Chris Lintott’s Universe

If you’re wondering why there aren’t posts here, a quick glance at The Zooniverse will tell you how busy we’ve been. I’m also just past half-way in a year-long stay at the delightful Adler Planetarium in Chicago. The year abroad has been wonderful, but sadly I’m so swamped with work that I’m not going to make it back across the Atlantic for Eclipse of the Century’s Northern Lights trip this year.

Paul Abel, my colleague from the Sky at Night, will be standing in, and I know he’ll do an amazing job. After the incredible display we had last year, I’d give anything to be in Tromso again but sadly it’s not going to happen. If you’d still like to go, you can visit Eclipse of the Century.

I’m slowly bringing this blog back to life. Watch this space.

In the meantime you have a twitter feed over there…

Chris

I want to learn how to fly (high) etc.

The kids from fame may not be your ideal scientific role models, but I’m delighted to be able to blog about the rather wonderful FameLab competition run by NESTA in association with the Cheltenham Science Festival.

I’d always been a bit scared of Famelab, which seeks new talent in science communication by asking anyone involved in science (researchers, teachers and so on) to communicate to an audience in just three minutes. But then I was lucky enough to be a judge at the first UK heat of this year’s competition, and we had a lot of fun, as you can see from their posted video :

Fun though that was (it’s got a frog in it!) it misses the point rather, which is that Famelab is a very serious event. The national prizes include £10,000, a foreign tour courtesy of the British Council and slots on Channel 4. More importantly, it was amazing to watch how the contestants improved between the morning’s heats and the evening’s regional final; a little thought, a little feedback from the judges (the others were much more useful than me – I was just generally impressed) and a masterclass arranged by the organisers made all the difference.

Much to my surprise, I learnt things during the day too. I learnt how precisely to explain that the LHC will not destroy the Earth, and I learnt I have the body of a 15 year old boy thanks to the replacement of my cells.

The next heat is in Bristol this Saturday, and then the roadshow visits London, Oxford and Edinburgh. If you’re at all curious about communicating science, go. If you’re a member of the public, go along to the regional finals and learn something. It’ll be the best use you will ever make of a sequence of three minute periods of your life.

Today is, according to Suw at least, Ada Lovelace day. As I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron who is often acknowledged as the first to write down a computer program. I’m not sure why today is her day, but it’s being used by hundreds of people as an excuse to blog about a female contributor to ‘technology’.

Never one to miss out on an opportunity to write, I was going to pontificate on the role the Harvard (and Greenwich) computers played in early 20th century astronomy, and how Galaxy Zoo relates to their legacy. But Andrew’s beaten me to the first part.

Instead, let me talk about two women who contributed not as practitioners themselves, but as popularizers and interpreters of cutting-edge science. The first is the namesake of my Oxford college, Mary Somerville. Somerville grew up in a relatively well connected family, and was encouraged in her talent for studying mathematics and science; she was quickly in correspondence with many of the learned men of the day. That led to the chance to make her own name in translating foreign texts.

In fact, her ambition reached wider than that. Her first major commission was to translate Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste. When the result was published under the title The Mechanism of the Heavens she had not only translated into English, but as she put it from ‘algebra into common language’. By doing so with grace and flair she brought the importance of the work to a much wider audience than it would have otherwise had – to give you an idea, the use of the word ‘variable’ in a mathematical context is her coinage.

The book also set the stage for her great surveys of 19th century science, including On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, published in 1834, a copy of which sits well-thumbed on my bookcase at home. To write a survey of a fast moving field is no easy thing, which brings me to my second heroine.

Agnes Clarke was an Irish astronomer in a similar position to Somerville, but about 70 years later. Although Somerville had, along with Caroline Herschel, been admitted to the Royal Astronomical Society it was still rare for women to be admitted, a major factor behind the founding of the British Astronomical Association. One of the BAA’s early leading lights, Clarke was also a prolific author whose greatest work was a history of nineteenth century astronomy. Published in the first decade of the twentieth century, the book takes a quick look back at progress made, before running through our current state of knowledge on everything from Mars (canals likely a mistake) to galaxies beyond the Milky Way (‘a long forgotten and discredited hypothesis’).

I know of no book in the field anything like it, and if I had several years spare I’d spend it writing the 20th century equivalent. It shares with Somerville’s writing a sense of being right at the forefront of knowledge in the company of authors who know the field which they are surveying intimately. The two are remembered differently; Clarke barely existing beyond second-hand bookshops, Somerville remembered with a crater on the Moon and, of course, the college named in her honour. Both, though, were clearly capable of contributing to science. If they were transported to 2009 would they have been researchers? Perhaps. But I bet they’d both be blogging, too.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day.

I had a very interesting evening last week chairing a discussion night at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre. The topic – the Big Bang – was ably introduced by Kate Land and Andrew Jaffe, before philosopher Roman Frigg talked, rather too provocatively for my taste, about religion and the Big Bang.

There followed a period for the audience to chat in groups with the speakers. How well this went depended on the luck of the draw; flitting from group to group I heard lots of argument about whether it made any sense to say space and time began at the Big Bang, but I also heard groups dominated by someone with a bee in his bonnet about the LHC.

The most successful part of the evening – much to my surprise – was the reading of a short story by poet and storyteller Ross Sutherland. I’m normally really skeptical about such things, but Ross had an interesting take on how theories develop, all wrapped up in a very human story. He was told he had to put it online – and it’s now available here.

In the beginning, there was Ewan’s Bar and Grill.

Ewan created a huge expanse behind the bar, and then I came into this world..

Now go and read the rest.

I’ve always secretly wanted one of two jobs; either to be Andrew Marr on Start the Week or Melvin Bragg on In our time. Beyond assassination or blackmail, I think either is a long way off but a flavour of both hangs around the first episode of the Inside Oxford Science podcast.

The format is very simple; put a bunch of talkative academics (is there any other kind?) around a table, and talk. The first episode features not only me talking about Citizen Science but the excellent Irene Tracey talking about synaesthesia.

Go and listen – and let us know what you think.

For those of you who don’t live in the UK, there’ll be a chance to watch six of the best Sky at Night episodes from the last few years on the BBC World News channel.

The first – my interview with the last man to walk on the Moon, Eugene Cernan will be broadcast today at 1530 GMT (that’s 1030 am EST), and then repeated at 0230 GMT on Friday (21.30 EST, Thursday).

Enjoy – and let me know if you see them.

Chris

Our recent Sky at Night programme about the Northern Lights seems to have attracted a lot of attention. To be honest, I don’t think we can take too much of the credit for this as we could have just shown the Lights and people would still have watched open mouthed.

To get a taste of it, the BBC have put a clip from the broadcast up on Youtube, so sit back, pour yourself a glass of aquavit and enjoy :

It’s been 19 months since the launch of the original Galaxy Zoo. That week was ridiculous – my main memory is of incredulous laughter as the number of users and classifications climbed and climbed and I, and the rest of the team, realised what we had on our hands.

Since then, we’ve made a lot of use of the results, but I’ve also spent a lot of time talking to all sorts of people and plotting to expand the project way beyond its original scope. Real people are now employed to make this happen, and Galaxy Zoo 2 which launched on Tuesday is our first site to use a new, extremely flexible interface.

It’s all come together rather rapidly in the last few weeks. On Monday night, I talked to the University’s Space and Astronomy society and told them the launch was only an hour or two away. Opening my laptop and connecting to the net on the train, I saw the new site appear. By chance I’d logged on 20 seconds after the beginning. I wonder if I was the first to see it?

I stayed up for a couple of hours that night watching the forum and email to see how reactions were. People were positive, but it stayed quiet and there was no flurry of press attention to mark the end of our press release’s embargo.

I lay in bed that night wondering if we’d just lost a colossal gamble. Perhaps we didn’t understand what it was about Galaxy Zoo that attracted people. Perhaps it really was just a one-off. It still seemed quiet the next morning as I watch the first report on BBC Breakfast TV, at 6.20, but I didn’t have time to think before being picked up and whisked off to Television Centre for more interviews.

And then we were off. More breakfast tv at 7.20, upstairs to 5 Live with Annie, one of our users, for 7.55 before that got bumped. Then back downstairs for more TV at 8.20 (Annie was great!) and then, as she headed off to work upstairs again for Radio 4. Once more I was sitting opposite John Humphrys, and we had a lot of fun on Today getting more and more enthusiastic about the project.

Spat out in the corridor, I was grabbed by the World Service for a quick interview, by now working completely on automatic. Just as quickly I found myself in a cab and at Paddington, and on a train to Oxford had time to catch my breath.

The site was clearly struggling, but stayed up (which is more than we managed for Galaxy Zoo 1) which I think is a pretty impressive achievement. More importantly, we were busy which meant that people were interested, and would come back to the site. Galaxy Zoo 2 is going to work, and we are going to get the data we want. It’s an amazing feeling; a mixture of relief and excitement. Less incredulous laughter, more satisfied grinning, I suppose.

We’d scheduled a small celebration for 5pm in the department, but unfortunately Arfon our lead developer had a bright idea just as the clock ticked toward 5, and he spent the whole time typing frantically, champagne at his side.

Since then, traffic has refused to die (which is fantastic) and as I write we’re on the front page of Digg.com so that’s not going to change any time soon. Thanks for your efforts – and the more classifications you do the sooner you’ll see what we’ve got up our sleeves for our next trick.

This week’s Carnival of Space is now live, over at the Martian Chronicles blog. The Carnival is the best way to find new writers about everything astronomy and space online, so make sure you click through and find something.

Personally, I enjoyed the update on the Chariot lunar rover – which took part in the inauguration parade in Washington this week – provided by Potentia Tenebras Repellendi.