Beamlines

Some years ago, I was watching a wildlife TV programme, where a mother leopard was leading her three cubs, and they encountered a bank. Two of the cubs jumped it on the first go, but the third struggled until it found a piece of overhanging vegetation which enabled it to take the bank in two leaps.When one leaves school and enters university, one can find that leaps are required which can overtax the brain. I am always pleased to find books in maths and the sciences which allow one to make these leaps. In Mathematician’s Delight (Pelican 1943), W. W. Sawyer wrote:

How often have you taken a picture with a digital camera, only for it to come out looking like this? The sky’s too bright, the shaded parts are too dark, and however much one juggles with it with software, it won’t come out right.  The eye managed to adapt to it all right, effortlessly moving over the scene. With film, if one were a darkroom wizard, one could play tricks with the processing. But digital – what do we get for our multi-megapixels and our 16777216 colours?

Just over a year ago, the Daresbury synchrotron closed down (Is The Ring Destined For The Cracks Of Doom?) and I was contemplating the prospect of travelling to THE Continent (OK, the European mainland) in order to continue our Small-angle X-ray scattering work. 

Recent correspondence directed me to the fact that there is a Philosophy section in Scientific Blogging. This is something I have kept away from, since my view of the subject follows the Pooh-Goethe paradigm [1]. However, I have just read In The Beginning - A Rough Guide To A Physicalist View Of Everything which introduced the subject of metaphysics. Now it may be customary to think that metaphysics is “that which lies beyond physics”, so the more we get our physics right, the better the metaphysics. But then Darwin had a different perspective. In his Notebook M (1838) he wrote

I have often found reference to medieval and early modern folks most helpful in debugging things that have bugged me since I did science when I was a student in the Sixties (for me they did not swing). One particular bunch are the Oxford Calculators, also known as the Merton scholars. As the Wikipedia article states:

Until recently, I had only known of Thomas Carlyle as a writer, mightily significant in the 19th century, but somehow superannuated by the time I heard of him.  However, recently I learnt that he is responsible for that famous English mis-definition:A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.which he gave us while translating the Eléments de géométrie of Legendre.  The great French mathematician actually wrote"La ligne droit est le plus court chemin d'un point à un autre."

Feeling increasingly uncomfortable on this blog, as it seems to be becoming an outlet for the Anti-God Squad, I nevertheless want to share with my friends this interesting news item which I first spotted in the Times of India Health&Science Section, where it was headlined
Cabbage fuel reduces carbon release.WASHINGTON: Jet fuel's grave carbon emissions can be reduced by about 84 per cent by refining it from the seeds of a lowly weed, which is a cousin to the cabbage, says a Michigan Technological University researcher.

Practically every month in my Chemistry World there appears an article where a group of workers has synthesized some natural product with amazing ingenuity. But why, to use a Hogwartsian analogy, does one go to such great effort when the greenhouse is only a walk away from the potions department? So let us join Professor Sprout for a walk around the Hogwarts greenhouses.Some plant families, such as the Cruciferae and the Labiatae are remarkably free from poisonous plants, whereas others such as the Araceae all seem to come with a toxic hazard warning sign.

Frederick II (1194 –1250), Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, so I have read, preferred equation-solving contests to watching knights impaling each other in jousting. Certainly, the great mathematician we know today as Fibonacci spent some time at his court. As a result of this development, Italy became a leading centre of the mathematical arts, and by the 1530s the solving of cubic equations was all the rage in Venice, with great prize money.

When the Chinese invented gunpowder round about the 800s, they founded one half of the science of chemistry, namely bangs, the other half of course being stinks. They quickly applied it to warfare, both as an explosive in bombs, and as a propellant in rockets.  It remained the explosive for about a millennium, but in the 19th century demands both from the military and from industry created a demand for new explosive.unpowder was a low explosive which burns swiftly rather than detonates.  

(Sensors in the skin - does that sound like Frank Sinatra singing?)Of the professors at Reading University, perhaps the one with the highest media profile is Kevin Warwick, well known for planting microchips inside himself as signalling devices. However, it seems that nature, as so often happens, got there first.

Recently I saw this Horizon programme on BBC2: Horizon - 2008-2009 - 8. Who Do You Want Your Child to Be?