A galaxy of cells, an NHS supporter and a wonderful world

"I am a galaxy."

Well, that's definitely one way to begin a book. And I've been learning quite a bit about the process of writing books in the last few weeks.

Recently I attended my first book launch: Marcus Chown's What A Wonderful World. It took place in a bookshop near Holland Park. There were vast tables of books, a great many about travel and cookery. There were a few tables of wine, juice, and nibbles. And there was Marcus, helping get everything ready. His publicity agent, Ruth Killick, remarked to me, "I've never worked with anyone as lovely as Marcus. Most writers don't pitch in and help set everything up the way he does!"

There was an enormous cake . . .

 . . . and Marcus did quite a lot of book-signing and talking to people . . .

Among the guests were Simon Singh and Nigel Henbest - who had a nasty bump on his head from a recent zero gravity experience, and who I was able to thank for writing The Space Atlas with Heather Couper, my second childhood astronomy book that really got me hooked. There was also Marcus's editor Neil Belton. In their speeches, they told the story of how Neil pushed Marcus to "go outside his comfort zone" and write a book not about his usual physics and astronomy, but about "everything": biology, evolution, geology, economics - generally how human society, and our planet and Universe, have come to be the way they are.

As part of their launch, they're doing a blog tour, and I'm today. (I suppose it would sound silly to say "Sorry I didn't have it ready this morning, but I had a headache yesterday"?) Various bloggers are writing with their impressions of the book. That is, I'm told, a very effective way to find readers!

It's a lovely huge chunky book. Marcus has been having fun giving it to astronauts and the Clangers. We begin with cells. Each of us has more cells than a galaxy has stars - hundreds of billions. As Marcus tweeted a few hours ago, "Your body will assemble 30 million new cells in the time it takes to read this tweet. Each has the complexity of a medium-sized city." We find out what a cell is made of and why they should be so complex - and what a huge leap it was that they should start joining together and forming multicellular organisms.

The interesting thing about this chapter, and other early chapters, is that they . . . well, not exactly contradict, but don't really quite match what I learned in GCSE and A level biology. I found myself arguing. "Yes, that's called the phosopholipid bilayer. Hang on, it's not always the case that men have XY chromosomes and women have XX. Wait, we get our energy from oxygen linking up with carbon, not hydrogen. Or as well as hydrogen? Wait, I must check that! How exciting!" (That's the rocket-fueled baby in chapter 2!) So, I was frowning and biting my lip, but . . . well, if there's one thing I found out from teaching, it's that the science curriculum does not actually have much in common with real science. So a lot of what I've learned in school biology might need some relearning. (The chromosomes knowledge has come from conversations with trans* friends on Twitter, but this is an exception.) Werner Heisenberg used to joke that he had learned physics the wrong way round - particle physics first, classical physics second. And I, too, learned about galaxies from Galaxy Zoo long before doing any actual astrophysics courses about them. Marcus wrote about how, knowing what he considered nothing about various subjects, started from scratch and phoned up experts. It's good to learn things, or re-learn them, in a new way. So I'm very glad my school knowledge has been so brilliantly challenged.

I was particularly interested to find out what Marcus would write about money and capitalism, given his activism to save the NHS! Marcus is part of the NHA Party (as am I) and most of his tweets are related to this. (We've been on demonstrations together and he, I and his wife Karen, who's a nurse, were going to bandage one of the lions in Trafalgar Square, but the police stopped us.) Initially I raised my eyebrows to read about a sweet ideal of money: that a fisherman can catch eight fish at the same time as an axemaker can make four axes, and if they tried to do each other's tasks they would do less well at them, so they trade. I needed not have worried. We follow history through the word "salary" coming from "salt", an early form of currency, and progress to all the dangers and the suffering caused by unchecked capitalism today - including the 2008 crash; the hypocrisy of developed countries imposing a "free market" on developing countries, ignoring their own economic histories; and the idea that the market is too unpredictable and complex to understand, how this has become an easy way out of trying to regulate it, and how some organisations deliberately make it more opaque than necessary. I wish my old economics teacher had read something like this - she extolled the virtues of the Tories and the horrors of any market regulation at us lesson after lesson . . .

One of Marcus's favourite activities is collecting together surprising facts, and this book is bursting with them! Slime moulds have 13 sexes, DNA in all species is so similar that we share a third of ours with mushrooms, we age more slowly at ground level than above, that the advantage that modern humans may have had over Neanderthals was sewing (I say "might; I don't feel I know enough to be sure), and that the Universe may have been a giant hologram. And this great favourite:

It definitely is a wonderful world, and I've been having great fun reading this book. Thanks for including my blog in your blog tour!

"A Passion for Science" and Ada Lovelace Day

Ada Lovelace Day, created by Suw Charman-Anderson, is a yearly celebration of women in science, maths, engineering and technology. It started with pledges to write about women in STEM on a particular day - here's my attempt from 2010 (yes, I should have done more since!). It's well documented, including by experiments, that women still face barriers in these fields, and Ada Lovelace Day is one of the initiatives to challenge this and to celebrate unsung heroines.

If you want to get blogging on Ada Lovelace Day, just pick one (or more) women in STEM to write about on 15th October this year and let Suw know what you are doing! I may not be able to as I'm writing something else on 15th October, so apologies for that.

This year, Suw's put together what looks like a fantastic event. I'm going, and maybe I'll see you there. It's at 6pm at Imperial College London on (you guessed it) 15th October. There are going to be lots of speakers on lots of different types of science, plus a healthy dose of comedy, and it looks to me like it will be immense fun. You can get a ticket here, and use the code "friendofALD" to get £5 off - there's a "enter promotional code" box just above the big green Order button. It's suitable for age 12 and over, which sadly may exclude my mental age when it comes to jokes, but the rest of me will be there.

Also, on 15th October, there will be a book coming out. It's called "A Passion for Science", is edited by Suw, and is to fund Ada Lovelace Day. It will start as an e-book, but Suw hopes to have a paperback version too.

The book is about 25 people who broke with tradition to study science, technology, engineering or mathematics. One of them discovered pulsars. Another wrote the first computer program. Another used her illegal radio set to help the resistance during World War II. Another discovered that stars are made of hydrogen and helium.

You've probably guessed it: all these trailblazers were women (though we're not being too loud about this, so that those who don't think women can do science will still pick it up and maybe learn something. I'm assuming that you're not one of these idiots, since you're reading a blog that's obviously written by a woman). And here's my big news: I wrote a chapter about Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who is my favourite ever astronomer. (I've blogged about her here and here.) I am very fond of Payne-Gaposchkin. Her discovery was, really, just as significant as that of Newton, Einstein or Darwin - what the Universe is made of - yet very few people know her name. She used some of my favourite pieces of science - the then very new quantum physics to take a new look at spectroscopy, the study of light and matter. Although she was kept as a lowly "technical assistant" for many years, and after her PhD had limited freedom to pursue her own research, she went on to make many more discoveries about stars, novae, and much more.

I love her for possessing many of my own "bad points" - she was quietly obsessive, moody, jealous, and terribly untidy. She - like me - particularly liked drawing together huge amounts of information from various sources, and putting it all together in a clear way. She was a kind, funny and wonderfully brave and compassionate person, fascinated by everything from astronomy to art to languages to cooking to woodwork to music to etc etc. I first read about her in Empire of the Stars and then, more compellingly, in The Magic Furnace (the latter is my favourite science book, by the way), and longed to know more. When I found her autobiography, that was one of my main motivators to study science more deeply and do an MSc in Astrophysics.

So, I've been researching Payne-Gaposchkin for the last three years, and plan to do a lot more. In fact, I wrote such a long chapter that poor Suw had to cut quite a bit of it out in order not to turn the book into "Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin with a sprinkling of other amazing scientists squeezed in". But I hope to share it all with you in time . . .

In the meantime, you should definitely follow Suw and Ada Lovelace Day on Twitter. And Suw's feline owners, Grabbity and Sir Izacat Mewton. Happy Ada Lovelace Day next week!

Update: Check out the cover! I love it!

Update II: You can now buy the book! I hope some of you will - it's full of wonderful stories and inspiration.

Opening the doors of the heavens

It must have been the early 1920's. The Great War was over and Arthur Stanley Eddington had just come back from a voyage off West Africa which had made him "the man that proved Einstein right". He was in his office at Cambridge, perhaps working on relativity or on his next major project, the mass-luminosity relationship in stars, which ultimately led to his groundbreaking "The Internal Constitution of the Stars" - when in came the Second Assistant of the Observatory, a man named Henry Green, who said: "There's a woman out there asking questions."

Perhaps the telescope - or one of many? - at Cambridge. Courtesy Society for the History of Astronomy.

It was a public observing night at the Sheepshanks Telescope. Poor Henry Green had no idea why two stars of the same age should be different colours, or several other things she wanted to know, and had come to ask Eddington for help.

When Eddington arrived, the woman was standing near the eyepiece with a child in her arms. She was holding her up to look through the eyepiece and telling her what to look for, and the audience about the Andromeda Spiral, then not known as another galaxy but thought to be a nebula in our own.

She turned round when she heard Eddington "chuckle quietly". She was a large, tall woman with blue-grey eyes, a broad forehead, and slightly poking-out chin. Normally serious and shy to the point of being thought "comical" and "slow", her fascination with astronomy had just prompted her to talk enough to Henry Green that he "left her in charge" of the talk - and her to talk to Eddington now. She had recently attended a lecture he had given on relativity and its astronomical aspects, which had set her imagination afire to the extent that - as she put it decades later - "I knew again the thunderclap that had come from the realization that all motion is relative . . . For three nights, I think, I did not sleep . . . I experienced something very like a nervous breakdown." She had written the lecture down word for word, and decided to switch her studies (various sciences) to physics.

She told Eddington she wanted to be an astronomer. This was not a path open to women at the time (nor would it be for many years); but he did not attempt to dissuade her, and she asked him what she should read. Every book he suggested she had already read. So he invited her to use the Observatory's library, at which she would find the two journals Astrophysical Journal and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin recalls that it was that night that Eddington had "opened the doors of the heavens" to her. And she went on, against many odds, to be known in her lifetime as the greatest woman astronomer of all time.

It's wonderful how a small intervention, or series of interventions, can change the future. It was pretty well by chance that, following a series of disappointments during and after university and planning on switching from teaching English as a Foreign Language to chemistry, I had some free time and decided to indulge myself with a return to astronomy, my long-lost childhood love. It was through getting "BANG!" and finding their question and answer website that it really hit home that anyone could write to scientists with questions, not just the professors' favourite few at university. I'd heard talk of students who did that. I never could think of any questions, much less felt I had the right. As soon as I got back into astronomy, I was brimming with questions. And, as I discovered, Chris was happy to answer them. Not just about the book, but about a Sky at Night. Specifically, I asked how on earth painting an asteroid white would deflect its course. He explained radiation pressure to me and, having a handle, I now knew what to go and look up. He reassured me about bothering him. "It's genuinely great to get feedback," he e-mailed. "We often just cast something out into the ether with no idea whether it works or not."

It's that, really, that made me actively pursue astronomy the way I hadn't even figured out how to pursue environmental science, in four years of doing a degree in the stuff. In spring, by which time I was taking a pre-teaching course in chemistry at Sussex University, I did an afternoon practical alone over lunchtime so I could rush off to a lecture in Oxford. Why didn't I do this at university? I don't know. But in any case, that opened the Galaxy Zoo Forum to me (which in turn opened up She is an Astronomer, article writing, and Skeptics in the Pub!). I've felt that I can not only search for, and ask about, whatever I like in astronomy, but I can also make a contribution. Not to science - well, except my classifying. But to the astronomical community. To education. To, perhaps, setting other people on the path to be scientists. Not only do I love doing this, but I can repay.

In a world where sexism was quite respectable, and Cecilia was disregarded for countless positions at universities across England and America because a woman could not be in charge or would be thought unsafe or unseemly or what have you in an observatory, Eddington (and of course others) gave her little helping hands. Not of course with the work, for at that she excelled. But at getting somewhere. At having confidence. She set up public observing nights at that telescope in Cambridge - and placed a book there with instructions that everyone observing recorded what they saw. That's just the kind of co-operative, practical thing a good scientist does. But you need a certain confidence - a certain feeling of permission - before you can do that. If you feel invisible and ground down, these things are beyond your reach.

As you've probably guessed, I'm currently reading Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's autobiography. It's a slim volume, devoted largely to her school and undergraduate education and her early years in the States, with family history at the beginning and philosophical thoughts at the end, and several other essays by her colleagues and her daughter. The passage which contains the story I began this post with was an utter joy to read. I could feel her seizing the moment; I could feel that earthquake of a realisation scientific or personal that sheds light, understanding, and courage.

And I could sense that it might have been a little thing for Eddington. I'm finding there are a great many kind, helpful scientists out there like Chris (and I expect a great many not!), who take the trouble to answer someone's questions, to try and show them things in a new light; and, occasionally, to advise them or to exert influence to get them somewhere else. I can only do these things in the smallest of ways on the Galaxy Zoo Forum - encouraging and sometimes equipping people to write zooite Objects of the Day for example, or passing along their questions or findings to the team - yet I think it does occasionally make an immense difference. Scientists and communicators have an awesome potential nowadays, especially in the age of the Internet. I think it would be harder for some than others. But if you're reading this and you work in science, this is why it's so important to reach the public when you can. It'll get you more audience, more colleagues, and so very much more - joy and otherwise - will come out of your work.

Book Review: "Big Questions - The Universe" by Stuart Clark

I'd better start this post by declaring an interest.

A few months ago I was contacted out of the blue by a friendly lady named Marta from Flint PR, inviting me to review a book, and asking me if I knew of any more bloggers who'd like to review it. I'm always up for getting a free book in exchange for writing a review, so I naturally said yes and alerted my astroblogging friends. I fear that by now she'll have put me on the blacklist as someone who nicks their books and doesn't carry out her promises, as I was probably supposed to do this in July - and you know what it's like, the guiltier you feel the worse it gets, like writing birthday thank you letters. Anyway, Marta, look, I've done it - though I'll understand if you don't want to bother with me again!

The book was from the "The Big Questions" series, subtitled "The Universe"; the others (so far) are Philosophy, Physics and Mathematics. I declare a subsidary interest: it's by Stuart Clark, who also wrote The Sun Kings and of whom I am a great fan. He's a very friendly and interactive Twitterer, happy to answer questions and generally a very encouraging sort of person.

He's divided up the topic into 20 questions, ranging from the obvious "What is the Universe?" to the basic "Why doesn't the Moon fall down?" to the contemporary "Why is 75% of the Universe a mystery?" to the uncertain "Do other intelligent beings exist?" to the downright brave "Is there evidence for God?" He chose the questions himself. You can see more of them in the link above.

Now, if you ask for my opinion, I'll give you my opinion - as some people have been rather shocked to find out. My opinion on the design and format of this book is that it is ghastly. The cover is made of that criss-cross stuff you get on nasty cheap folders. The pages are rounded at the edges, looking like a dreaded office diary, and smaller in the middle, so you can't riffle through them. There is no space between the heading of a subsection and the first paragraph, but there are spaces between the paragraphs. (This blog does that automatically too. I hate it.) The introduction paragraphs and the diagrams aren't aligned with the text and huge areas of paper are wasted, which does my eyes in. Stuart has inserted beautiful, illuminating, carefully chosen quotations to go here and there in chapters, and those appear in boxes with only the corners showing, as if the words are trying to burst out like parasites and escape.

Well, I did warn you. (Cumbrian Sky has more positive comments about the book's appearance if you want balance!) I suppose it would suit an ashamed closet astronomer who wants his or her colleagues to think they're reading something else. However, may I also add that this is a good moment to mention not judging a book by its cover?

Because it's a gorgeous book! It focusses heavily on the facts, the science, rather than trying to awe us with pictures. It presents the science that's been discovered so far, as well as what we don't yet know. Sometimes Stuart starts a chapter with a historical anecdote. Other chapters he starts by setting out the basics, or describing a method of measuring something to do with the question. You get a very gentle introduction to each issue, even when the issue itself (and the rest of the chapter) is enough to make your head spin.

The book is not afraid of uncharted territory (as scientists say, if you know what you're doing, it's not research). Kepler invented his laws of planetary motion before we knew what caused the planets to move. Pauli invented the neutrino, as Stuart writes, as "a desperate remedy" to account for lost mass in nuclear fusion - twenty-six years later, neutrinos were discovered. Stuart discusses dark matter and dark energy, but also modified Newtonian dynamics, "quintessence", and the idea of overturning the cosmological principle, as means to account for the 96% of mass that we cannot see and the expanding acceleration of the Universe. I can't pretend to have understood it all, but the nice thing with this book is that it's broken up into lots of little chunks you can go back to several times. Actually, that's one thing that kept me reading it for so long. I kept going back and looking at things again. Although each section is independent of the others (there's very little "see such-and-such a chapter" business), my mind got a lot clearer when I re-read and re-re-re-re-read, trying to take difficult concepts in.

There's a great variety of subject matter. In the chapter "Are we made from stardust?" we get taken into the world of biology, of the definition of life, of the intricate complexities of amino acids, of experiments and fireballs and meteorites and uncertainty. So taken in, in fact, that the "stardust" bit, of which we are reminded at the end, comes as a bit of a jolt.

One chapter really threw me and left me feeling very frustrated: "Can the laws of physics change?" We began with the story of cave in Gabon which is, as far as I know, the site of the only natural nuclear reaction that ever took place on Earth. I remembered a very pro-nuclear power lecturer at university telling us about that site, remarking that the products of the reaction haven't moved since (therefore, his point was, nuclear power is safe). How the uranium built up due to being carried along by water and deposited, and why it set off a chain reaction, was clear - until this bit:

The nature of the nuclear reaction appeared to have changed and that could only happen if the laws of physics had changed too. Research conducted in 2004 showed that the strength of the force governing the nuclear reaction in Oklo had been different by a tiny amount, less than five parts in 100 million, from what it is today.

That's all we learn - unless I've managed to miss the explanation every time I read the book (possible, I suppose). What aspect of the nature of the nuclear reaction had changed? What laws of physics had changed? What force governing the nuclear reaction? Different how? I'm hardly going to care what year the research took place in if I don't know that, or who did the research or what they were doing or what they found, am I?

And yet even from that paragraph you'll probably see how clear and easy Stuart's style is, how gently he takes us along - his text is not hideously condensed or full of jargon; he doesn't rush us; he explains exactly what he's talking about. Except in this one chapter, and one out of twenty isn't much to complain about. In any case, he's spurred me on to try and find out for myself, which if I was a bit less lazy I might have done by now.

I think some reviewers have wondered what the chapter "Is there evidence for God?" is doing in that book, but I found it very useful. It goes into the dilemma of exactly how fine-tuned the Universe is for life. There are a lot of terrifyingly exact coincidences that have allowed matter to exist, and carbon and oxygen to form readily in stars, and solids to form . . . But would slightly different conditions, perhaps, have been even more suitable for life, perhaps a different sort? Are there a lot of alternative universes which have these different conditions? As Stuart explains, the Universe keeps throwing surprises at us, and showing us systems (such as Jupiter-sized planets orbiting very close to their stars) which we thought were impossible - perhaps similar surprises will come on the subject of life. There is a lot we don't know yet. But Stuart clearly sets out what we do know, and there is definitely plenty to please both sides!

I'd recommend this book to anyone who knows a bit of physics and cosmology - and especially to those many people who know enough to start thinking up lots of fancy theories but have no way of testing them, other than to appear on the Internet and usually get refuted by scary mathematics they don't understand. Actually, I'd recommend it to anyone who likes reading astronomy but doesn't get much time, as it's perfect for dipping into and out of, or to anyone with lots of niggling questions and uncertainties. There's plenty I still feel I don't know after reading it, but that is of course always the way.

Book Review: Horizons of Cosmology by Joseph Silk

Just a quick announcement that my review of "Horizons of Cosmology" by Joseph Silk is now available online at the Astronomy Now website.

It's an excellent book (bar my one criticism, which you'll find in the link - but which does not in any way detract from the many wonderful things). It was also the reason for this blog post about Dark Matter. Seriously, I was just reading it on the train and when that sudden burst of understanding arrived, I practically leapt up and danced for joy. Not being one to want to intrigue my fellow passengers that much (and too lazy anyway), I texted umpteen people instead!


Anyway, I thoroughly recommend it. To the extent that I got it for a friend for his birthday. Give it a read if you want to know about dark matter, dark energy, galaxy evolution and the Big Bang. But not if you want a basic introduction to astronomy.

Black Beauty

I found out something beautiful a month or so ago. Something so brilliant, so satisfying, so dazzlingly perfect that I gasped, stared at the book, re-read the passage again a few times and then held it away from me - and then texted a few people to tell them how happy I was.

It was about dark matter.

It's also a book that I'm reviewing for Astronomy Now, so I won't be tell you too much about it or reproduce what's in my review. It's called Horizons of Cosmology and it's by Joseph Silk, once a colleague of ZookeeperKevin. It's about galaxies, star life, dark matter, dark energy, the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe - and the study of all this and the way humans look at astronomy. I think the most interesting human point Silk makes is that discoveries are generally made by doing something new with an existing set of data, rather than thinking up a theory and then trying to derive it.

That's actually very significant for science in the public too. Alternative medicines such as homeopathy and chiropractic were born of rather random ideas which then try to get data to fit them. And although I guess much astrology has a basis in "when the Pleiades are so high in the sky, then it's the best time to plant your grain", statements such as "when Jupiter comes near the Moon from the Earth's perspective it isn't the best time to annoy your lover" are certainly based on ideas rather than concrete evidence.

Yes, of course ideas are a good thing. But they're not the only thing - not when it comes to science, and probably not when it comes to most other things.

The trouble with science in the public is that only the results (and usually only a small part of the results) are seen - not the method, and not the data. The Daily Mail, for instance, has just claimed that going to the toilet in the middle of the night will give you cancer. They certainly don't explain what the hell has led anyone to this idea. Sure, they might give you some guff about cell division and throw in a scary word or two, but what was going on? What experiments have been done? How have they organised the data and is it absolutely unbiased? And is it something for which it is seriously, statistically significantly worth making a change? When I was at school we had to write a hypothesis before our experiments, and then our results were supposed to match it. That's not science. Today the emphasis appears to be the ability to give reasons why there are "two sides" to issues such as vaccination and global warming. That's not science either.

Back to the dark beauty.

I've heard plenty of people voice the opinion that dark matter is a myth. They might have heard of MOND (modified Newtonian dynamics); they might just have a gut feeling that it sounds too unlikely or that some clever dick is over-complicating things; or they might be a bit too used to scientists sounding sure of themselves, so hearing "we don't know what Dark Matter is" comes as a bit of a cop-out (though it shouldn't - the most exciting science is the unknown). So I'll quickly summarise the evidence for dark matter's existence - although I should add we still can't be entirely and absolutely sure it even does!

The Solar System works perfectly for Newtonian dynamics. Planets nearest the Sun go round fastest. (Check out this gorgeous musical representation of how it works.) It's the same with a whirlpool or a tornado. So it should be the same with a galaxy. This one, for instance, NGC 4535:


You'd expect those stars on the very edge, the blue ones, to be going round far slower than the ones nearer the middle. Surprisingly, that isn't the case. Although of course they do take longer than the centre ones to complete the circuit, they still ought to fly straight out of the galaxy. They don't, because there's something else holding them there. It's the same with galaxy clusters. Zwicky examined the Coma Cluster to find the same effect. More evidence for there being more matter than we can see includes gravitational lensing and the rate of the Universe's expansion. To the best of my knowledge we haven't confirmed we've trapped any dark matter particles yet, but there are definitely experiments on the way and I believe one just might have succeeded.

Dark matter behaves differently from baryonic matter, the matter we can see and touch. It doesn't interact, except gravitationally - otherwise we'd be able to feel it. It also doesn't interact with light, or we'd see it. (It might just as well be called invisible matter, rather than dark.) And yet we're able to decipher dark matter haloes around galaxies, and map it out around galaxy clusters:

(You can read more about this here.)

What I found most mysterious was: if a spiral galaxy is flat, why on earth is the dark matter halo much more spherical? And in any case, as a few people have sensibly asked me, why should dark matter be so spread out that it only becomes apparent at galaxy-or-bigger-sized scales? For instance, why can't we have dark matter stars or planets or black holes?

Horizons of Cosmology answered me.

It's so simple. I actually told you earlier, and I could have told myself a lot earlier, but I had never picked it up. It's because it does not interact with the electromagnetic spectrum. Therefore, it cannot throw off photons, and therefore, it cannot lose heat.

Stars can only form when their parent dust clouds lose heat. When a dust cloud is hot, its atoms are not going to clump together. In fact about half the baryonic matter in a galaxy cluster is hot gas that cannot condense; the heat from stars alone stops it condensing. It is ironic that the hottest objects we know have to be born from something so cold. But there you have it.

All matter has been at about a billion degrees, in the moments and days and millenia after the Big Bang. Because baryonic matter has been interacting with light - first from all the photons from the Big Bang and from annihilation between matter and antimatter and then from stars and so on so forth, and from shelter amongst dust clouds and even, in minuscule quantities, in planets, the baryonic matter has been changing temperature, so we wouldn't know what temperature it would "naturally" be on its own. And you can't really stick a thermometer into dark matter, either. But because it can't condense, as can the atoms we know, it's like a ghostly fluid, floating around the more solid objects.

As far as I know, we don't know what would happen if we could cool it enough so that it can: for instance, we don't know if it's atoms like baryonic ones, which can interact with each other chemically, forming bonds and different types of atom and so forth. It may be much simpler. Or could it have its own, different complexities? I have no idea.

What happens in the formation of a galaxy, I also learnt from Horizons of Cosmology, is much more complex - but much more satisfying and beautiful - than I thought. I won't go into most of it, only a few basics. Remember the Cosmic Microwave Background had very, very tiny unevenness. I don't know if this was simply due to inevitable random movements of particles or something else. But in any case the slightly denser areas had a slightly stronger gravity, so they were able to attract more material, so the gravity got stronger . . . and so on. (A popular joke about this is the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.) This was actually mostly dark matter. It can't clump together, but it's still affected by gravity. So it pooled into huge, more or less spherical haloes. And because baryonic matter can clump, it trickled right into the middle of those haloes.

And after that I picture the spiral galaxies flattening and spinning in their centres just like the foam on my coffee.

The simplest thing imaginable, the difference between hot and cold, lit up dark matter in my mind. It's the purest, most dazzling beauty. I feel so lucky to be here to appreciate it all.

Book Review: "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula LeGuin

Geoff on the Galaxy Zoo Forum lent me Ursula LeGuin's "The Left Hand of Darkness"; he has a habit of introducing me to some of the best books I have ever read.

This classic of science fiction was published in 1969, and is as up-to-date as though it came out yesterday. Perhaps that's a strange thing to say about a novel set thousands of years in the future, on a planet not our own. But perhaps it's a gentle mocking of our own history. Or even a warning to our race. Yet at the same time the world is wonderfully and convincingly completely foreign.

The planet in question is named Gethen, nicknamed "Winter" by the first humans to visit it, because its temperatures are permanently freezing. Its inhabitants, the Gethenians, are both similar to and different from humans, the most important difference being that they are all hermaphrodites.

The Gethenians have no space travel or knowledge of alien civilisations; so when an Envoy arrives from a far-future, much-improved Earth, offering them an alliance with many other worlds, they disbelieve and fear him. Not the sort of fear you'd expect; but you must find the details out for yourself. He begins the story in beautiful prose:

"I'll make my report as though I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling . . . The story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better." The other tellers of the story are a Gethenian, a human scientist, and several short legends of two major countries on Gethen: Karhide and Orgoreyn. The legends shed much light on the world's religions, laws, traditions, and families. They are a treasure to read, and I could almost see sunlight making patterns on the ice as I did so.

They are also a delightful tickle to anyone keen on science, especially astronomy. One legend is about an all-seeing fellow named Meshe (well, I say "fellow"; the characters choose to use the pronoun "he" because it is less specific than "she" or "it"). He was all-seeing in the sense that "our doing is his Seeing: our being his Knowing" and that, to him, past and future are all the present. Apostrophes and entertaining but profound footnotes are used occasionally in the book; here is one such case:

Meshe saw all the sky as it it were all one sun . . . The stars that flee and take away their light all were presnt in his eye, and all their light shone presently.*

*This is a mystical expression of one of the theories used to support the expanding-universe hypothesis, first proposed by the Mathematical School of Sith over four thousand years ago and generally accepted by later cosmologists, even though meteorological conditions on Gethen prevent their gathering much observational support from astronomy. The rate of expansion (Hubble's constant; Rerherek's constant) can in fact be estimated from the observed amount of light in the night sky; the point here involved is that, if the universe were not expanding, the night sky would not appear to be dark.

Which is completely true, and was dubbed by one professor I had as "the simplest experiment you can do" (go out and look at the night sky - the fact that it's dark, rather than covered with stars, means the Universe must be expanding).

The inhabitants of Gethen all being the same sex is a major theme in the book, and the consequences of this anomaly are very far-reaching. The Gethenians do not go to war, and the Earthly protagonist remarks, "They behaved like animals, or like women" - which sounds like an insult, but also like a compliment, and was very funny. One chapter begins, "My landlady, a voluble man . . ." Not to mention, "The king was pregnant." Alongside the laughter is the totally unexpected, such as a warning to humans that their masculinity or femininity will never be appreciated on Gethen: "One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience." That which I would long for as a freedom and relief! Anyone can be a mother, or father, or both; everyone and no one is tied down and categorised. Their reproductive means are complicated, intriguing, and made me intensely curious - and rather wishful that we Earthlings could be like that, or at least that I could slip into the mind of a Gethenian to try it all out.

One aspect of real bravery in writing is not writing some of the things your book is saying. Just as absence makes the heart grow fonder, a point subtly made - which the reader works out for himself - is a stronger point than if it was spoon-fed. It takes even more courage to leave a plot dangling, the great question of the book never answered, as Cynthia Voigt does with "Sons from Afar". And what Ursula Leguin does at one point in the novel is to leave the readers' desires unfulfilled. There was a point in the book when I felt almost - being so very much inside the minds of the characters - that I would be able to "try it out"; but I was left unfulfilled. It was disturbingly clever. I was left in longing - left to speculate, left to care a lot more, so that the book was able to clobber me round the throat and leave me aching with sorrow. Not that the ending is all sorrowful: by the end, a healthy hope is growing for Gethen.

The whole book is disturbingly clever. It's not long, but has reams of satisfactory ingredients for a delicious read. It's got travels across this Arctic planet rich in detail; it's got alien tricks that appear almost magical (just as the human protagonist's equipment does to them); it's got adventure, toil, political intrigue, tragedy . . . It's also got mystery and beautifully constructed lack of understanding. The dialogue at first seems clunky, unrewarding, and containing little interesting information. As the reader gets to know and understand the Gethenian's different ways of communicating, you start to realise what they are really saying, and unlike some novels which involve misunderstandings it's chillingly plausible and inevitable. Largely because of this, good and evil wear each other's faces very convincingly, and the character you end up liking the best is not the one you expected to.

I found the book a bit hard to get into for the first chapter. At first I wasn't sure whether it was a Gethenian or the Envoy talking (it's the Envoy). But within a few pages, I was immersed in it; I could feel the cold and see the Gethenian streets and forests and faces. I was also a bit dubious about some of the science - I don't think any primates as advanced as them could have evolved on a planet with no other large or intelligent terrestrial animals, and I'm not convinced that an elliptical planetary orbit alone could cause seasons (the planet isn't very tilted; our Earth also has an elliptical orbit, and we're furthest from the Sun during summer if I remember correctly). I think there's also a hint at one point that capitalism and individuality means more concern for others, with which I didn't agree (though it had an important context with which I wouldn't argue); and I wanted to jump into the pages and start a row when a Gethenian remarks to himself "To be an atheist is to maintain God" - even though that again has an extremely specific context.

There is an awful lot to think about in that book, yet at no point did I feel any dryness, or information overload. Perhaps one of the most interesting things is the demonstration of two "ideals": one, the hermaphrodite state, in which everybody is equal; two, the Ekumen, a civilisation humanity has managed to attain whose morals and abilities make our present politics and countries look savage and stupid. I had a look on her website and it looks as if there are many more books about the Ekumen. "The Left Hand of Darkness" has the feel of one of those unique novels to me, one of those super-special ones whose sequels would never be as good - but I am impressed enough that I've every intention of reading more of Ursula LeGuin's work to find out. There's something for everyone in "The Left Hand of Darkness". I can't think of anyone who wouldn't find it interesting.

ISBN 978-1-85723-074-1

Book Review: "Copenhagen" by Michael Frayn

I got punched in the throat a few weeks ago. No, not literally, but by a piece of literature: not even a book, but a play by Michael Frayn. Not only that, but I fear I have let myself get drawn into a bitter historical argument. I generally try hard to avoid doing this - I refuse to read "The God Delusion" because I believe such debates are a complete waste of time, changing nobody's opinion and merely causing hurt.

Copenhagen was the occupied capital of Denmark which Werner Heisenberg visited, watched closely by the Gestapo, one night in September 1941 to visit and talk to his old mentor and close friend Niels Bohr. It is the title of a play both historical and scientific, and the most fascinating I have ever read. It is the home of the Niels Bohr Institute, where the Copenhagen Interpretation - the new way of describing atoms, using quantum mechanics - was born, after difficult but exhiliarating years of debates and struggles between physicists all over Europe.

I love the story of those scientists. Most of them were young, and breaking new ground, and they fought to the point of tears and avoiding each other for weeks. They were spaced all over Europe, yet operating closely - "Everyone in and out of each other's departments." "Papers and drafts of papers on every international mail-train." I wish I'd been there! I feel the same way about Galaxy Zoo. I honestly believe we might change the face of science and in the long term science education. But my God I get het up if there's the slightest sign that our standards are at risk.

It was Chris's fault that I ordered a copy of this play. I read it again and again at the time - early November last year. The science was enthralling, as was the story. (I didn't feel a need to watch the play, let alone a film - the dogma that "it is always easier to understand when you see it" has never applied to me.) It took several reads to establish exactly what they were talking about, how much each character knew. Their perspectives keep flipping from past to present to future (or rather, from the 1920's to 1941 to after the war, since, in the play, they are "all of us dead and gone"), which was an added brain-teaser until I knew all the steps. It was like having to learn a piano piece or a dance back to front before I could start appreciating the finer points.

Anyway, I picked it up again somewhat absent-mindedly a couple of weeks ago. And again I was reading it over and over. Until suddenly one evening it was like being punched in the throat because what happened was so terribly sad. As a teenager, Heisenberg had had a terrifying time towards the end of the war. Aged 20, his university supervisor took him along to hear Niels Bohr speak, which was a thrilling event. "The war had been over for four years, but we were still lepers . . . in Germany we worshipped you. Because you held out your hand to us." Heisenberg challenged the mathematics Bohr was using, and Bohr came to meet him afterwards. It was the start of a seventeen-year friendship; Heisenberg was almost adopted into Bohr's family. "In the whole history of physics no two men were ever closer," wrote Thomas Powers many years later.

But in 1939 there was war again, and soon Denmark was invaded. Bohr and Heisenberg were both patriots and on opposite sides. Worse, Bohr's mother was Jewish, and in 1943 he had to escape being rounded up by crawling down the beach on his hands and knees in the dead of the night to be smuggled away on a sailboat.

"Copenhagen" looks back on an intriguing, eternally confusing event that took place in 1941: Heisenberg visited Bohr and clearly told him that Germany was working on a nuclear project. But afterwards, the two could not agree on what had been said, or even where. Heisenberg was depressed afterwards, and Bohr clearly angry with Heisenberg for the rest of his life. Heisenberg was no Nazi supporter, but he was clearly working for the regime. Bohr concluded that he wished to provide Hitler with an atomic bomb. Heisenberg claimed that he wished no such thing and was in fact trying to avoid it, perhaps even asking Bohr's advice in going about doing so. Today, many scientists and historians disbelieve Heisenberg and feel his behaviour was immoral and arrogant. What did the two of them say to each other?

That is what the characters in the play try to answer. It deliberately takes place in an unrealistic "afterlife": all three characters are dead, but get together - as they both decided not to do in real life, because trying to resolve it only made it worse - to try and work it out. They also fail to work it out in the play, but at least they explore it and at least each man gets his say.

Present in the conversation are, indirectly, the audience, who take the place of the Gestapo, and the people who subsequently interrogated Heisenberg for many years afterwards. Directly present is Bohr's wife Margrethe. In real life she and Niels were devoted to each other. She typed up all Bohr's papers and he plainly discussed all his research with her. She was less enthusiastic about Heisenberg than Bohr was, and discouraged her husband from allowing him to visit in 1941. The play opens with them debating whether or not to invite him, and they agree that he can come on the condition that they don't discuss politics. (But physics and politics, as Heisenberg remarks, are "painfully hard to separate".) Her presence requires the two physicists to use "plain language", so the audience can understand the science; and she disbelieves most of Heisenberg's explanations. "Every time he explained it became more obscure."

Much of the play is told in a sort of monologue, the characters speaking to nobody and everybody simultaneously. "We operated like a business." "Chairman and managing director." "Father and son." "A family business." It sounds as if they are taking parts singing in a choir. During pauses in the conversation, they follow each other's thoughts: "Silence. And of course they're thinking about their children again." "The same bright things. The same dark things. Back and back they come." Many times the play returns to "the same moments I [Bohr] see every day" - his eldest son, Christian, drowning in a sailing accident. Apparently Bohr and Heisenberg could finish each other's sentences, and once you're used to it, it sounds like close relatives talking. At other times, they argue about the things they and the other scientists did in the past - "shoot" each other by beating each other to it writing papers, skiing, piano-playing, hiking, and Schrödinger's visit during which Heisenberg was angry and jealous and Bohr talked Schrödinger to the point of illness. These snippets are both hilarious and some real philosophy to chew on - "that particle that goes through two slits at the same time" being compared to skiing at 70 k.p.h, and making a decision about which way to swerve when necessary!

Even during the most heated moments of the play, Frayn can suddenly make me snort with laughter, by the two men knowing each other so well. "The speed he skis," Heisenberg remarks of Bohr, "he has to do something to keep the blood going round. It was either physics or frostbite." Later, Heisenberg challenges the Bohrs to murder him as an enemy, adding that this would not be immoral in a war, and that all they have to do is tell someone what he said. At white heat, Bohr interrupts: "My dear Heisenberg, the suggestion is . . ." "Most interesting. So interesting that it never even occurred to you." Bohr was famous for saying "this is most interesting". Frayn brings it out very well how widely Bohr was loved. He has the characters mention that Bohr was dubbed "the Pope" by his students, that it is impossible for anyone to accuse him of ever having done anything wrong. I get the feeling that whatever Heisenberg hoped to gain from the Copenhagen meeting, Bohr's kindness would have been a real encouragement to go ahead with it.

That closeness, I think, is the tragedy - that for seventeen years that there was this special cooperation, the shared excitement and science and walking and talking - and then, because of the war, it died.

There is strangeness. There are differences between the characters and the real people, of course. There is eerie unease when they can't agree on what they said or where, or who did what during their science. Some of things they say sound odd. It particularly struck me early on, when Heisenberg has, in their memories, just arrived at the Bohrs' house in 1941. Bohr says: "I believe you had some personal trouble . . . I'm so sorry." It took a few reads of the commentary to establish that this meant Heisenberg had been interrogated by the Nazis for teaching "Jewish physics" (i.e. relativity). He was accused of being a "White Jew" and forbidden ever to mention Einstein in his lectures. Heisenberg's reaction is very odd: "A slight misunderstanding . . . These things happen. The question is now resolved. Happily resolved . . ." Surely he wasn't happy about it. He was still treated with suspicion, and he could hardly have been anti-Semitic or happy with the persecution taking place. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Hans Geiger dismissed Hans Bethe from his post as assistant without the slightest regret, and Heisenberg offered Bethe a job despite the dangers he must have known this would bring. Bethe sensibly refused and went to work in the USA.

It is so obvious it is almost a cliche that Heisenberg's life, aims and activities are rather a parallel to his legacy, uncertainty. Michael Frayn is clearly fascinated by human motivation. (I read a linguistics book when I was 15 and have since been used to the idea that we have a dozen different motivations at a time for every word we say.) Frayn wrote: "He wanted to distance himself from the Nazis, but didn't want to suggest that he had been a traitor. He was reluctant to claim to his fellow-Germans that he had deliberately lost the war, but he was no less reluctant to suggest that he had failed them simply out of incompetence." Robert Butler, writing in the commentary of the student edition, points out, "The position for many 'good Germans' was that they wanted Germany to win the war and Hitler to lose it."

This is not enough for many critics of the play. Frayn writes two postscripts, in which he baldly details the criticisms, accepting some and refuting others. (He writes with the confidence of one whose work is good enough that he need not really fear any criticism.) There are many, but just as I can't mention every point in the play I liked without this blog post ending up the size of the Encyclopedia Britannicca and spoiling too much of the plot for you, I won't go through them all. I will mention the one I thought was silliest, though: apparently, there were loud calls for more condemnation of the Nazis. As Frayn points out, the evil of the Nazi regime is "a given". For goodness sake, we don't need yet another sermon on what we don't need telling; the physics and the ethical debates and the mixed-up memories are far more fresh and exciting!

Personally I think it's a sort of trendy modern hysteria. Few people alive today remember the war, so we don't know quite what it was like and therefore whether it might happen again. It's not reality to us, it's a nightmare. It must be fended off. Sadly, people are so worried about what other people think of them that one can't even mention the war without ritual condemnation of the Nazis! Tell me honestly, do you really think that unless someone goes out of their way to state otherwise, they're pro-Holocaust? An old friend of mine accused me of sounding so simply for using the word "Jewish", not in a remotely derogatory way. In my father's school days it was quite acceptable to mention the fact that someone was Jewish; it was like mentioning that I wear glasses or that Spain is sunny. (One of the mostly-Jewish school football teams dubbed themselves "The Smelly Yids"!) Another friend of mine was once warned never even to say "black coffee". Oh, and when discussing schoolkids with one another, teachers who wish to avoid trouble must say "pupil", not "boy" or "girl", because apparently any assumptions that might be made are more important than the actual information they wish to give or obtain.

I think this is wicked. To forbid mention of someone's culture and heritage is to deny them a face. It's also to subtly imply that there is something wrong with their gender or nationality or what have you, but that you personally are too smugly refined to say so. And similarly, to assume everybody guilty of sympathy with the Holocaust unless they go on and on about it is to contribute to another culture of suspicion.

(Mealy-mouthed-ness - using the correct words, or not - doesn't mean anything, anyway. Genocide goes on today and not only do we not do any more about it than we did for the Jews during the war - I doubt the victims of Darfur for example will get another country to live in - we daren't mention the fact that it does. As Amnesty International pointed out the other day, it's inadvisable to use the word "genocide" even during an admission that it is actually taking place. I'm not kidding about people "not having a face", either, or why would there have been those two films a few years ago about the "human sides" of Hitler and Jesus? Because people are so silly they actually need proof that every human has a "human side". How babyish.)

Getting back to the play, I also hugely admire Frayn's attempt to tackle very difficult science. He describes himself in the postscript as "a non-scientist" who "can't offer any opinion on the physics". He was certainly braver than the newspaper reviewers. Butler offers seven reviews mentioning the reviewer's own ignorance of science and fear that they needed a physics qualification to understand the play - fears which were mostly dispelled, it seems. It's sad that people are frightened of science. I hope citizen science will help put an end to that; we wouldn't be frightened of a play about art or music. Frayn's ability to have the characters talk understandably, but as scientists, about fission, neutrons, and quantum physics, is brilliant. He has a glossary of some of the lines used at the end of the book. For "that particle", he makes a double joke: "One of the mind-bending aspects of quantum mechanics is that when a particle is faced with the choice of going through one of two slits it appears to go through both of them. (Don't ask.)" Because, of course, "asking" - or using light to "see" the particle - would deflect its path anyway!

* * *

Frayn's masterpiece intrigued me enough to get Thomas Powers's "Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb". It seems impossible to get what is politically correctly termed "a balanced view" - Heisenberg has attackers and defenders. P. L. Rose's book, "Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project, 1939-1945: A Study in German Culture", for example, is an attack, if that is more to your taste.

Now, like the mealy-mouthed folks I criticise, I wasn't there during the war. But I have a relative who's lived in a terrifying dictatorship abroad, and I'm a history fanatic and an Isabel Allende fan, and like most people I've had the odd instance where I've had to be sly to win a fight because to open my mouth too wide would have been disastrous - so I don't consider myself totally ignorant. I feel an intense admiration for and sympathy with Frayn's Heisenberg, and I think the things his fellow physicists and historians feel he should have done were not actually any better than what he did.

We come to a major question now, which I had never really considered before: Why didn't the Germans manage to build a bomb?

When I was younger I assumed it was simply that America was more powerful and advanced. As one learns more, one finds out that Germany had been bursting with impressive physicists - but the expulsion of the Jews, such as Einstein, sent the brains off to America and brought poetic justice. What about the physicists who stayed in Germany? One physicist, Weizsäcker, stated: "History will record that . . . the peaceful development of the uranium engine was made in Germany under the Hitler regime, whereas the Americans and the English developed this ghastly weapon of war."

Hardly. Take this review by Ian Kaplan: "Those [physicists] who remained in Germany fell into one of three categories: (1) they were Nazis, like Nobel Prize winner Johannes Stark; (2) they could not leave, for what ever reason, or (3) they were selectively blind to the regime around them and its implications . . . The evidence of the Farm Hall transcripts is morally damning. Heisenberg and his colleagues knew about the murder going on around them, but they still worked on the German nuclear program. They did not build a nuclear weapon because they did not know how."

Perhaps there was a fourth reason for not leaving Germany: that one's family and friends and students and fellow countrymen were there too, and one does not abandon all these people lightly. Do we call on all Americans to emigrate if they disapprove of the Iraq war or Guantanamo? Am I going to condemn myself to exile over Ian Tomlinson? No, there are people here besides the police and the government, and I'd rather stay and work here with them. Exile is not a happy future. If the scientists had all left, Nazis would have been put in their places anyway, and then goodness knows what would have happened.

It is possible that the scientists did not know how to build a nuclear weapon; Heisenberg claims that he had some idea, though he had actually got several points wrong. But perhaps - and if you think about it, this isn't as pathetic an excuse as it sounds - they did not want to know. Towards the end of Allende's first novel, "The House of the Spirits", a Communist in danger of being murdered by Pinochet's soldiers explains to his lover that he cannot tell her where he hides: "If they find you, it's better if you don't know anything." The German project, when found by the Allies, turned out to be very primitive, and they claimed they only wished for an energy source. If this is true, one can hardly blame them for wanting that much. People were starving and freezing.

Heisenberg claims in the play that he had hoped that physicists across the world could collectively refuse to build atomic bombs, and then mankind would be safe from the worst of destruction. This was a futile hope. There was no way the Allies would agree to that, and his team could hardly tell Hitler later that they refused to cooperate. But I got interested enough to Google the transcripts from Farm Hall, the house in which ten physicists including Heisenberg were imprisoned (though very well treated) for six months, and their horrified reactions after they heard about Hiroshima are hardly "morally damning":

HAHN: . . . For [Uranium-93] they must have an engine which will run for a long time. If the Americans have a uranium bomb then you’re all second-raters. Poor old Heisenberg.
LAUE: The innocent!
HEISENBERG: Did they use the word uranium in connection with this atomic bomb?
ALL: No. . .
HEISENBERG: Then it’s got nothing to do with atoms, but the equivalent of 20,000 tons of high explosive is terrific. . .
HAHN: At any rate, Heisenberg, you’re just second-raters and you may as well pack up.
HEISENBERG: I quite agree.
HAHN: They are fifty years further advanced than we.

. . .

WEIZSÄCKER: I don’t think it has anything to do with uranium. . .
HEISENBERG: I don’t believe that it has anything to do with uranium. . .

. . .

WEIZSÄCKER: I think it’s dreadful of the Americans to have done it. I think it is madness on their part.
HEISENBERG: One can’t say that. One could equally well say, "That’s the quickest way of ending the war."

Later:

HEISENBERG: We wouldn’t have had the moral courage to recommend to the Government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 men just for building the thing up.
WEIZSÄCKER: I believe the reason we didn’t do it was because all the physicists didn’t want to do it on principle. If we had all wanted Germany to win the war we would have succeeded.
HAHN: I don’t believe that. But I am thankful we didn’t succeed.

. . .

KORSCHING: If one hasn't got the courage, it would have been better to give up straightaway.

[At this point, Gerlach, at who this remark was aimed, stormed out and was later found weeping in his room. Meanwhile the debate continued:]

DIEBNER: [The Reich authorities were only interested in immediate results.] They didn't want to work on a long-term policy as America did.
WEIZSÄCKER: We were all convinced that the thing [bomb or reactor? Nobody knows] could not be completed during this war.
HEISENBERG: Well, that's not quite right. I would say that I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making an uranium engine but I never thought that we would make a bomb
and at the bottom of my heart I was really glad that it was to be a Maschine and not a bomb. I must admit that.
WEIZSÄCKER: If you had wanted to make a bomb we would probably have concentrated more on the separation of isotopes and less on heavy water.

Why are they discussing what they are thinking now? Why not while they were working together? Well, it's suicidal to say exactly what you think in a dictatorship or war. You don't know if your neighbour might turn you over to the authorities. They were probably all trying to guess what all the others were thinking; Diebner, in "Copenhagen", is criticised as having "ten times my [Heisenberg's] eagerness [to build a bomb]". But after the bomb had exploded, they knew they had lost. It was too late, they had no more to lose now.

In "Copenhagen", Gerlach is described as "our old Government administrator". He does not seem to have been a Nazi, but was afraid of what might happen to him if he returned to Germany now, and felt responsible for the defeat and deaths of his fellow Germans. Otto Hahn, as Heisenberg said, "wants to kill himself, because it was he who invented fission, and he can see the blood on his hands". He had contemplated suicide years before when he realised what fission could do. Major Rittner, their host/warder, and the other physicists, were very worried about Hahn that night, but Hahn also found time to comfort Gerlach:

HAHN: Are you upset because we did not make the uranium bomb? I thank God on my bended knees that we did not make an uranium bomb. Or are you depressed because the Americans could do it better than we could?
GERLACH: Yes.

Powers states at the beginning of his book that the American scientists feel no guilt at working on the atomic bomb, and Frayn reiterates this in his play - Margrethe asks incredulously, "You're not implying that there's anything Niels needs to explain or defend?" - though he later cites two Americans, including Oppenheimer, feeling revulsion at what their weapon has done. But the German scientists appear to be condemned for both having a project to do, and for failing to complete it. "Hands that had actually worked on the bomb wouldn't touch mine," Heisenberg laments in the play.

I still admit there's a lot I don't know, and I must find the courage to read the critical literature as well as the supportive. But I will say one last thing: those who judge Heisenberg and the other physicists harshly might like to read the Göttingen Manifesto.

Book Review: "100 Things to Do Before You Die", edited by New Scientist

Want to make shimmering snow angels in water? Or find out how it feels to be a human comet with a bright tail? Then take a trip to a bioluminescent bay. There are only a few in the world, but one of the brightest and most pristine is Mosquito Bay in the small Carribean island of Vieques, off the coast of Puerto Rico.

Pick a moonless night and use a kayak if you can. Each stroke will light up the water and your boat will be surrounded by the most magnificent bright blue-green glow.

Dip your hand into the water and twirl it around - the more vigorous your movements, the more you'll shine. Cup your hands and reach in. As you lift, look closely at the water. There you'll see the culprits: microscopic organisms called dinoflagellates that release light when they are disturbed.

Nature's pixie dust is all around you.

These are the opening words of the book "100 Things to Do Before You Die (plus a few to do afterwards", which in late 2004 came free with a New Scientist magazine. Over four years on, I still read bits of it every so often. It's a very little volume, each "thing" with an opening title, catchy subheading, and the information rather neatly arranged, I think, by a loose formula. It seems to be an opening paragraph about the activity, followed by some of the science, a bit more detail, and ending with a cool, rather journalistic catchphrase. It's not the least bit rigid, though - the topics are wide-ranging to say the least, and it also has 12 "guest" entries from public science figures such as Sir Patrick Moore (from before he became a "sir" - and his suggestion is a mild surprise!).

I love this book and would give it five stars any day. I've done about seven of the activities, which range in ease from contemplating the size of the Universe to scenarios involving impressing NASA enough to get picked to do an experiment in space. I definitely mean to do more, such as spending all night in the garden to listen to the wildlife. There are some really little things whose value we don't think about until it's brought up short under our noses by books like these. For some reason, I often fall asleep while I'm reading it - not because I'm bored, but I guess because it's familiar, relaxing, and also makes me use my brain. Not with problems, but by making me picture the activities.

The book should really have been called "100 things, some of which you might be able to do before you die". I did a quick tally through the book the other day. 32 of them can be done with minimal money and travel; though it feels like fewer, probably because most of these are at the beginning, and their leaves me with an increasing slightly feeling of disgruntlement (is that a word?). 35 require major travel across the world, but all of them sound well worth it! Two involve becoming an astronaut; four depend entirely on luck; three demand you be rather a special person; and three are impossible if you're not a millionaire. Nine depend on a technology in the pipeline being launched and made widely available, four are not possible unless you have a high-up scientist for a friend, and one is medically not to be advised!

Just one guest entry really annoyed me: Anton Zeilinger on time travel:

My dream is to go back in time, say 200 years, and show people a CD player. How glorious to watch their reactions. Would they be shocked? Would they grab it from me and check if there are miniature people inside? Would some even be creative enough to guess that this is a future technology?

- which I can't help feeling is just pointless, as well as very patronising! If I went back in time, I'd want to see how these people lived, and the things they put up with that we're not tough enough to deal with now, and how they spoke (apparently people used to speak slower than they do now), and what skills I could learn from them.

And imagine explaining to these 19th century children how much longer we live today. And that many of today's 60, 70 and 80-year-olds are happier and more active than they are.

That's just cruel. Let's boast about our supermarkets to the starving, too. Anyway, I doubt it's true about more active - kids worked on farms and in factories well over 12 hours a day back then.

Rant aside, the activities are wonderful, involving food, travel, science, machines, books, thought, and simple appreciation . . . but none of these in excess. There's a great range of themes and locations and things to suit various personalities, and it's a great reminder that, as it points out in one entry, we are still animals. It also inspired and explained to me to make liquid nitrogen ice cream for my Chemistry class at Sussex University, and then as a demonstration for primary school children in Brighton!

I thoroughly recommend a read.

ISBN 1-86197-925-8

Book Reviews

One thing I'd like to do with this blog is to write the occasional book review. I wrote one on Amazon two years ago for the book that got me into astronomy: "BANG!", by zookeeperChris, Sir Patrick Moore, and Dr Brian May. I stand by what I said about it then, though I don't recommend typing out an Amazon review whilst having a chat with the family. It doesn't make for a mature writing style.

As a child I read and wrote constantly. These days, when I do, I ask myself, "Why don't you do this more often?" I love books. I planned, when teacher training, to have a "library" of great and also entertaining science books available in my classroom - and found out during my course that not only were children not expected to read, we were discouraged from encouraging them to do so. What a shame. Books shouldn't be work. They give you a rest and make you grow. As the protagonist Kitty puts it in Anne Fine's "Goggle-Eyes": "Living your life is a long and doggy business. And stories and books help. Some help you with the living itself. Some help you just take a break. The best do both at the same time."

To the following photo, add several cups of tea, something unhealthy like chocolate or Pringles, and a few foot-high piles of books randomly scattered around, and you have purr-fection! (Oh, and never get your cats to pose when they're in whizzing loony mode. They stayed there for about two seconds eating their cat treats, then started a fight. They do curl up with me when I'm reading, but never when I have a camera to hand.)


I'll mostly write about books I love, so let's have our fun now. To start with, Stephen Pile's "The Book of Heroic Failures" lists the worst ever review written as being for a performance titled "A Good Time". Next day, the following review appeared in the newspaper: "No".

My grandmother trumped that. She often annotated her books - which helped me choose a poem ("Afterwards", by Thomas Hardy) to read at her funeral. On the flyleaf of Thomas Pynchon's "Vineland" she wrote: "Unreadable Free Book". (I tried to read it . . .)

Nigel Rees's collection of "Eavesdroppings" contains something similar. The person who sent in the eavesdropping explained that they were in the audience of a "well meant but rather pretentious" play. After the lukewarm applause, one woman in the row in front of him turned to her companion and said, "Well, Emily, all I can say is, I hope the dogs haven't been sick in the car."

Izzy, stop licking the computer screen. The mouse icon is not edible.