I received my unconditional offer to study for my PhD in Particle Physics at the University of Birmingham today. In addition, I also found a place to live and put down the deposit so all that’s left to do is fill in the forms and collect my keys!
It all feels like it’s falling into place now and I am quite excited about the prospect of moving to Birmingham.
Hopefully while I’m there, I’ll be part of an amazing Physics project (ATLAS); meet plenty of new friends; have plenty of visits from old friends; make a lot of new music drawing from brand new inspirations; actually get somewhere with it…

The last point is probably a bit ambitious, but one can hope!

It’s that time of year again. The Perseids reach their peak and everyone goes meteor shower crazy.
I will admit, spotting a meteorite just as it ‘flashes’ is a pretty spectacular event and it never gets old. I was just hanging out of my bedroom window trying to spot a few myself.
Reaching a peak at around 22:20pm (on the 12th August) and then again at around 3:20am, with just over 1 meteor per minute, it’s pretty easy to find a few just by staring at the constellation Perseus.
I find it pretty fascinating where they come from.

Everyone has heard of comets, right?
Well, comets orbit the Sun, and in their wake they leave a trail of ice and rock. As Earth continues on its own orbit, it intercepts some of these trails at certain points of the year. The meteorite trails you see in the sky are formed when the icy part of the trail melts and the rocks burn up as they enter the atmosphere.
Now, the Perseids shower originates from the debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle. Not a very well known comet, but nevertheless it has a funny name…

A more famous comet associated with a popular meteor shower is Halley’s comet. This gives rise to the Orionid meteor shower, so called because the meteors radiate from the constellation Orion. This shower occurs around mid October, and is a bit dimmer than the Perseid shower, but is so much cooler because it’s Halley’s comet.
Even better than that, however, are the Taurids.
Caused by a lesser known comet, comet Encke, they also produce a relatively dim shower. However it occurs close to Hallowe’en, which earns it some cool points. The debris stream of the comet has also been disrupted by the gravity of larger planets, like Jupiter, into two distinct streams, which can be seen as the Northern Taurids and Southern Taurids.
Even bettter than that, though, is the possible claim the Taurids can make.
They may be the cause of the Star of Bethlehem.
Now, a quick disclaimer. This doesn’t have to assume that the Christian religion is correct, or that a ‘God’ even exists. Just that Jesus Christ was born around the time we all know…

With that out of the way, the Taurids have a periodicity. This means that it has a peak in activity roughly every 3000 years. Astronomers have estimated that the next peak in activity will occur around 3000AD. Which makes the previous peak around 0AD. Jesus’ Birthday.
This is a kind of nice thought, and it has Astronomical credability, although a more likely scenario would be the triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn that also occured at that time. That event can also be placed at that time with a bit more accuracy.
The conjunction of two planets means that they ‘overlap’ each other on the sky. Now, they may not exactly overlap, and the light from the planets will add together to make a particularly bright point of light. If this happened around that time, it would have definately seemed like a ‘divine message’, it’s not everyday that you see a bright light appear in the sky three times in a row…

But then, this is all moot as we then have to assume that three ‘wise’ men would follow a strange bright star on a whim and that it would lead them to a newborn child in a barn…

Make of the mythology what you will, but the astronomy stands up

I uploaded a new albums worth of songs, working under the title ‘Introspection’.

I’ve also included a link to download a .rar of all the songs and hi res artwork.

So go and listen to the songs

A recent post on a forum I visit got me thinking about this idea.
First, imagine you are on board a high speed train and you have a gun. This isn’t Murder on the Orient express though, this is an experiment.
Say the train is moving at the same speed as the gun can fire a bullet (assuming this speed is the initial velocity of the bullet and the train is moving in a vaccuum, so air resistance is negligible), call this 500 m/s.
Now, fire the bullet out of the window directly ahead. What happens?
Well, without air resistance the bullet isn’t limited by terminal velocity, so the bullet is moving at 500 m/s before it is fired, then gains an extra 500 m/s once it is fired. The bullet is moving at 1000 m/s. Or, with respect to the passenger on the train, the bullet is moving at 500 m/s.
Now, point the gun directly backwards, away from the direction of motion and fire. Again, relative to the passenger the bullet travels at 500 m/s, but relative to an observer standing by the tracks, the bullet appears to be falling straight down.

Then that got me thinking about a similar problem that is all too common in Physics classes.
Imagine you are on board a spacecraft travelling at the speed of light.
You have a torch, you point it in the direction you are moving and turn it on.
What happens?

Well, the light travels away from you at the speed of light.

Now, what about a stationary observer? (that is, the spacecraft is moving relative to the observer)
Nothing can travel faster than light, right?
Right.
Well, the observer also sees the light travel at the speed of light in the direction the craft is travelling.
But then the observer would see the light moving at the same speed as the craft, yet the craft sees the light moving away at the speed of light.
A contradiction?

That’s where Einstein comes in with the Special Theory of Relativity.
This states that light moves at a constant velocity relative to all observers, irrelevant of their velocity or direction.
This is allowed to happen by a phenomena known as time dilation. That is, time slows down the faster you get.

This then leads to the famous ‘twin’ thought experiment.
Take a set of twins, give them identical clocks, leave one on Earth and set one off on a journey round the Universe at very, very high velocity.
When the travelling twin comes back, his clock will be lagging behind the stationary twin on Earth. Thus, he has aged less.

Time dilation is a very interesting concept of both Special and General Relativity, and has had a profound impact on modern Physics, even modern life. In fact, GPS satellites orbitting Earth must take into account relativistic effects, something called gravitational time dilation, when sending positioning data.

It’s been 40 years since the Apollo missions and the first manned lunar landings and I, for one, have been watching the TV programmes quite a bit. It’s all the same old knowledge though, filled with things everyone already knew. The crew of Apollo 11 underestimating their position and having to land in precarious circumstances, the cancellations of the later Apollo missions due to lack of political will, the more recent US revival in space exploration by ‘Dubya’ and his directing NASA to get a man on Mars in the next few decades.

What I found more interesting was the missions planned by other nations. Particularly China.

OK, so many people know that China have a lunar exploration programme. Many people know that China plan to land men on the moon around 2020/30.
What I didn’t know was that following their manned missions, China will begin construction of a permanently occupied lunar base!

If this did happen, it would completely change space exploration. I’m thinking along the lines of 2001 here. Minus the evil computer.
Whoever decided to build an extremely powerful artificial intelligence and give it a BRIGHT RED EYE anyway?!

A lunar base would not only be exceedingly cool, but would offer a ‘recharge station’ for spacecraft going from Earth to more distant destinations, not needing anything like the huge rockets required to take a craft to the escape velocity of Earth. Taking off from the Moon would be a much easier task.

Hopefully once it’s all completed the Chinese will share their lunar base with the other nations, perhaps there’ll even be an Earth-wide space exploration programme and all of the political agendas involved in space exploration will be gone. Maybe I’m wishing there though.

None of this is fully OFFICIAL yet, but the renewed interest in space exploration is definately a good sign of things to come!

Further reading:

New York Times
Statesman.com

I’m currently finishing up recording and mastering another full ‘albums’ worth of electronic music.
Tentatively titled ‘Introspection’, it contains 8 tracks, all of which have previously been available to download in the Music section, but have currently been taken down while I polish them all and finish everything up.

Here’s some artwork.

Track listing.

1. Start
2. February
3. Meridian
4. Krystaal
5. Untitled part 1
6. The Endless, Repeating Cycle (Untitled part 2)
7. Recreate
8. Finish

So I thought this deserved a bit of an explanation.

In the music section, there’s a part titled ‘Project:Alice’, which includes 4 songs at the time of writing.
These songs are titled after the first 4 chapters of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The aim of Project:Alice is to write a song for each chapter in the story, which conveys a message that can be drawn from the chapter. This is done either by interpreting the chapter (semi)literally, as in ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’, which essentially retells that part of the story by way of song; by metaphor or allegory, or by parallelling real world events. An example of the latter is found in ‘The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill’, which draws a comparison between Alice’s confinement inside the rabbit’s house to the confinement of a human within his own mind by a condition known as locked in syndrome. ‘The song of the dead man’ is a reference to Sylvia Plath’s ‘Berck-Plage’, a poem set in a French hospital, which reads: “This is the tongue of the dead man: remember, remember. How far he is now, his action/Around him like livingroom furniture, like a décor.”
A striking parallel to the story of Jean Dominique Bauby, a sufferer of locked in syndrome.

Over the coming months, I hope to complete more and more of Project:Alice, with the eventual goal of completing a full CD’s worth of music and releasing it through this website.

I hope you enjoy the music.

I remember back to September last year and the first beam at the LHC (shortly prior to the mishap which led to a liquid Helium leak).
The media was in full swing with scare stories about the LHC being a doomsday machine destined to destroy the universe.
Statistically speaking they weren’t wrong, but the probability of the LHC destroying the Earth by whatever means is astoundingly small. In fact, the cosmic rays which collide with protons in the atmosphere posess much higher energies than the LHC will achieve and we are all still here after countless numbers of these collisions.

Still, I thought it’d be fun to present a list of (bad) things that may happen at the LHC (despite the extremely low odds).

1. The heavy ion collisions used in the ALICE experiment produce a very high density plasma which collapses into a black hole, which then grows and grows and destroys the Earth and the Solar System.

2. High energy proton-proton collisions produce strangelets which convert all matter on Earth into more strangelets, leaving a big ball of strangelets.

3. The extreme conditions produced in the LHC opens up a wormhole, which allows an evil genius from the future to come back in time and enslave the world population.

4. Pink flying monkeys appear in the ATLAS control room and evaporate people with their eyes.

5. The LHC breaks again, but NOT TO WORRY, Chuck Norris is hired to smash protons together by hand.

6. Time stops. Like the ULTIMATE Bernard’s Watch.

Some of these are more likely than others (Personally I am leaning towards number 5), but all are quite frankly absurd.
Click here for more information.

What WILL happen at the LHC is that science will take a huge step forwards and yet more holes in our collective knowledge will be filled, perhaps the Higgs boson will make a special guest appearance, perhaps Supersymmetry will show up, perhaps it will be something completely unexpected. Either way it will be momentous.

Not many people realise this, but, technically speaking, there are thirteen signs of the zodiac.

Let me explain.

As mentioned in a previous post, as the Earth orbits the Sun, the Sun appears to move across the sky relative to the stars. The path that the Sun traces is called the ecliptic.
The concept of the ‘zodiac’ – the division of the ecliptic into 12 segments – may have been used as long ago as 7th century BC by the Mesopotamians (or Bablyonians). Each of these 12 segments is nicely represented by a constellation, the ram of Aries or the bull of Taurus, for example. Each of the 12 segments of the sky is associated with one of the months of the Mesopotamian calendar, the months then being recognised when the Sun moves into a different constellation. Thus, the constellation that the Sun occupies when a child is born is equivalent to the birth month of the child. This is the concept we know today as star signs.

(As an aside, the whole superstition behind star signs is related to the religious ceremonies and superstitions practiced by the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, a tradition that stubbornly refuses to die out)

Now, the Earth’s axis of rotation is tilted with respect to its orbital plane, and it is this tilt which gives rise to the seasons (or alternatively, the inclination of the ecliptic with respect to the celestial equator). This tilt is not fixed however, and, due to a phenomenon called precession (similar to the way a spinning top twists on a flat surface), traces out a conical shape every 40,000 years.
The effects of precession include the changing position of the North Celestial Pole, which is currently quite nicely marked by Polaris (the north star), and the changing inclination of the ecliptic.
Historically, when the 12 signs of the zodiac were originally drawn out, the ecliptic passed through 12 constellations. Quite handy really.
Presently, the ecliptic passes through 13 constellations. The extra constellation being Ophiuchus. A bit of a mouthful.

So, technically speaking, anyone born between November 30th and December 17th was born under the sign Ophiuchus, not Saggitarius. But alas, tradition is stubborn and people don’t like change. Not to mention it would mess with all astrologers and mystics everywhere if we suddenly had an unlucky 13 zodiacal constellations. The truth hurts.

So today, 21st June, marks the summer solstice. The longest day of the year and the midpoint of summer.

If you were to mark out the position of the sun on the sky at midday every day for a year, the summer solstice is the day when the Sun is at its highest point in the sky. Conversely, the winter solstice (21st December) is the day when the Sun is at the lowest point of the year at midday. This naturally leads to the solstices being the longest and shortest days (or shortest/longest nights) of the year, as in summer, the sun has longer to travel on the sky from sunrise to sunset, and shorter in winter.

The reason we have the solstices is for the same reason we have seasons, the Earth is tilted on its axis. In the summer, in whatever hemisphere you are in, the Earth is tilted towards the Sun, in the winter, it is tilted away from the Sun. The summer solstice marks the point in the Earth’s orbit when the axis is most tilted towards the Sun, and when it is the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere, it’s the winter solstice in the southern hemisphere.

Now, you probably already know about the summer and winter solstices, but not everyone has heard of the vernal or autumnal equinoxes (around March 21st and September 22nd), . These are analagous to the solstices, in that they mark the midpoint of spring and autumn (or fall) respectively. However, the equinoxes mark the time when day and night are of the same length, which corresponds to the perpendicular points on the Earth’s orbit to the solstices.
The equinoxes are formally recognised when the position of the Sun on the sky crosses the Celestial Equator, which is the projection on the sky of the Earth’s equator.
With a bit of simple stellar geometry it is quite simple to prove all of this stuff, but I’ll not bother here.

I’m sure someone out there finds this stuff interesting!