Chris Lintott’s Universe

For reasons a long way beyond our control, this month’s Sky at Night will be broadcast on Sunday 11th, rather than this Sunday as normal. Your first chance to catch up with Venus Express and the world of extra-solar planets will therefore be on Monday 6th at 7pm on BBC4.

In the meantime, you could celebrate the successful launch of Stereo, NASA’s new solar satellite (with substantial UK involvement) by watching our coverage from a couple of months ago, available here.

I’m really looking forward to starting work on our special Sky at Night on Mars, due for broadcast as the 650th program in January. We’ve had this in the diary for years, but kept waiting for the rovers Spirit and Opportunity to die. We’re still – thankfully – waiting, and we eventually blinked first. One of the most memorable parts of interviewing the rover’s principle investigator, Steve Squyers, was hearing him describe just how overwhelmed the team felt by a mission that had lasted eight times its scheduled lifetime and that was a year ago!

All of which serves as a prelude to this fantastic spoof by The Onion (which contains occasional swearing).

I’m a little late in reporting this one, but I thought you’d be interested to see how the observatories on Mauna Kea, Hawai’i (my favourite place in the world) are responding to a larger than usual Earthquake that happened ten or so days ago. That Hawai’i is a violent place is obvious to anyone who has visited the Kilauea volcano, the world’s longest running erruption, but at magnitude 6.5 or so this was a much bigger quake than the usual tremors. Worst hit was Keck – both at the summit and in their control room, which was on the side of the island closest to the source. This picture showing staff working to move the telescope by hand, seems to sum up the effort involved…

and as proof there’s an earthquake, here’s a record of how the telescope I use – the JCMT – responded to the shake. My infamous jinx with anything mechanical has caused many things to go wrong here but this is new even for me…

The launch of the book on Monday was a surreal experience, at least for me. I suppose I’d got used to working with Brian and Patrick and it hadn’t occured to me quite how strange a trio we made! The Guardian had an excellent article which begins

Brian May wore a resplendent rock god crimson velvet jacket, Sir Patrick Moore wore his monocle, and Chris Lintott wore a slightly sheepish smile, when the most unlikely trio in the history of publishing took a curtain call yesterday.

and you can judge for yourself via Brian’s picture here.

So far people seem happy, but to judge for yourselves you really should read the book (of course). Amazon have sold out but you can still obtain a copy via the Bang! shop.

At roughly 6pm on Friday, I became Dr Lintott. I won’t be changing the title of the blog, but thought I’d mention a rather nice tradition, that of starting one’s thesis with a suitable chosen quotation. Somewhere there is enough material for an academic study of this (what did Einstein choose? What does the difference between the quotations chosen by mathematicians and economists, say, tell us about their subject) but for now I thought I’d share mine. Like everything else, this field is subject to inflation and so I settled on three

‘He could never resist an old wine or a new idea’ – Brecht, life of Galileo

‘I knew that even if I were second or third rate, it was astronomy that mattered’ – Hubble

and a poem by Walt Whitman, not normally my favourite author but who gets it right here:

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture- room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Having publicised the 2mass survey earlier in the month, I can’t resist posting links to a couple of other nice movies which illustrate our place in space.

The first starts off by flying toward Orion, past some of the galaxy’s highlights before heading to the Virgo cluster via M81 and M82 (a galaxy close to my heart as I’m working on a paper about its chemistry), while the second shows the Sloan Digitial Sky Survey’s half-a-million or so galaxies in all their glory. (The strange shape is because of where astronomers have chosen to look on the sky, rather than a real future of the Universe).

An article in the Guardian today – it’s a good job I have Brian to handle all of this media attention and take the pressure off my busy schedule (!).

Apparantly I am the ‘essential geek anchor’. I’m not really sure if this is a good thing…

The Bang! website has just gone live in anticipation of our launch next week. As well as plugging the book, it should provide a place for me to write updates and articles, like this one on the Bullet cluster. The Bullet is important because many people (including the NASA press office) claim that it provides direct proof of the presence of dark matter on galaxy cluster scales.

An interview with Brian May appears in New Scientist this week (subscription required), and he seems to have done an excellent job of relating the experience of working on Bang!.

The three of us would meet at Patrick’s house in Selsey on a Friday night, do a little gentle writing, have a couple of drinks, then hunt for Patrick’s cat, Ptolemy, who is an accomplished escapologist. When we got up the next day we were in the mood for serious work. Patrick shocked us by writing the first draft in two weeks. We all then spent the next two years rewriting it. He was good about it. He didn’t mind at all.

Simon Jenkins had an interesting article in the Guardian yesterday, which came very, very close to being write. Essentially, his point – made in response to the recent fuss about the new science syllabus – was that we should stop pretending that science should be a compulsory subject much past the age of 14. (Obviously, I’m paraphrasing).

What might surprise you is that I agree; almost. Knowledge of Newton’s laws, beautiful though I think them and essential as they are to understanding how the physical world works, is probably completely pointless for well over 90% of the people who learn them by rote for GCSE physics. The new syllabus attempts to recognise this by concentrating instead on ‘modern’, ‘relevant’ topics such as GM foods or nuclear power. However, to my intense frustration, we are still teaching science FACTS (and then testing them through watered-down exams involving mini-essays) instead of teaching the scientific METHOD. If we are to continue with the age-old researcher’s defence, which boils down to ‘I can research what I like but the responsibility for how it is used belongs with the population as a whole’, we need a population that understands how science makes decisions. A population that understands that not all scienctists will agree on any subject, but that this does not mean that science has nothing to say is the first step towards a reasoned debate on almost any issue with scientific input, whether it’s the importance of manned spaceflight or the MMR jab. We need to show everyone – whether before or after 14 – how science works in practice, and neither the new nor the old syllabus, nor Simon Jenkins, is proposing to do that.