Beamlines

When is a Metal not a metal?  At high pressure, of course!

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."Thus spoke Sir Winston Churchill, in the company of President Harry S. Truman, on March 5, 1946, at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri.But this Iron Curtain was not a single boundary, but two fences (mostly) separated by a furlong or so (5 furlongs = 1 kilometre) with a no-man’s-land in between.

Tomorrow is Sunday, and as I prepare to mount my plastic pulpit I will take as my text the introduction to Chapter 5 (Complex Numbers) of A Survey of Modern Algebra by Birkhoff&Mac Lane.  This is a classic and accessible work, first published in 1941, which brought to the American-speaking world what was previously locked up in Van der Waerden’s Moderne Algebra (1931).  The chapter opens with the definition of a complex number and the field C [1], and then continues:

To the historian, English is a fascinating language.  Unlike most of the languages of Europe, it underwent an almost complete makeover following the Norman invasion (1066 and All That).  As a result, although or basic words and grammar are basically like German and especially Dutch, the lion’s share of our vocabulary is from French and Latin.  

Last night, I watched on BBC Television Natural World, 2008-2009 - 14. A Farm for the Future in whichWildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family’s farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future, and discovers that nature holds the key.

I have been working in research for 36 years now.  As the millennium turned, and our department found itself being starved of staff like the Hodja’s Donkey, I found myself being called upon to assume some small teaching roles.  I found two incompatible things: one, that I really enjoy teaching, even more than research; two, that there is so much physics that I never had learned properly.

Recently I read on this site Massimo Pigliucci’s articles on Hard and Soft Science.  As usual, though, I at first sailed over the main theme, and picking up one or two phrases went off on one of my tangents.  The first of these phrases was:    the long interval on the question of the nature of gravity between Newton and Einstein.which led me to think that:

Yours truly has been watching telly again!  (I hope no-one will get the idea that the couch potato might be a significant source of starch.) This time, on our local BBC news service, we hear how researchers at the University of Portsmouth Institute of Biomedical and Biomolecular Science are cooperating with their Institute of Marine Sciences to harness the Gribble.  

Dengue fever is a nasty disease found all over the tropics, with names like break-bone fever referring to the severity of the pain it causes.  It is carried mostly by the mosquito Aedes aegypti, but also by related species.  I have just read three reports on the BBC science site of techniques aimed at controlling the fever by attacking the mosquito in its sex life.

You may remember the melamine scandal where in September this year over a thousand babies were made ill and four died as a result of producers putting melamine, or worse, melamine scrap  into milk to increase its apparent protein content as determined by standard analytical methods (basically nitrogen determination.)

So says an article in the Sunday Telegraph, following the death of Oliver Postgate, creator and writer of some of Britain’s most popular children’s television programmes, namely Pingwings, Pogles’ Wood, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, Clangers and Bagpuss, of which the last was voted in a 1999 poll to be the most popular children’s television programme of all time.

Recently News Account have published an item The Meaning Of Milton 400 Years Later. This has led me to some thoughts.It was only when I was into my forties that I got around to reading Paradise Lost. To start with, there are some bits that really stick in my scientific mind. Take this bit where Satan gets ejected from Heaven:Him the Almighty Power hurled headlong flaming from th' eternal sky with hideous ruin and combustion down to bottomless perdition, there to dwell in adamantine chains and penal fire, who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.