an RI junior associate and once a member. I have attended and enjoyed both the RI Christmas Lectures and Friday Evening Discourses. I have even taken part in an arts/science exhibit there. I considered, in light of your financial problems last year, rejoining, but never got round to it, things in academia being as busy as they are.

I am now so glad I didn’t.

To park your tanks on the generic term Christmas Lectures in an attempted trademark grab is unconscionable. Many colleagues around the country and around the world give Christmas Lectures. They benefit science and society. And you now want to stop them using that term.

This is a huge public relations error. You will lose far more support than the little benefit you gain. I understand you have problems, but this is not the way to get over them.

Take the shotgun away from your foot before you do yourselves more damage. Admit to this utterly tone deaf error, and apologise to all those who have loved your lectures before you tarnish your brand completely, and people start giving RI Scrooge Lectures this december.

Yours, appalled,

Dr DL Clements, Imperial College London

Press Release: Star Factory in Distant Universe Challenges Galaxy Evolution Models

We have a Press Release out!

Sadly, the news from Waco, Texas bumped us off the Today programme this morning, but we may be back tomorrow. In the interim you can read about our new results, out in Nature today, below and at other places like ESA and Universe Today.

Imperial College Press Release:

Astronomers have discovered an extremely distant galaxy that is expanding by more than 2000 new stars each year.

Using the European Space Agency’s Herschel space observatory they have seen images of the galaxy as it was when the Universe was less than a billion years old.

This is the most active that astronomers have seen such a young galaxy and since this discovery they are re-thinking some fundamental ideas about how galaxies form and evolve over time.

The newly discovered galaxy, known as HFLS3, appears as a faint red smudge in images from the observatory’s Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES). In reality, this represents the activities of a star-building factory, which is transforming gas and dust into new stars.

“This particular galaxy got our attention because it was bright, and yet very red compared to others like it,” says Herschel researcher Dr Dave Clements from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London.

Tens of thousands of massive, star-forming galaxies have been detected by Herschel as part of HerMES and sifting through them to find the most interesting ones is a challenge.

HFLS3 has one of the highest star formation rates astronomers have seen; over a thousand times faster than our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

According to current theories of galaxy evolution, galaxies as massive as HFLS3 should not be present so soon after the Big Bang.

Even at its young age of 880 million years, HFLS3 was already close to the mass of the Milky Way, with a mass of stars and star-forming material roughly 140 billion times that of our Sun.

The astronomers have calculated that light from HFLS3 has travelled for almost 13 billion years across space, and that by now, it may have grown to be as big as the most massive galaxies known in the local Universe.

The first galaxies were thought to be relatively small and lightweight, containing only a few billion times the mass of our Sun.

They formed their first stars at rates just a few times more than the number the Milky Way does today, then grew by feeding off cold gas from intergalactic space and by merging with other small galaxies.

“With these observations, Herschel has found a rare example of a galaxy bursting with stars at a time in cosmic history when there were very few such galaxies,” says Göran Pilbratt, ESA’s Herschel Project Scientist.

The mere existence of a single such object so early in the Universe poses a challenge to current theories of early galaxy formation, which predict that they should reach such large masses only much later.

The team are continuing to comb the enormous dataset from Herschel looking for more examples of such extreme, early galaxies.

“A DustObscured Massive HyperStarburst Galaxy at Redshift 6.34” by D. A. Riechers et al. is published in Nature, 18 April 2013.

Upcoming publication (scientific)

We have a paper coming out in Nature on 18th April.

Can’t say what it’s about as the Nature embargo applies as much to blogs as to more traditional media, but it is an interesting paper, though probably not as amusing as the fiction I wrote for Nature Futures a while back.

More news once I can write about it!

The Planck ESLAB conference

The big conference about Planck’s first cosmology results is at ESTEC in the Netherlands this week.

Several of us are livetweeting some of the sessions. Go and look at:

@davecl42 (which is me!)

@Planck

@mike_peel

Planck Blogging

The astrophysical bloggerati are getting their comments out on the Planck results, so for interesting commentary see for example:

• Peter Coles’ In the Dark
• Andy Lawrence e-Astronomer

There were also media appearances by our own Prof Andrew Jaffe on Channel 4 News last night (you can still get that for a few hours via 4OD – his spot is right at the end of the programme, starting about 46 minutes in) – and Oxord’s Dr Jo Dunkley on Radio 4′s The Material World.

To quote Andy Lawrence, Planck seems to have shown us that ‘The Universe is EVEN MORE BORING than WMAP told us. Perfect fit to simple inflation.’ The few disagreements with that perfect fit were originally hinted at by WMAP, known as the ‘cold spot’ and the ‘axis of evil’. The rough alignment between the plane of the ecliptic and the ‘axis of evil’ is a little suspicious, suggesting that this is a foreground effect due to dust in our own solar system, and might hint that more sophisticated models of the zodiacal dust are needed.

Interestingly, such an improved model is already available thanks to Rowan-Robinson and May. It will be interesting to see what effect that has on the Planck data.

Planck Day!

Things are, as you would imagine, busy. My colleague, Andrew Jaffe, is off to Channel 4 in half an hour, and a posse of Planck scientists is sitting in our coffee room watching presentations from Paris.

The ESA pages on the Planck release are here, and BBC coverage can be found here.

And if you want to play with the Planck maps yourself, I can recommend the Planck Chromoscope.

Bottom line of the results from my point of view: the era of precision cosmology has arrived!

More will accrete over the next few days.

Planck Day

Today is the day!

Inconveniently I’m lecturing from 10am to 11am so will miss a lot of the fun, but hopefully I can get some reports copied. link to here as things emerge.

Planck: Release Details

No – not the content of the release, that’s still embargoed, but how you can watch the press conference yourself…

This is what I’ve been told are the arrangements for Planck Day, Thursday 21 March:

There is an ESA Press Conference in Paris from 9am UK time, with talks from the ESA Director General and George Efstathiou. There will be a simultaneous press event at the RAS here in London which will stream the Paris talks, and will be followed by a panel discussion and Q&A featuring Andrew Jaffe (Imperial), Mark Ashdown (Cambrdige), Richard Battye (Manchester), Anthony Challinor (Cambridge), Jo Dunkley (Oxford), Steve Gratton (Cambridge), Paul Shellard (Cambridge) and Locke Spencer (Cardiff).

There will also be an afternoon session in Paris with more technical talks.

Both morning and afternoon Paris talks will all be streamed at http://www.esa.int.

Papers will be up on the ESA site at about noon Thursday, and on astro-ph Friday morning.

Planck: The Teaser Trailer

As you all already know (and if you don’t you’ve not been paying attention to this blog!), the first Planck cosmology results are coming out on 21st March.

Just to make sure absolutely everybody knows this is going to happen, ESA have produced a trailer. Go and watch it now…

I think this is the first time there’s been a teaser trailer for a set of scientific results. I don’t think even the LHC did that.

And as for the cod 70s soundtrack? Sounds more appropriate for a Shaft movie to me. The possibilities for remixes are endless…

Potentially Vast New Suboceanic Biosphere Found on Earth

One of the great things about teaching the Planets part of Imperial’s Sun Stars and Planets course is that it gives me an excuse to read scientific reports I would be reading anyway from the science fictional perspective. But the way stories have come out over the last several weeks that have been so well timed for lectures I’m delivering has been more than a little uncanny.

Before I started we had, of course, the landing of Curiosity on Mars, Messenger’s results from Mercury and Dawn’s results from the asteroid belt. Then, just before I started the course, the possibility of two naked eye comets this year emerged. And once I started we had the Russian meteor, and a few days ago a report about the nature of supermassive planet cores around evolved stars, suggesting that they are the remains of evaporated gas giants.

Next week I give a couple of lectures on exobiology, so inevitably there’s a relevant report in Nature in a paper in Science.

It seems that suboceanic basalt, a layer several kilometres thick and covering 60% of the planet, may contain a large number of chemosynthetic bacteria using hydrogen, carbon dioxide and reactions with iron to produce their energy, rather than any of this new fangled photosynthesis stuff. This suboceanic biosphere could be bigger than the biosphere we know on the surface.

The science fictional connections are obvious – the ‘shadow biosphere’ discussed in novels by people like Peter Watts – comes a step closer.

And of course with the company I keep the first comment I hear when I mention this is ‘are you sure they’re not shoggoths’?