The Science and Technology Facilities Council in the UK has managed to create a terrible situation which could destroy fundamental research across the country. This would have a devastating impact on not just the lives of people who have dedicated themselves to their fields, and not just to the UK’s reputation, but would be a massive loss for everyone.

One institution, Jodrell Bank (where I used to work), is listed as “threatened” (BBC News), and this story a great showcase for what’s at stake.  What’s really at stake isn’t even visible, so I’m going to use JB to give tiny insights into what this could mean for a broad community of brilliant minds and projects, and what we might lose that we can’t imagine and can’t measure.

In true British fashion, Jodrell is an example of how spectacular scientific endeavour is completely under-represented and unappreciated in the UK.  We have a world-class, thought-leading, inspirational, world-changing, unique facility, and it’s not considered as an imperative to sustain.

Jodrell (with MERLIN) is as powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope. It has been for over 15 years. (I believe Nasa spend more on marketing the HST than Jodrell’s entire budget).

I went to visit some friends at Jodrell a few years back and as they we updating me on some of the progress a few nuggets dropped into the conversation - like the fact that more data was flowing across the MERLIN network than the WHOLE of the UK internet. One of the engineers showed me their own self-build multi-gigabit router (because nothing commercial was quite cutting it).

Jodrell was instrumental in Apollo missions. It was the only instrument in the Western Hemisphere that could track Sputnik. It led to the discovery of Pulsars. It helps us map the entire universe. It finds new physics.

The people who work in this field, using instruments like Jodrell,  help not only to literally uncover the mysteries of “life, the universe and everything”, but to create fundamentally new technologies, push boundaries and inspire generations to drive innovation - they do this as a side-effect to their daily work. One colleague wrote 100,000 lines of PERL to help with data processing tasks, so they could carry out their own astrophysics research.  I was part of an international team of about 10 people managing about 1 million lines of Fortran that carried out data and image processing.

While I was there (in 1993-95) I helped to set up their first website. We did this in our lunch breaks, as a means to an end - helping to share information.

Of course it’s not just Jodrell, it’s all the fundamental research that we use to fuel  our innovation, which ultimately fuels our economy, and could help us address the many global issues that we face as a species.

To find ourselves in a situation where this level of innovation is threatened is, at best, atrocious, at worst immoral.

Interesting2008 lived up to its name today. I gave a rather rapid (7 minute!) summary of Acoustic Cosmology. As a few people mentioned afterwards that they would be interested to know more, here’s a few links;

Acoustic Cosmology (Interesting2008 presentation PDF)

Acoustic Cosmology: Summary essay

My own music

The Long Now essay by Daniel Hillis on “Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine” contains some fantastic, inspiring nuggets, which I couldn’t resist quoting from … they really remind me of conversations at Jodrell Bank.

“… we planned to connect the processors in a 20-dimensional hypercube …”

“In retrospect, if we had had any understanding of how complicated the project was going to be, we never would have started.”

“… he distrusted abstractions that could not be directly related to the facts.”

“Since the only computer language Richard was really familiar with was Basic, he made up a parallel version of Basic… “

“Like many physicists who had spent their lives going to successively lower and lower levels of atomic detail, Feynman often wondered what was at the bottom. One possible answer was a cellular automaton. The notion is that the “continuum” might, at its lowest levels, be discrete in both space and time, and that the laws of physics might simply be a macro-consequence of the average behavior of tiny cells. … If the universe in fact worked this way, then it presumably would have testable consequences, such as an upper limit on the density of information per cubic meter of space.”

“… a typical Richard Feynman explanation … on the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality. “

Balancing vast complexity with the ability to genuinely communicate ideas is a remarkable skill, and very hard to find. As someone who takes quite a long time to understand the complexity, I’m eternally grateful to the handful of people I’ve met who can do this. The chasms between science and its representations in business, politics and the media are intensely frustrating, and very hard to navigate.

Has anyone documented best-of-breed examples (like Feynman) to try any cement those bridges? Why don’t we have better communication? We have great examples of interconnected silos, but no real cohesion…

(image from http://www.longnow.org/about/)

Sad news today.

Clarke’s three laws;

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

http://www.clarkefoundation.org/

This year is the 50th anniversary of Jodrell Bank.

Today is also a landmark day for Jodrell Bank - the whole science team are moving from on-site, to Manchester University. While this is probably very practical, I can’t help feeling sad that this unique and historic research establishment is dramatically shifting its identity.

I worked at Jodrell from 1994-1995 and thoroughly enjoyed it: 120 scientists in the middle of a field in deepest Cheshire. Remarkably “British” Science - on my first day I was shown around to one of the “workshops” (very slightly more advanced than a garden shed) where someone was building an amplifier for the main dish and cooling it to about 10 degrees Kelvin, making it one of the quietest amplifiers on Earth. In another room, someone was building their own data router, to carry data at 30 Gigabits per second,

since the best commercial ones of the time couldn’t come anywhere close

…today MERLIN’s seven telescopes ship 30Gbps, each, to a huge computer cluster at the main facility that processes 150-200Gbps of data in real time - making it one of the most powerful computers on Earth.

The history of Jodrell Bank and the Lovell Telescope is vast: it’s first official task was to identify and track Sputnik - it was the only instrument the West had (at the time) that could do so.

Pulsars and Quasars are amongst the discoveries in which Jodrell was the catalyst. The Cosmic Microwave Background, Masers, Gravitational Lenses, and myriad others are part of the rich mixture of Radio Astronomy research.

Jodrell gets very little mention compared to other facilities, unlike its US counterpart the VLA, or the Hubble Space Telescope. The latter is particularly relevant - Jodrell has had equal or better resolution than the HST since before HST launched - and the only reason you don’t know that is because NASA have a $20m “marketing budget” to tell the world. That’s about the same as Jodrell had to upgrade the entire facility.

Jodrell was mentioned a couple of times in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “… Jodrell Bank looked straight through them [Vogon spacecraft]— which was a pity because it was exactly the sort of thing they’d been looking for all these years … someone decided it was time for a nice relaxing cup of tea” - and happens to be very true: tea at 11am and 3pm was an unmissable part of the day. Everything stopped. It was at tea that one of the longest serving members of staff was trying to recall how they’d built some of the 6-bit computers I was trying to re-interpret the data from (”now was bit 3 the weather or the telescope ID?”). I should have kept that envelope…

Last year the Lovell Telescope was nominated the UK’s greatest ‘Unsung Landmark’ in a BBC competition. This only scratches the surface. To me, Jodrell Bank is iconic of an entire country of passionate, brilliant scientists, who get little of no recognition for the spectacular work that they do. At various times, Jodrell has had to justify its existence, which is reasonable for any institution to have to do, but I believe that much of its real value is overlooked….

I am delighted that, 13 years after leaving, I will be going back to hear some of my music played at the 50th Anniversary celebrations. Amongst other things they are projecting onto the 76m Lovell dish, which should be quite spectacular - it’s at least twice the size of the largest IMAX screen. (hope the weather’s good!).

Announced late last year, but I only just noticed, “An international research team led by Prof. Michael Kramer of the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory, UK, has used three years of observations of the “double pulsar”, a unique pair of natural stellar clocks which they discovered in 2003, to prove that Einstein’s theory of general relativity - the theory of gravity that displaced Newton’s - is correct to within a staggering 0.05%.” (Jodrell Bank)

Hurra.

And a great addenda to my piece based on the pair, called PSR J0737-3039B which I hope will be played on Antarctica’s first artist-run radio station (go Adam!) sometime this month if it gets there!

Listen to a clip here.

The blurb of the piece, which I wrote in 2004 is here:

“PSR J0737-3039B (ds squared - series 1) [8m56s] 2004

Inspired by the discovery of the first double-pulsar system (ranked as the 6th most important scientific discovery of 2004). Pulsars are “pulsating stars” - objects with about the same amount of matter in them as our Sun, but squashed into a 20km ball. They spin very quickly (some a thousand times a second) and emit jets - creating a lighthouse type effect. These two not only spin, but rotate around each other every 2.4 hours. One spins 45 times a second, the other every 2.8 seconds. They are very chaotic, and will collide in 85 million years, maybe turning into a black hole. By analysing them we can check many of Einstein’s theories of General Relativity, which help us understand how the Universe works.

The piece is named after the slower pulsar, PSR J0737-3039B, or alternatively ‘ds squared - series 1′, reflecting some of the 4 dimensional geometric properties used in this field. Collaborators: Andrew Newsam (Astronomer + Software), Peter Clive (Piano), Jaako Mattila (Artist), Ulya Gumeniuk (Artist), Aidan Keane (Cosmologist)

PERFORMANCES
Dorkbot, London, UK 2004
Iberne Radio Telescope, Latvia 2004.
Sprawl, London. Nov 2004
DEAF04, Rotterdam. Nov 2004
ResonanceFM, London. Nov 2004
La France, London. February 2005
Science Museum, London. April 2005
Placard, London. September 2005
Poitiers/Bourges, France. February 2006″

I’ll get on and write the second movement then…

Random conversations are great.

I’ve been looking at mappings between cosmology and ‘other things’ for several years now. Recent conversations keep orbiting links between psychology, music, perception, spirituality and cosmology …

So I was delighted to see at least one example of cross-over research between MRI scanning and CMBR analysis here;

http://www.nserc.gc.ca/news/stories/041006-2_e.htm

Haven’t found the follow up links yet, but would be fascinating to see the results of a pathalogical or psychological analysis of the Universe using the CMBR treated as an MRI scan…

A friend just sent me the best sms ever…

“Quick question: what is a universe?”

Lovely.

Talk went ok.

Dominique Proust was interesting - mapping the history of Music of the Spheres from Pythagoras to Kepler to Herschel, so I followed on nicely with my 21st Century “Music of the n-dimensional hypercube”

His astronomy research also focussed on the Great Attractor, so he wants to use the Radio Cube sonification tool we have to plug his very rich redshit data into.

Here’s the cathedral with the planetarium dome in the foreground.

.. the upper level of the venue

Inside the planetarium

In an exhibit

‘Space:Planetary Consciousness and the Arts‘ - 10th Workshop and Symposium

Château d’Yverdon, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland (PDF 2MB)