Ions are the 99%

Remember what you were taught in chemistry at school? It was very exact. Water is solid at 0°C, gas at 100°C, and liquid in between. Metals are solids; oxygen and nitrogen are gases. Gases like oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and chlorine are invariably molecules containing two atoms of each element. Atoms like their outer "shells" to be "full" and join up with other atoms to reach this stability. Oxygen is electronegative: it likes to grab electrons. You never hear of an oxygen giving up its electrons to some other type of atom.

But there is nothing universal about this.

These are what, by A level at any rate, we call "standard conditions" - 25°C, Earth's atmospheric pressure, Earth's gravity, and with all the protections of Earth's atmosphere from the violent radiation from space.

Of course, we learn that it's not like that everywhere. The pressure at the bottom of the sea, for instance, is intense - "if you went there, you'd end up the size of a chip," my Chemistry teacher told us when we were about 13. And up at the top of the atmosphere, in the ozone layer, you hear about photodissociation and ultraviolet light (the type that is dangerous if you're out in it too long) snapping ordinary two-atom oxygen molecules in half, leading to each single oxygen atom joining up with a normal two-atom pair to make a three-atom molecule of ozone.

But all this is just on our little planet Earth: a tiny, tiny place in our great Universe.


(The Pale Blue Dot.)

What about on other planets? Well, we know the gas giants, such as Jupiter, are made largely of hydrogen. Jupiter is almost 318 times more massive than Earth, though less dense; and its gravity is gigantic. It is therefore hypothesised that hydrogen in its core is likely to be solid, behaving like a metal. (If you look on the Periodic Table of the elements you'll see that hydrogen, H, actually rests right above lithium, sodium, potassium etc. - due to having one electron in the outermost "shell"; and arrangements in common like this create characteristics in common.)

(Jupiter from NASA/JPL/Cassini's Photojournal. The Great Red Spot is on the right. On the left is a black circle - it's the moon Europa's shadow. It's worth zooming in!)

But Earth and Jupiter are planets. That means they're compact, cold and - in our cases; not in the case of Mercury, for example - there is a protective atmosphere. Off a planet, this stabilising gentleness is gone.

In space, you often get one atom - or fewer - knocking about in every cubic centimetre (it varies, of course, for example whether you're near a star or in a nebula or inside or outside a galaxy, etc. etc. In the meantime, you might enjoy this little bulletin of interstellar medium facts, from a lecture in Ohio). At sea level, the "standard conditions" on Earth, you get 100,00,000,000,000,000,000 or so. Marcus Chown likes to remind us that atoms are so numerous that every breath that you take will contain an atom breathed in by Marilyn Monroe!

This of course makes it pretty easy for molecules to find and bond with each other. In space, to be able to do this is very rare.

Apart from on nice cool compact places like planets, the only places you're likely to find actual molecules are inside nebulae. It wasn't until last August that it was announced that molecular oxygen - the type of oxygen we breathe in - was discovered in space. Molecular hydrogen of course is better known, and carbon monoxide - the same type of carbon monoxide that is poisonous - is a good "tracer". That means that it's easy to find by its spectrum, so astronomers look for it as an indication of what else is going on around the place.

There is, according to the APOD I nicked it from anyway, molecular gas here. It's been able to form molecules because - although even though those dark "pillars", similar to the marvellous "Pillars of Creation", are devastatingly empty and thin compared to what we know - the environment is dense enough to block out a lot of light. ("Light" is a loose term for what stars give out. You've probably heard of ultra-violet radiation damaging your skin. That's the same type of thing as light, but it's a shorter wavelength we can see. Shorter still are X-rays. Hot stars and energetic environments give those out too. Longer include microwaves, infra-red, etc.) This does two things. Firstly, it allows the gas to cool and condense. Secondly, a lot of light in space (electromagnetic radiation) is "ionizing": it knocks the electrons' atoms right off!

99% of atoms in space are ions. Lone electrons, or (as "ion" usually means) a charged nucleus - a proton if it's hydrogen, or a ball of protons and neutrons if it's anything else. Some of these nuclei may retain some of their electrons. This completely changes their properties - they become much more affected by electric and magnetic fields, for example.

Stars are almost all ions - unless they're incredibly cool stars. So is most of the interstellar medium. All that radiation flying around is no match for poor lonely atoms. They might find an electron and combine with it, but chances are it'll be knocked off again before too long.

And this is the norm. The orderly, neutral molecules that make up the Earth we know behave as only 1% of the matter in the Universe behaves. The upper atmosphere is full of ions that bear the brunt of the stronger radiation from the Sun. By having their electrons knocked off, they absorb the energy and let the rest of the planet go relatively unmolested!

This ionization is what we noticed going on when we discovered the "Pea" galaxies: that oxygen, that really electronegative atom that loved electrons, was present and getting two electrons knocked off. (Of course there was a great deal more hydrogen, but oxygen shows up better in the spectrum.) This happens pretty frequently in space, of course, but things were really firing up in those peas!

One of the units I'm studying this semester is called "Astrophysical Plasmas". You'll have heard that matter is a solid, a liquid or a gas. If they taught you much science, you'll have heard of the fourth state: plasma. Plasma, as you've probably guessed by now, is the state of matter when some or all of the atoms' electrons have been torn off, whether by radiation or electricity or intense heat. It behaves like a gas - even in the centres of stars where it is millions of times denser than any environment you get on earth. Most of the Sun is a plasma, as is the solar wind that triggers the Aurora.

You'll have seen gorgeous pictures of the Aurora from the ground, for example this lovely picture from Alaska Photographics - and also this footage of the Aurora in real-time from the Bad Astronomer is breathtaking to watch.

Looking at it from space, you can see that it's going on very high up in the atmosphere . . .

. . . and, in fact, that the Earth's magnetic field direct the charged particles from the solar wind to form rings around the poles (in this case, the South pole - the Aurora Australis).

The Aurora is caused when charged particles strike oxygen and nitrogen in the magnetosphere of the Earth's upper atmosphere. The molecules don't zoom around in those dancing curtains. It's different areas being struck at different times - like the light from a torch moves around when you point the torch in different directions.

What happens is ionization, or excitation of an electron - the same mechanism, but without enough energy to actually kick the electron free! Two charged particles from the Sun strike, say, two nitrogen atoms. One loses its electron altogether - and becomes an ion, one of the "99%". The other's electron gets "excited", into a higher energy state, but doesn't actually lose the electron. Later, the nitrogen ion finds an electron (maybe the one it had before, maybe another) to recombine with. This releases energy in the form of blue light. The other nitrogen atom's electron also falls back into a lower-energy state, releasing red light. (This process is described here.)

The oddness of ions doesn't stop there. Our lecturer gave us the example of a gyroscope: that when you push it forwards, it will move left or right; and charged particles can behave in this counterintuitive way, too. (We write about parallel and perpendicular vectors quite a lot in Astrophysical Plasmas - and, if you don't mind, I'm not going to go into that here, for I may well make a fool of myself.)

I mentioned earlier that the properties change and that magnetic fields have an effect on them. Ions in a magnetic field will gyrate as if they are sliding along a spring: round and round (in opposite ways depending on their charge!), and along, sometimes at right angles to forces acting on them. And sometimes they will reach a point in the magnetic field where they are "mirrored" - it is as if they hit a brick wall and are bounced straight back in the other direction.

And this is what helps create the van Allen belts around our little blue planet.

The van Allen belts, although - like the Earth's upper atmosphere - help protect us from solar radiation, are dangerous areas spacecraft have to watch out for. They are lobes of ions from the solar wind and our own atmosphere that are held in place by the Earth's magnetic fields. Some ions travel along in a banana-shaped object from the North Pole to the South, and vice versa - because when they stray too near the pole, the Earth's magnetic field lines become closer and closer together, and eventually this causes the "mirroring" of the particle - and it will zoom back off in the banana-shaped orbit. It's a bit like a skateboarder on one of those amazing curved platforms in the park, who doesn't go quite fast enough to get to the top and rushes back down again. He speeds up as he reaches the bottom and zooms his way back up the other end - but slows again towards the top. It's a constant motion, like a pendulum; potential and kinetic energy swap places again and again as the particle goes back and forth.

Charges make particles do very strange things.

We are unable to process your response

Scientific surveys are distrusted by many people and organisations. Sadly, due to the fact that surveys are not always particularly well written, this is not entirely without reason.

Many years ago, when working for a health and safety consultancy, I was shown a newspaper article about the enforced closure of a care home after they had failed an inspection on safety grounds, such as their banisters being a couple of millimetres too wide apart. "These people aren't interested in whether or not you've got a loving home," one of the very upset care workers was quoted as saying, "they're only interested in ticking little boxes."

More recently, the IT firm Atos has been the recipient of the outsourcing of decisions on sick and disabled people's welfare, taking these decisions out of the hands of GPs and others who know the welfare recipients, and placing it in the hands of a survey for which you have to score points to be declared unfit for work. LatentExistence describes it in more detail here, and this is one of the results of this procedure. (By the way, if I say anything too critical of this company, my entire blog may be shut down - this happened to CarerWatch and it took a lot of fighting and correspondence to find out that the entire forum, which is a pillar of sanity and support for many exhausted, poor and desperate people, was closed due to a link someone had posted many months previously. But I recommend Margaret McCartney's writings on them, too - sadly the BMJ article I had in mind, and which I believe is linked to here, no longer seems to be available.)

In other words, a badly thought out survey can have horrific - and fatal - results. It can of course also be fairly hilarious to those who have the time and ability to pick it apart, as bloggers did to the BCA's "plethora of evidence" about chiropractic being effective back in 2009.

I'm currently earning my pennies by doing some scientific data entry, which involves a bit of database testing. I'm actually finding it both fun and fascinating, and also discovering just how much thought has to go into writing a survey and its results. A simple "N/A" in a box where an integer is required means that query after query gets generated, multiplying the poor data manager's work. When you create a survey, study, or report, you have to allow for various responses.

The problem a lot of people cite (in my experience, anyway) with surveys is that they "don't give a holistic picture", "ignore the real person", "don't treat anyone as an individual", "reduce important things to tick boxes" and so on. The trouble with this is that a really large survey can't treat everybody, or anybody, as an individual, except for case studies. You need to state exactly what you want to find out, and how much. No survey can find out everything about everybody! And if what people say isn't representative of what's really going on, or the results don't make any sense - that's when you've got a problem.

If your tick boxes make people feel like that, this doesn't mean that surveys involving tick boxes are the problem, it means that the wrong questions are being asked - or, if it's multiple choice, that the wrong range of answers are being offered.

It's a pretty good idea, I'd say, to do a trial run of a survey, and find out where these errors are coming from. No planning can possibly think of everything that will go wrong. So do a practice run, change what you need to, and then have another go. (This is much better than, say, adding a new question halfway through what you are doing - this makes the whole thing a mess.)

Still, I would have thought that even a mobile phone company would have had the imagination to forecast the problems they created themselves with the survey they just sent me. I won't name the mobile company, but they've just offered me a new contract. I've accepted it, because it's a lot better than my current one, and also there isn't a minimum time on it. Let me make clear that they telephoned me while I was at work and I asked if they could call me back another time, which they did, exactly when they said they would - and they did not much underestimate the time the call would take, which was a big bonus. Anyway, next day I got the following message as follows:

MOBILE: "From [X]: You recently spoke to us on [Day X] and we'd like to ask you 6 quick questions about your experience. All your feedback is free."

MOBILE: "Question 1: Was this the first time we've spoken about a specific problem or query? Reply with Y for yes and N for no."

So far so good . . .

ME: "Y".

MOBILE: "Question 2 of 6: Is your query or problem now resolved? Reply with Y for yes and N for no."

ME: "Y."

First problem. I thought I'd better add to that . . .

ME: "Except I didn't have a problem/query. [MOBILE COMPANY] did."

MOBILE: "Error: We were unable to recognise your response. Please enter a number between 0 and 9 where 0 is 'poor' and 9 is 'excellent'."

MOBILE: "Question 3 of 6: That's good to hear. Overall how would you rate our advisor on a scale of 0 to 9 where 0 is 'poor' and 9 is 'excellent'?"

I know a few people who work for these companies and know that if you answer anything other than the top number, they get a bollocking and lose their commission. (Mobile companies are not always kind to their staff - I recommend a read of this experience Dean had with a different one.) So although it was annoying being rung up and I had to listen to the standard waffle, the guy was a good listener and answered - even anticipated - all my questions. So I decided to be generous.

ME: "9."

MOBILE: "Question 4 of 6. How would you rate the time it took before you spoke to an advisor where 0 is poor and 9 is excellent?"

I think by now it's clear that they have started off this survey by making a very specific assumption which needed clearing up before questions and answers could helpfully continue.

ME: "N/A. I didn't call you."

MOBILE: "Error: We were unable to recognise your response. Please enter a number between 0 and 9 where 0 is 'poor' and 9 is 'excelent'."

ME: "'Excellent' is spelled with two 'L's. Please take a literacy course."

MOBILE: "Unfortunately we are unable to recognize the response in your message. Please try again at another time."

By not allowing for a few very simple different situations, or employing a proofreader, or even allowing a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V to be used in designing error messages, this company has messed up its own surveying ability and wasted its own time and money as well as mine.

And this is why it's important to learn how to design a survey before you do one.

And another Skeptics in the Pub. Welcome Hackney!

Because obviously I haven't got enough to do at the moment, what with a course and a zoo and a bunch of talks coming up, last autumn I let myself be dragged into co-founding Hackney Skeptics in the Pub.

There are already two Skeptics in the Pub in London: London and Westminster. But there are over seven million people too, and James Robson, who works with exotic animals at the Horniman Museum and runs Science in the Pub with Paolo Viscardi, thought there was room for more. In other words, you can blame James for all this . . .

Westminster is the place that focusses on media, law, policy, etc. So we thought we'd be "the Skeptics with a science slant". Like Science in the Pub, we hope to run the odd silly experiment during the interval (when I gave a talk there, for instance, people were invited to taste different wines to see if we could tell which were old, which were new, which were cheap and which expensive. I forget the overall result, but I certainly couldn't). We also differ from other places in another way, by being based at the Hackney Attic rather than in a pub. I personally love pubs (the kind with pool tables and room for conversation, anyway), but this is where we are, and a damn glamorous venue it is too.


It's the fifth floor of the Hackney Picturehouse on Mare Street, opposite the Town Hall and Hackney Empire and, as you see, in a street containing rather a lot of pretty lights. It's a fantastic venue for gigs etc and has a bar and comfortable chairs, and they serve food and can bring it upstairs - so that covers all the necessaries for Skeptics in the Pub without it strictly being a pub. Maybe that'll expand our audience. Maybe it won't make any difference at all. We'll have to see.

Let me digress into exactly what "Skeptics in the Pub" and "Skepticism" is, for anybody new coming along. It is not cynicism or pessimism, or people yelling "I don't believe you". There are various definitions of what Skepticsim is, and useful articles about where it's needed in the face of misleading claims, but a beautiful one was recently shown to me by Tannice, who runs Guildford Skeptics. It's by DJ Groethe, and he says:

"To me, the word is best understood by looking at its roots: it comes from the Greek word 'skeptikos', which just means to inquire or to find out. We say that skepticism is the best way of finding out the truth and is precisely the opposite way of just saying 'no' to others' beliefs . . . Critical thinking is continuous with skepticism – and with science, for that matter. It is simply thinking critically about claims and issues . . . Some people think the skeptic’s work is trivial, but we think beliefs matter very much. If the majority of people believe in the claimed supernatural ability of a TV preacher to heal their illnesses, there are real-world effects: the believers won’t go to real medical doctors."

From here - the whole thing is very well worth a read!

The Greek word may be why we call ourselves "skeptics" rather than "sceptics", although for many of us I guess it is just a habit, a joke, a special sense of belonging. Quite a few of us feel we don't belong among many others - with severities ranging from when all the people in the office are going on about how marvellous such and such a psychic is, to being the only atheist in your family and being constantly told you're going to Hell.

But the nights at almost all the places I've been to are cheerful and bonding. I used to co-run Cardiff Skeptics with Dean Burnett, which was an incredibly happy year - I lived in Wales just long enough to be there for our first birthday party before moving here to London and having to leave. I've given talks at half a dozen or so places, and all the events felt happy and full of learning. Granted, at the Questions & Answers there's occasionally the odd smartypants or shouter, but the evenings are carefully watched by the people running it (and the pub staff!) and I've never yet been to one where I didn't end up in several great conversations.

We're launching our first event of 2012 on Monday 30th January. The speaker is David Allen Green, better known as Jack of Kent. I thought he'd probably be talking about libel law or some other bad law, but he's decided to be more interesting - for that, read "stirrer" (in a smiling way). As we're "the sciencey place", his title is "Scientists do not have a monopoly on assessing evidence". In other words, while the scientific method is one of mankind's foolproof - yet counterintuitive - inventions, and has driven our progress for the last few centuries, history and law (and perhaps other things as well?) can be equally evidence-obsessed. He'll be talking to us about that.

We've got more events on the way - Ben Hardwidge to talk about "The Sharks Don't Get Cancer" myth in February, Alok Jha for an unconfirmed topic in March, Deborah Hyde on the origins of zombies in April (her talk was my introduction to Skeptics in the Pub!), and we have some cool plans for May and June too . . .

The challenge I've got this time that I didn't have in Cardiff is local advertising. My experience with this is limited to going round local businesses in Pembrokeshire and asking them if they'll have petitions to save Withybush hospital (the only hospital with an A&E in the whole of Pembrokeshire!), so I may make a complete hash of this. There is a Facebook group for "SITP Organisers" where I asked about advertising and was absolutely pelted with encouragement, ideas and advice. I'll be getting a day free this week - do get in touch if you even vaguely know me or plan to come to Hackney Skeptics and would like to accompany me on some poster-posting!

I hope to see you on Monday 30th!

Headless chicken

Don't start me off on how busy I am at the moment - as soon as I have the energy I will write a post introducing Hackney Skeptics in the Pub - but it just occurred to me the other day that I appear to be giving five astronomy talks in the next month!

Just in case you'd like to come to any of them, they are as follows:

Wednesday 18th January: Guildford Skeptics

Thursday 19th January: Queen Mary university (general Galaxy Zoo talk to my coursemates) -> Now rearranged to 7th February.

Wednesday 1st February: Reading Skeptics

Wednesday 8th February: Birmingham Skeptics

Monday 13th February: Astronomers in the Pub

Never mind, keeps me out of mischief. The talks will, surprise surprise, be about Galaxy Zoo, citizen science, and the new concept of open science hopefully becoming part of society. The Skeptics ones will be more education/people orientated, while the Queen Mary and Astronomers in the Pub ones will be more Galaxy Zoo/astronomy focussed. I like both sides! Now to go and either get some sleep or finish off those galaxy-speckled Powerpoints . . .

36 Symptoms of Science Geekery

Science geekery is a deadly disease, not least because it makes you so happy you never want to give it up.

These are 36 of the symptoms I've encountered - and I don't think this is all. Most are mine; a few are other people's. What are yours?

1. You look for constellations in freckles and moles on your skin. And your boyfriend's/girlfriend's - and point them out when you find them. They may be a little disturbed, which is saddening because you mean it as a compliment.

2. One of the most upsetting and bewildering things you can hear is the sentiment that science takes the beauty or poetry out of something.

3. You start quoting Tom Lehrer at length when drunk. Or, indeed, sober and having a good time.

4. Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot makes you well up.

5. You have a mental list of all the science things you didn't understand in school. If you're organised you read up on them. If you're not, you just feel annoyed about them and keep planning to read up on them some day.

6. You have your own mental list of what you would put on the science curriculum, if given dictatorial powers!

7. Bookshops are incredibly dangerous places to enter. (For your bank account, not your physical self - unless you do your back in, of course, or indeed sit on the floor and get so absorbed reading something that somebody trips over you.)

8. Once shy and lonely, you suddenly become a very talkative and enthusiastic person!

9. Other people's responses to this vary. They might remark, "You get all animated!" or "You light up when you talk about . . .". However, more commonly they'll object to "these things you just blurt out" as if you've said something exceedingly offensive. Other remarks may include: "You're very passionate about . . ." in a telling-off sort of voice; "You're obviously really shy. Only shy people talk that much all in one go" and "You really remind me of my autistic relative/friend X" or gently take it upon themselves to diagnose autism or Aspergers. You tell them that is very interesting.

10. Fellow geeks are always to be cherished.

11. Your Facebook wall shows rather a lot of links to APOD pictures. You can't help but hope that some of the desperately boring people you can't acceptably unfriend will be even a little inspired. They aren't.

12. Stories such as the idea of "open science" (1st chapter here!) or the children's bumblebee paper put a silly grin on your face for hours.

13. You sneak onto a geeky website, or at least Twitter, when clothes, make-up, alcohol and X-factor become a topic of intense and opinionated discussion in the workplace. Or, if forced to participate, you come out with all the conversation-stoppers.

14. This makes perfect sense!

15. When your friends discuss the inevitabilities of nuclear war or the futility of trying to feed the starving or combat corruption, or treat as completely reasonable the idea of no country agreeing to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions until everyone else does (because it would be bad for their economy), science seems the obvious solution. For example, putting more money into science will drive our renewable energy, and then when everyone else runs out of fossil fuels we'll be in the lead. "Yes," they shrug, meaning "If only", or less.

16. Seeing the cruelty and stupidity of a lot of the world is, every so often, a horrific shock - because you've been concentrating on science, which is so beautiful and makes you so happy.

17. Indeed you feel that more science for everyone would make the world a much happier place.

18. Glow-in-the-dark stars are a very good idea.

19. Remarks such as "But we didn't know how electricity worked for ages, but we still used it" and "We used to think the world was flat" (usually said as excuses for thinking something unscientific and being too lazy to listen to reason) drive you up the wall.

20. When someone claims that some alternative remedy works just fine, you immediately prepare a firestorm of questions about studies, evidence, the placebo effect, and the mechanism (sadly, that usually has to remain inside your head - unless you're a lot braver and more patient than I am).

21. It deeply upsets you to see an inaccurate scientific article.

22. The best clothes and other accessories are those containing an excellent science slogan/joke/diagram.

23. After years, when young, of being personally desperately committed to all your arguments, you grow a virtue of detaching yourself from your scientific work, in order to look at it properly. That ties in with the dry, detached language of scientific journals - although you can't help agreeing they would be much more accessible if written in more ordinary language. (Now if only there was a job requiring that type of translation . . .)

24. You look back on the times you weren't doing science and ask yourself, "What was I doing all that time?"

25. The world becomes full of toys. Clouds change shape before your eyes, whiteboards invite you to write a science joke, broken machinery is there to be pulled apart, Lego is perfectly acceptable at all ages, and your glasses (if you wear them) turn the edges of everything red and blue. And when you arrive early for a meeting, and are conveniently there to help pour the coffee, you first arrange all the polystyrene cups (which you disapprove of, because they're not recyclable, although you wonder if you ought to check that is still true - but cool mugs are still better) into the shapes of a barred spiral, an unbarred spiral and an elliptical.

26. You then excuse yourself by explaining that, now you are into science, the world is suddenly full of toys, and everyone around you grins and nods, because they all feel the same way!

27. You see galaxies in your coffee. And everyday objects in galaxies. And point them out.

28. You can't help but check for flawed methodology in every claim and every study you see. And you see a lot.

29. Organisations or groups whose principles support sometimes see you as the enemy when you point out the flaws in their methods or reasoning. This is tragic, because you want them to produce the best data and arguments.

30. You are occasionally reminded that you have forgotten to do something important, such as turning off the oven, because you were so busy thinking about supernovae or similar.

31. When you suddenly understand a concept or equation you began struggling with a long time ago, it's difficult not to jump or dance. You have to settle for texting your geeky friends or blogging about it later.

32. Sooner or later, you will come across someone who feels that there is something childish about facts and being "right or wrong". This is a lot to do with their own maturity and having learnt to compromise and respect everyone's opinion. You think about this and go through a long thought process concluding that your own maturity about knowledge has passed various stages. As a child, for instance, you might have thought in black and white, and that is what this person usually thinks you are doing. As a teenager, you learnt to think like them (and some people never get beyond that stage). As a science geek, the maturity is error bars, acknowledged uncertainties, and a healthy respect for facts which you know can never be entirely proved, only disproved - who knows how or when?

33. When people ask you to recommend Christmas presents, you give them a list of science books. You genuinely found them funny and delightful.

34. You tell your beloved to paste this equation into Google: (sqrt(cos(x))*cos(200*x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01, sqrt(9-x^2), -sqrt(9-x^2)

35. A science lecture, a Skeptics in the Pub night or a stargazing/telescope session is a much better night out than getting pissed.

36. You use the word "geek" as a compliment. Other people think you're putting yourself down. This needs explaining.

The train tracks

Before you read this post (or choose not to), please bear in mind it might be distressing or triggering - that is, bring horrible memories to the forefront of your mind. It's not something I would have intended to blog about before this happened, but now it has, I think it's important - hopefully, you'll see why. There's some help sites at the bottom of the page.

It's the 11th week of a 12 week term in my postgraduate course. My blogging has gone out of the window, as has a lot of my attention on other projects such as Galaxy Zoo. I'm stressed about getting work to support myself and about my not-easily-cured lack of mathematical knowledge. I love the course but I'm just exhausted now and want to sleep, but I have to get off the train to wait for the next one because the line is branching.

It's freezing out. I was having a fascinating e-mail conversation earlier and completely forgot to change into warmer clothes before leaving the house. The platform's shiny black with rain and I think about latent heat and how it can be both raining and so cold. I walk up the platform to try and get warm, my bag batting on my back. I turn back and - what?

There were two men on the train tracks. They appeared to embrace briefly, and then walk slowly and carefully back across to the platform opposite. Something stopped inside me, as if I was watching a film that had suddenly gone silent, the screen shrunk, my breathing switched off. What if a train came? They were standing on the rails - would they be electrocuted? A bunch of people had gathered at the edge and held out their hands to pull them up again. I took this to be a prank, or one of them having dropped something. I was quite far away but wandered nearer, suddenly nosy.

One of the men was holding his hands up, as if the others were pointing a gun. There was some jostling and pathetic wails of "leave me alone". It was then that I realised what was happening. Would they calm him down? Talking helps usually, doesn't it? There were a few moments of rising jostling and then calm. And then the man broke away and ran. Towards me. I was just wondering if there would be any point jumping onto the tracks myself when another man ran after him, caught him up, grabbed him, and was joined by two others who held him tight. They ended up on the ground. The man was howling now. He wanted them so much to get off so he could . . . do it again.

I looked around me. Most people were standing still, staring. No, I didn't see anyone obviously calling the emergency services. Suddenly it occurred to me that the men holding him couldn't, there were no staff around, and nobody was in charge. Nobody was going to come along and make everything all right. How could they? British Transport Police. What was their number? There were signs everywhere normally saying "If you see a train being vandalised, call . . ." I couldn't find one. Right. Can't waste any more time. You might have seconds. Action stations.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket. For some reason, dialling 999 - the first time I've ever done that - made me feel very foolish and embarrassed. Also I had started to shake wildly and it affected my voice.

"Emergency services," came a recording. Then silence.

Then "What emergency service do you require?"

"Police please."

Ring, ring. Oh, a long ring, ring. "Police, what is your emergency?"

I almost said "Hello, good evening," on autopilot. The guys still had the man held down, against the wall. His howls were just incoherent howls, like a baby crying. I couldn't even see him. I was right opposite them now, just those two horrifying railway tracks in between.

It was a very clear-voiced, calm lady. I told her which Tube station I was at and that someone had tried to throw himself onto the tracks. She asked if he was still on the tracks and I said no. I described as best I could what was going on. She asked me what he looked like. I had to be honest and say it had all happened so fast and I couldn't see him any more, I couldn't be sure. My mind was suddenly full of a list of features David Allen Green explains here: "Sex, height, hair colour, build, jacket, bottoms, trainers, fabrics, colours of clothes." (I could remember most of those, not all, and managed to come up with height, hair colour, jacket, colours of clothes. I won't repeat them because I don't want this poor guy to be identified this way.) She asked me the most obvious, race.

"What platform is he on?" Oh God. I couldn't see. I paced about trying to find the sign. I told her that he was "on the one in the middle". I found out I was on Platform 3 and told her, adding that he was opposite me, but she thought I meant he was on Platform 3. I was later able to interrupt her and say Platform 2 - I had walked to the right place and was able to see a tiny sign. She clarified with me that there were people holding him. I said there were but I thought he might well do it again if they let him go. All this while people were standing rooted to the spot. A few were on their phones but it seemed to be to friends. I really couldn't tell. None of them seemed to be aware I was calling the cops. I can't remember what she asked that prompted me to respond at one point that he basically just seemed terribly upset and needed some looking after. I still felt really silly and apologised for wasting their time if they'd received other calls about this. She said "No, no," and really sounded like she meant it. "The police are on their way," she told me after a surprisingly short time, "and an ambulance, too, just in case."

She asked me if I wanted a reference number. I told her I couldn't write it down but if it was short I could try and memorise it. I think I have! She asked for my name, but no further details. She thanked me for calling and we hung up.

I longed to yell across to the struggling guys that I had called for help but I knew my feeble, shaking voice wouldn't get to them and it would hardly impress the guy they were holding. I was contemplating finding my way to that platform but it proved unnecessary: within a wonderfully short time several policemen arrived. Slowly they seemed to be taking over the holding down, and doing some talking. The guy stayed on the floor. I couldn't make out what the police were saying but at one point one asked, "And have you taken anything with that?" I noticed a girl had her arm around him - did she know him? I got the impression nobody else did. At one point the police told people brusquely to move away, apparently including the folks who'd held him down. But in general it was all very politely executed.

It had to be ten or fifteen minutes since I'd seen the two men on the rails - of course it's so hard to tell - but it did occur to me that no trains had come, though mine had been due for a long time. Although I hadn't seen any staff, they must have been stopped. I was sort of loathe to get onto mine when it did arrive. I wanted to stay and see what happened. But it wasn't as if anything I did, or knew about, would help him now. Calling the police had been in my hands: now everything was out of them. I went home.

* * *

I was shaking a lot as I got onto the train and sat between people who had no idea what had happened. It seemed very odd that none of the dozens of folks watching had exchanged any communication. I guess it was because it wouldn't have helped. What was passing through the minds of those who hadn't pinned the guy down, hadn't called 999? Had they been appalled at the thought of him dying or was it just something to watch? Had they seen me call 999 and did they think I was doing the right thing? It didn't matter, of course. It's just that . . . well, this hadn't seemed how people are, usually. The number of times someone's spontaneously helped me drag a suitcase upstairs, or even spotted me looking lost and come to see where I was going. Or just happily begun a chat. Yes, in London.

I walked home fast, as always. It was still cold, but my own shaking had I think warmed me up. This kind of thing lets loose all kinds of emotions. I wanted to call my parents, but as they're doctors and saving lives is routine to them, I was afraid they wouldn't be impressed. I hoped that guy would be taken to hospital and get what he needed. And, of course, I wondered what the hell he'd gone through.

He must have been out of his mind to do something so publicly. Did that mean it was just attention-seeking (a cry for help), or that he was so far gone that he wasn't thinking, or that he honestly didn't think anyone would stop him? Four years ago, during that teaching course, I had three detailed suicide plans and all of them involved ensuring I was alone and, if anybody turned up, they wouldn't have time to stop me.

I certainly didn't begin this blog expecting that I would reveal anything so personal, but what the heck - once something's public anyone trying to use it against me would look bloody silly. (And if you are for example an employer who'd turn me down for a job because I've once felt suicidal, I don't want to work for you anyway.) Suicide does happen, it does affect people, and there is no point in not talking about it.

At the time, it seemed that nothing was within my control, and it was only going to get worse. I was far away from home with no real friends anywhere remotely near me, and no time to contact those who mattered. There were so many documents being demanded of me that were intrusive and personal and gave people with power too many more weapons. The reasons I wanted to teach were just the things the teaching profession seemed to wish to attack - in fact my very self as well as my dreams seemed to be their target. That and really obvious bullying, such as criticising me loudly in front of the pupils, teachers and teaching students, or the technicians keeping me waiting for 45 minutes and, while I was still standing there, greeting the other student enthusiastically and helping her immediately when she came in without an appointment. And a teacher, knowing this had happened, charging me with booking equipment that he knew I knew the technicians would refuse to provide. I reported all this and was told "oh, how sad" by the course director. My mentor and his colleagues blamed me, informing me that either this had not happened or that it was my fault it had, and upped their vigilance and destructive criticism of my teaching. I knew that nothing I did would make them pass me - that everything I did I would have to write about and that they would state that it was a failure. In short, I was dependent entirely on the judgment of other people. Home was no respite; I was sharing a very cold grubby house with a girl who among other things almost constantly played music so loud that my body and furniture shook, and screamed her head off if I asked her to turn it down. I was the only person on the course without a car and a nice place to live, and one of only two without a family or partner living in the same house being a constant support. No rest, no control, no hope, no alliance, and a weird sort of grief - that's not a combination you can easily solve.

It's a pretty basic feeling, desperation, and a pretty basic factor that stopped me. I wrote a goodbye letter to my family - at which point I saw my mother's face with an expression of knowing what I was going to do. I couldn't do it. Simple as that. In fact, I decided if I was willing to destroy my own life, I might just as well cripple myself financially, so I moved house. That did improve things. It only delayed the inevitable as far as the teaching went - but it was very uplifting to realise how very easy it was to make a major change.

There was a massive shift in my thinking. I realised this a year later when I finally found a sympathetic doctor. He asked me if I was suicidal. I said no, and meant it, but mentioned that I had been a year previously. He asked me what I would do and I told him. It occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea then (I had moved back home by then) what I would do. If I ask myself now, I have no idea.

If you're feeling like that, it does end. And no, you're not the only one. I have read of, and been told of and confided in, too many similar situations to feel that posting this is somehow going to expose me as a freak. There are so many hopeless situations, so much cowardice and bullying, so many power games in this world. And of course there are so many other reasons other people have for feeling like that; I doubt my case is remotely unique, but nor do I think it a descriptor for other people.

It does pass.

I wonder what happened to that guy. I worried all the way home that he would do the same thing again tomorrow. Can he be helped? Do we have the resources to do so? Will the right people be in the right place at the right time? Can he make a drastic change to his life - is he in a position to do it? I don't know. I would love to know if he's OK but I guess I'll never find out.

Suicide has been much in the news lately - this is written not long after the death of Gary Speed. Comments on Facebook and other such treasure troves of wisdom ask: "How could he have been so ungrateful? He had a family, didn't he realise he had any responsibility to them?" A frequent response, which is probably true, is that he was no longer in a position to think in that rational way - perhaps he felt, if anything, that they'd be better off without him. Prior to 1961, suicide was illegal - a book I read in my early teens, "Tell Alice" I think it was called, included a family which had lived in permanent shame because a daughter had attempted it.

Stigma and shame solve absolutely nothing. Same with disability and mental illness. Making an act shameful will not prevent someone from falling victim to circumstances that will make them carry out that act - and stigma and shame includes responses such as "he was irresponsible to do that to his family". Yes, a person in full happiness and control would be, but the very point is that that person has lost such happiness and control and needs to get that back before such things can be expected of them. This page sums it up perfectly: the unbearableness has outweighed the ability to cope.

At this point I know I'm treading on very thin ground, being utterly inexpert in such matters, and I don't want to go and put out any misinformation or distress anyone for no good reason. So I won't attempt to analyse any further.

The other thing that prompted me to write this honest and soul-bearing post (although frankly what happened to me could happen to anyone, so it's not even as personal as all that) is the deluge of positive and honest reactions I got on Twitter when, still shaking, I got home and shared this story.

Several sent me virtual hugs and sympathy for having seen something so awful. A few sent me blogposts linking to their and their friends' stories, about how someone's suicide or attempted suicide had affected them, and what happened - they were frightening and painful, but life-affirming: we are all people, most of us care very much about each other, including complete strangers. So many congratulated me for calling 999, which was a little embarrassing as the heroes in the story were surely the blokes who reacted so fast and held him and particularly the one who got down on the tracks. So many expressed sorrow and empathy for the man who wanted to die. And so very many told me, publicly and privately, that I was right to bring up suicide and that it affects so many people and should be talked about more. It chokes me up just how many people have come closer, much closer, to ending their lives than I did.

If you are feeling that way, or you know someone who is, please take other options first. Talk to someone about it, contact an organisation. Don't worry about wasting their time. Don't think your needs are less than others who call them. They're there for you as well as for other people. If you feel guilty, just acknowledge that you do.

These are a list of organisations I've come across, heard of, been sent - please add to them in the comments if you wish.

Metanoia - "If you are thinking about suicide, read this first"

The Samaritans - you can phone them, write to them or walk in

Mind - information for families and friends as well as individuals

Suicide Forum

NHS Choices has a range of phone numbers and websites, including some listed here. They also suggest seeing your GP. Other places suggest going to Accident and Emergency.

The Calm Zone, specifically this page

And, if it's already too late, Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide

And a bit more lighthearted, Questionable Content. Yes, really. This arc in the story starts here (five pages earlier) and Jeph Jacques, the author, recommends an American site, Suidology.

I've decided to edit this paragraph as I felt so bad about it. I initially was terrified someone suicidal might come to me for help and I would need a miracle to save them, so would fail. (After I did my First Aid course I was warned that if I tried to help someone I might make a mistake and be sued. That sort of thing.) But whatever I wrote looked like I was saying "Sorry, but whatever you feel, I can't help." I then came across this list of things you can do if you get a suicidal call and none of them require a miracle - they're all quite simple. I recommend a read - it contains good news for both parties: that the important things are talking and listening. It's surprisingly simple to ask for help, and it's surprisingly simple to give it!

If my distressing evening and my witnessing what that man did leads to one person reading this who will pick up the phone when they need help, then that's all I can possibly want. Back to astronomy at some point - honest!

Space's Explosive Candles

This blog post is an adaptation from this Object of the Day, which is an adaptation from my course at Queen Mary. Here will go back a lot further into the history of the violent events in space that prove vital to astronomy: the standard candle.

A hundred or so years ago, a computer went every weekday to Harvard College Observatory's plate stacks, and compared plate after plate of glass. That computer was a determinedly selfless lady named Henrietta Leavitt; "computer" was the job title of one who analysed astronomers' results, from plates to notebooks to calculations. "Plates" in this case were sheets of glass onto which projections from telescopes had been collected by a light-sensitive silver nitrate solution, capturing the patterns of stars. This meant both greater accuracy in measurements, and a permanent record. (Today, Harvard College Observatory holds thousands, although obviously they are no longer used for observing.)

A "positive" and "negative" plate could be taken of any sky area - white stars or black stars - and laid upon each other. These average out - if the two plates are exactly the same. But if anything has changed in that area of the sky, the object in question will leap out, starkly black or white against the grey.

In fact, this is pretty much the same technique as Ice Hunters uses; more on that in this post from June.

Women were not at that time permitted to use the telescopes themselves. However, as she worked - at first, without pay - on the thousands of plates, Leavitt spotted many variable stars. (Variable stars are stars that change in brightness; they had been objects of interest for some time, but regarded with as something amateurs rather than professionals studied.) The discovery she made that earned her a nomination for the Nobel Prize - but only three years after she died, by someone who was not aware that she was dead - was Cepheid variable stars, a type of star whose brightness rises and falls in direct correlation with its mass.

Stellar mass is directly proportional to its luminosity, and as light's intensity falls in direct proportion to its distance - the inverse square law - it is possible to tell how far away a star is. There are three factors, and if you know two, you can deduce the third. There's a brilliant explanation here at Hyperphysics about how the inverse square law of light (and gravity) works:

Leavitt did not know exactly how far away each Cepheid was, but she had a very useful sample to study: those in the Magellanic Clouds.

The Magellanic Clouds, so named for a Portuguese explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, who used them to navigate while sailing around Africa, are a couple of nice little dwarf irregular galaxies in the southern hemisphere. Leavitt did not know the distance to these, but did realise that they were far enough away that she could treat all the Cepheids in them as being effectively the same distance away.

This APOD shows the Magellanic Clouds over the Very Large Array during a lunar eclipse. The link will show you a map of what everything is in the sky.

Extrapolating her results led to a bombshell. As telescopes improved, Edwin Hubble was able to spot Cepheids in the Andromeda galaxy, and calculate their distance. Andromeda was completely separate from the Milky Way. Harlow Shapley, who while showing that Earth was not at the centre of the Galaxy was nonetheless convinced that our Galaxy was the only one, was shattered when he heard. He thrust Hubble's letter to him at his young colleague Cecilia Payne, saying, "Here is the letter that has destroyed my universe."

It turned out that there are several subclasses of Cepheid variables - and not knowing this led Hubble to wildly overestimate how fast the galaxies are receding from each other. Nineteenth century geologists, biologists and physicists had rocked the world by showing, through geology and evolution, and radioactive decay, that the Earth was over four billion years old rather than a few thousand as religious history taught; and Hubble's figures suggested that the Universe was only two billion years old!

Henrietta Leavitt had started a new way of looking at the Universe: she revealed the first set of standard candles. It was Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky who discovered the next sort: supernovae.

Zwicky and Baade were close colleagues in the 1930s, but at the advent of the Second World War, some scientific friendships fell apart (the most famous being that of Heisenberg and Bohr) and theirs was one of them. But they both made outstanding contributions. Zwicky predicted gravitational lensing and dark matter, and Baade identified Population I and Population II stars, which taught us a lot about galaxies. But they had time to separate the already known novae from the much more impressive supernovae, and to predict the neutron star - the complete collapse of an object that had reached the Chandrasekhar Limit.

Chandrasekhar, known as Chandra, had predicted a strange but inevitable law of white dwarfs. A white dwarf is what is left of a star once it has burned all the hydrogen fuel in its core (the hydrogen at the edges is too far away and too cold), and it has stopped shining - though it will remain extremely hot for billions of years. However, should this white dwarf have a mass more than 1.4 solar masses (a solar mass is the mass of the Sun - about 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg, if you care) its gravity will be stronger than that of the repulsion between electrons which basically gives everything its solidity. This idea was not widely accepted, and he could not predict what would happen. Baade and Zwicky, with more observations and probably more knowledge of nuclear physics under their belts, predicted that protons and electrons would fuse into neutrons. This gives off a staggering quantity of energy, and because electron orbits make up virtually all the volume of an atom, the white dwarf shrinks to a tiny, unimaginably dense object only about 20km across.

A neutron star is what is left after a supernova. (Supernova 1987A, on whose rings the Galaxy Zoo logo is based, has confused astronomers by not so far appearing to have left one.) As with Cepheids, there are different types of supernovae. The most important difference is type I and type II. Both basically involve the collapse of the star's core. (Stars don't automatically collapse when their cores are over the Chandrasekhar limit because of the furious heat of nuclear fusion maintaining an outward pressure.) Type II is the explosion of a star between nine and and up to fifty times heavier than the Sun.

A type II supernova still has an outer layer. A type I supernova does not. These are divided into the subclasses of type Ia, Ib and Ic. Type Ia is the collapse of a white dwarf that has accumulated more material since the star's outer layers were puffed off into space. Types Ib and c are the core collapse of a star, making them more similar to a type II explosion, but their outer layers do not contain hydrogen. Type Ia supernovae have a very special property: the transition from white dwarf to neutron star always happens at precisely the same mass - 1.4 Suns, the Chandrasekhar limit.

And because they are of the same mass, the explosions are of exactly the same brightness. Therefore, they are an ideal standard candle. And because they can outshine entire galaxies, these candles can be seen billions of light years away.

It was examining those that are fairly far away that led to the Nobel prize winning discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe. By "far away" I mean with a redshift of under 1, so not exactly at the edge of the observable Universe: far enough to get a really large scale of what is going on, but not so very far that we're looking back at ancient history. Near enough to give a picture of modern times. Naturally that discovery is still being questioned, but the papers (Perlmutter et al and Riess et al) were extremely thorough - indeed, thorough enough to be held up as examples worth learning from, as well as critiquing, as part of my course!

What they found was that the supernovae were fainter than we would expect. And because this is, basically, a local effect - though one over huge scales - it means that expansion is going faster than we thought it is. We know that inflation, unfathomably rapid expansion, took place when the Universe was less than a second old. But we had been assuming the Universe's expansion was slowing down ever since - like a ball thrown up into the air, ready to hover for a moment, and then crash through the greenhouse windows or into a paddling pool or similar.

It turns out the ball has a booster rocket, which is dark energy. The density of dark energy never changes - but, as the volume of of the Universe is ever increasing, the density of matter decreases all the time. There isn't much dark energy about per given volume. But there's more all the time. And we found all this out through standard candles.

Just how standard is a standard candle? Science is never as straightforward as would be convenient - though that only contrives to make it even more interesting!

Not all Type Ia supernovae are made quite the same way - or, to put it in more scientific terms, they may have different progenitors. A white dwarf may start off as under 1.4 solar masses, but accumulate enough material to pass that limit. There are two ways it can do this, and both ways are through starting off as a binary star system. Its companion may still be a star, and it may drag off its outer layers. Or its companion may also be a white dwarf, and they might merge.

(It used to be predicted every so often in astronomy that a star might grow by passing through a nebula, but in practice nebulae are far too rarefied for this to be more than negligible - and the star's stellar wind drives off surrounding gas anyway. Also, two white dwarves merging will not make a type Ia supernova if the both their masses add up to less than the Chandrasekhar limit. If that happens, if they have enough hydrogen, they will become a star again!)

This little theoretical paper predicts that the "single degenerate" supernova - the star plus whit dwarf - will explode in the direction of the host star, and contain hydrogen from the star in its spectrum; while the "double degenerate" supernova - the two white dwarves - will have a different shape and contain no hydrogen. (They are called "degenerate" because the term "electron degeneracy" refers to "degenerate matter", i.e. matter crushed to a point where it only stops being a neutron star because of the electrons holding it apart.) It predicts, in the latter scenario, that the lighter white dwarf will break up and form a ring around the heavier - like Saturn's rings - and the resulting explosion, when it occurs, "may be expected to be axially symmetric, but predominantly of the form m = 2. That is, there is an additional reflective symmetry about the equator. Here the character of the explosion changes monotonically as the viewing angle moves from the pole to the equator." (I think I know roughly what that means, but I'm not quite sure how to describe it! Also, we do not yet know whether or not that paper's predictions are correct. Science will, hopefully, find out.)

It also depends on what the white dwarf is made of, as pointed out by Robert Gagliano, who is one of the major posters on Supernova Zoo. Even if the explosions have roughly the same characteristics, their spectra will not, for white dwarfs may be made of carbon, sometimes oxygen, and may or may not also contain hydrogen and helium, which may or may not be ionised - all these affect the spectrum.

Finally, and to me the most interesting point of all: as this paper points out, although there aren't necessarily two distinct types of Type Ia supernovae - there is more a continuum (like galaxy shape, really) - it is established that spiral galaxies tend to host brighter supernovae than elliptical galaxies. This paper, from zookeeperKevin, points out that it is correlated with a galaxy's starforming rate. One of Galaxy Zoo's great finds was about galaxies and colour. "Roses are red, spirals are blue, or at least so we thought until Galaxy Zoo": spirals tend to live alone, where there is plenty of free cold gas, and therefore are blue with star formation. Ellipticals tend to live in clusters, where there is no free cold gas, and are therefore "red and dead". I've written more about this here. The exciting exceptions are blue ellipticals and red spirals. What, I would like to know, are their supernovae like?

A normal red elliptical, normal blue spiral, less normal blue elliptical, and less normal red spiral, taken from the Galaxy Zoo Forum.

Now, if all that fried your brain, go and soak it in the music of a Supernova Sonata, or read Alice Allen adapting William Blake to the supernova.

Cults, laws, and free speech

Cardiff Skeptics in the Pub turned a year old on 20th September. The day before - it also being a Monday - we held its birthday party, with crisps, cakes, balloons and two very special guests: David Allen Green and John Dixon to revisit #Stupidscientology.

Thank you @wmjohn for this photo. Are there any more?

It was a good time to be all insane and swoony over the astonishing fact that our baby group had launched a whole year ago - that had been a pretty good day too. Thanks to all the speakers who've been so far: Simon Perry, Ash Pryce, Andrew Holding, Simon Singh, Hayley Stevens, Deborah Hyde, Jon Ronson, Trystan Swale, James Onen, obviously David and John, Rhys Morgan who's every so often had another news snippet for us, and the great comedy cast of July, whose names for which my memory is embarrassingly incomplete. And the people who've helped with lifts and chair stacking and spreading the word, generally being enthusiastic and supportive, and the audience for keeping us going, and the lady who brought along some profiteroles!

Appreciation expressed, to I hope the smiles of those receiving it and not too much boredom from everyone else (Skeptics leaders love it when you visited one of their events!) - we visited the subject that had got John famous. It may look like an idiotic piece of red tape, political correctness gone mad etc on the surface, but the implications were surprisingly sinister.

David has written a brilliantly detailed blog post about it here; I recommend a read. In short, John, in between tweets about what he was up to in London, had tweeted that he was hurrying past a Church of Scientology so the stupid didn't rub off. A while later, a scientology Twitter account began following him. Well over six months after this, someone complained to the council about the tweet, mentioning, I might add, that they thought there might have been two other tweets they objected to but they could now no longer find them on Google. It was a great many months more before his fellow councillors could make the decision what to do. In the end, they did not take it to court, though John gave us the impression that he might rather have enjoyed himself if they had.

John defended himself with great humour and sense: someone having attempted to make him look a bigot, he was able to raise awareness of quite a lot of unsavoury information (links provided by me, not him) about the Church of Scientology that made "stupid" look like the kindest possible description. You might enjoy this video of him standing up to Kirsty Wark, and being much politer than she was in her attempt to make him appear rude. David's knowledge of law gave him expertise in tackling this issue of free speech defense versus "bigotry" accusation, with weapons I would never have thought of - for example, in his criticism of the document by the Ombudsman, he did not mention the author, because "you can't defame a document". John actually skyrocketed to fame whilst in a tedious two-hour meeting. His mobile was switched off, and he had no knowledge that David had brought the case to the country's awareness. When he switched it on, he had 700-odd new followers and umpteen tweets and voicemails waiting for him.

This is of course far from the first time David has got involved with an issue like this. Not scientology, but a case where the law is being treated as a weapon, rather than a means to get justice.

"The Church of Scientology has as much right as anyone else to assert and protect their ultimate legal rights," he writes. "But it is misconceived and illiberal for litigation (or the threat of litigation) to be used by itself as a weapon."

L. Ron Hubbard, who founded Scientology, is quoted as saying:

"The purpose of the [law] suit is to harass and discourage rather than win. The law can be used very easily to harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway, well knowing that he is not authorized, will generally be sufficient to cause professional decease. If possible, of course, ruin him utterly."

In other words, the point is not winning or losing. As Simon Singh found out, even if you win, you have lost thousands, sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands, and years of your life. Very few people in their right mind would take that on if there was any way out. The way out is to back down, to apologise, to retract all your statements, to make out that the individual or organisation suing you has nothing to be ashamed of - and your peers will self-censor their own work, too.

I had something like this happen to me 11 years ago, albeit on a much smaller scale. A boss in whose employment I had been extremely unhappy (the guy I describe at the end of this post, if you're interested) took it upon himself to tell the company treasurer I had said I didn't want to be paid for my last two weeks of employment at his firm - at least, that is what she told me when I telephoned to enquire. When I wrote to the firm to challenge this, I was fobbed off for 3 months (the 3 months in which an employee must begin an industrial tribunal), then suddenly accused of theft on the grounds that I had sent an e-mail to a friend with verbal permission. I was informed that there were 4 logged occasions on which I had been forbidden to use the Internet, and that two other employees had wasted four man-hours searching for any viruses I might have allowed into the company's computers, time I was being charged for.

The charges were blatantly ridiculous, since other employees had routinely used e-mails and often sent them to me, one of my duties was using the Internet, the boss was famous for never logging anything or even being able to use a computer, and he had even claimed that each man-hour cost the company £65 after I had spent the best part of a year daily logging man-hours which were £45. And, as Acas told him, it is illegal to deduct pay from an employee under such circumstances; you have to bring a case against them first. If anyone tried this nonsense on me now, I would laugh in their face. But I was only eighteen, I was extremely poorly, I was inexperienced, and I had spent months being bullied and humiliated by him and had had about as much as I could stand. Now obliged to fight for myself when I was least able to do so, I went to the Citizens Advice Bureau (now being cut all over the place), and although I did not win any compensation I was given back most - not all - of the money I was owed. But it took five months, by which time my sickness had become long-term. He never did drop his threat of suing me. My sickness and the worry that he might do it went on to ruin university for me and whenever I start any new employment I still have an undercurrent of alarm that something like this might happen again. Frankly, if I could have foregone my lost wages and allowed the wrong thing to happen, in exchange for having my health and confidence back, I know which I'd have chosen.

(I would love to name the individual and company that did this - and I bet I'm not their only victim - but sadly, I do not dare do so . . .)

The mere threat of litigation is a massive weapon. For me it was merely "civil action", minor but bad enough. For someone like Simon Singh, or Hardeep Singh, or anyone who someone with as much money as Hubbard had to use the law as a weapon as much as he pleased, the consequences could be much, much worse.

The law, there in principle to do a good and essential thing, can also ruin the innocent. That's why I admire David. He dedicates huge amounts of time and energy, often free, to fighting against that, and defending those to whom it happens.

But that's not the only way the law can be used for personal benefit rather than as it is intended.

A few days ago, Steve Jobs lost his battle with cancer. I've never been able to afford any kind of Apple product, but the effect they've had has really changed things - there's an app for Galaxy Zoo, for instance. The Curious Astronomer and the mother of a special needs child whose life was transformed by Apple have written about that. Sadly, certain people affiliated with Westboro Baptist Church were not so graceful.

This piece of utterly hateful loser-ness circulated the Internet quite a lot shortly after Steve Jobs's death. (She then claimed that God created the iPhone purely so she could insult its founder . . .)

Even though I didn't know much about Steve Jobs, and I'm certainly not an uncritical fan of Apple, I exploded with indignation when I read this. Death hurts. How can anyone use the occasion of someone's death to pick on their relatives? As I've just described, to be kicked when down makes you feel desperate. Why do Jobs's relatives deserve to be made to feel desperate when they're saying goodbye, already knowing the world is watching them?

How, I tweeted, was this kind of harrassment even legal?

I was then immediately challenged by someone I hadn't come across before: Donalbaion, a mature student in Physics. He pointed out that I was arguing against free speech. Simple as that. To deny Westboro Baptist Church the right to harrass the grieving was anti-free speech.

Initially, of course, I was even angrier. Honestly, who would be suffering from a deprivation of their rights more: the bullies, who would be told "No you can't upset these people", or, say, someone who might have to hold a funeral in secret (and therefore deny many others the chance to mourn) if they didn't want to be psychologically attacked? What kind of freedom is it when you can't even have a funeral in peace?

But of course, anger alone isn't much of an argument. What would be the consequence if Westboro Baptist Church was not allowed to exercise its freedom of speech by picking on grieving people?

Donalbaion tweeted me this review of the book "When the Nazis Came to Skokie". In summary: in 1977, Skokie was an area in which a sixth of the residents were Holocaust survivors and their near families. In this very area, a neo-Nazi group wished to demonstrate. The residents fought against this, citing not only the worry that violence might erupt from the demonstration, but their right to live without intimidation from a group who presumably supported the horrors they'd gone through. But on the other hand, to refuse the neo-Nazis a right to protest would violate freedom of speech. The review concludes: "Strum's book shows that freedom of speech must be defended even when the beneficiaries of that defense are far from admirable individuals."

In other words, once someone (say) took out an injunction against Westboro Baptist Church, who else might lose free speech as a consequence? It could be anyone, for any reason. It's just too dangerous.

But that's not the end of the story. All that agonising over human rights, knowing that people are going to be bullied and degraded - that is, according to this piece of writing, precisely what they want us to do. Go and read it now.

Apparently, this is not about beliefs at all. Whether or not they honestly think God agrees with all their statements about who is going to Hell, their aim is that someone else will get angry enough to try and violate their rights somehow. And then they can sue them.

As "El_Camino_SS" has written:

I saw that he was way too calm and collected for what he looked like in the media. I noticed that he never made personal statements against a person, which is verbal assault, and an out against a lawsuit. Also, for a religious fanatic, a group of people who pride themselves on personal attacks, he was running a protest so terribly by the books that I was impressed by it. He will not bait a person, ever. He will not make personal attacks. He will make blanket statements. He will look at a person in the crowd that he thinks is gay, walk over to his stack of signs, pull out the appropriate, well designed, easily read, laminated bright board, and hold it up and loudly proclaim that "gays are going to hell" or some such nonsense, and make eye contact, but he will never cross the line of telling that person that they're going to hell. That would be the part that would screw up the lawsuit. He just wants to get them after him, but wants to appear utterly blameless for damages.

. . . They run too tight of a ship to slip up, and at that point, I realized that the objective of the group was not anything religious at all.

Assuming the above is true - and here I do not claim to know for sure - this seems to me another misuse of law, and it's even more cynical than the type of misuse about which Skeptics here in the UK have heard so much. It's not even, strictly speaking, misusing the law. It's not using archaic silly laws that are set up to benefit the already rich and powerful. It's using a hallmark of civilisation simply to try and get money out of people.

And frankly, I'm not sure if there's anything we can do. With the first type, we can sign the petition to change the UK's outdated and embarrassing libel laws. With this type? We can't change that law, because that way almost everybody would lose their rights, rather than in the above case, where so many would gain them. After all, a civilised society does not remove its welfare state because a handful of people abuse it. And Donalbaion was right to point out that we cannot put free speech to a majority at risk because a handful of people abuse that.

I suppose, in this case, that if anything can be done, it could be a grassroots, done-by-the-people effect. For example, stronger people are less bothered by banners which display the words "God" and "Hate" in the same breath - so a campaign to give people strength in some way. Perhaps similar banners could be waved, saying something like "Civilised people don't target the grieving" - using the Phelps' tactics of blanket statements and never coming across as personal. Just showing solidarity. Bringing a society to a point where it no longer cares. Of course, you good folks in the States may already be doing that; I honestly don't know. My post is about law and free speech, not about any particular church.

And there are things that to some extent make up for the worst. For instance, according to that journalist's post, at least the grieving cannot be verbally attacked, and that these folks only stay for a maximum of 30 minutes. And, more importantly, they are a tiny minority. Take a peep at this Apple store in Chicago (photo taken by Arfon from the Zooniverse). We may not all be Steve Jobs, but if your rights have been violated, in most cases in civilised countries it will only be a few people who've done it, rather than an entire society. Often, most people are on your side.

Astrophysics, here I come

Whew! I'm here!

"Here" is London, the city I was born in and still think of as home. Through a friend of a friend I've found some lovely lodgings just outside the North Circular and am getting used to cooking for one again. All of a sudden there are things going on all around me. There are kids playing with remote controlled cars in the streets, there are buses and trains for which I seldom have to wait more than one or two minutes, there are endless food shops, there is shouting and laughter, there are beautiful parks, there are such a huge variety of people, there are all these friends I can meet without travelling for hours. And there is Queen Mary University and a course which, so far, looks as if it's going to be the course of my dreams.

Over the years of running the Galaxy Zoo forum and getting more and more interested in astronomy, I became increasingly aware of the gaps in my knowledge - the more I knew, the more I found there was to know for which knew I needed some training. Absorbing facts is one thing, but mathematics and computer code and the language I call "journalese" (in other words, the very dry style in which scientific papers are written) is quite another. My knowledge contained some of the gorgeous constructions of science, but without the nuts and bolts to hold them together or build on them. The trouble was that neither my undergraduate degree in Environmental Sciences nor my attempt at teaching had been any encouragement to study any more. I had long stopped thinking of myself as academically minded. So I had thrust the idea into the back of my mind and it stayed there for years, until one tedious morning driving to a pretty useless course I was on for work when the idea of doing a masters in astrophysics suddenly popped into my head like a massive bright gold light being switched on.

At work later that day I snuck onto Google and by that evening I knew which course I wanted to do: this one. There weren't very many others, to be honest (at least not without also doing an undergraduate degree), but this seemed both the friendliest and the best tailoured to what I wanted. I began filling out the form, but procrastinated, worried about money and unable to get hold of one of the referees I had in mind. Then it was off to Boston for the 218th AAS Conference and that was it.

That conference was one of the happiest times of my life. I was invited into what turned out to be a waterfall of astrophysics, flooding me from all sides. Everywhere I went there was more. And miraculously, I found I actually understood a lot of it. Not a large percentage. But I did begin to notice that what I wasn't understanding was the jargon, the mathematics, the acronyms. The concepts themselves were fine. And many astronomers didn't understand the acronyms either: astronomers were specialists, so a cosmologist for example might be bemused by the many Kepler reports on extrasolar planets - and they were quite happy to tell me so. Even more encouragingly, several astronomers wanted to talk to me at their work, and were quite happy to explain things to me in detail. Since I was writing an article for the Astronomy Now magazine, and because the older I get the less self-conscious I become, I never worried about putting my hand up in seminars or press conferences to ask questions. And the upshot of that was that I heard the same thing from umpteen genuine scientists: "Where do you study?" and upon hearing that I was not a student, "Oh, you must do a PhD! Your questions are really good - you've obviously got a great aptitude for this subject!"

(It's really hard work, not aptitude, but we are often reminded that the former is what really makes the difference. For instance, I also used to be one of the worst public speakers I know. I just curled up and mumbled. Seriously. Now, due to repeatedly bludgeoning myself with the task, public speaking is one of the things I'm best at. In fact this was one way I reasoned myself into going ahead and applying: if you can run the Galaxy Zoo Forum, co-found Cardiff Skeptics and learn public speaking, I told myself, you can conquer mathematics. We'll see in the next few weeks if I was right . . .)

This autumn, I'm studying Cosmology and Research Methods. The latter is quite a new course and there is some worry that it seems "soft" and is somewhat hard to teach. It's actually incredibly valuable - everything anyone studying science needs, everything I wish I'd been told as an undergraduate, everything you need to know if you want to back up some claim you've made (or debunk someone else's). The material we are reading for it is also anything but "soft"! Next term will be Astrophysical Plasmas, and Extrasolar Planets and Astrophysical Disks, both of which sound pretty mysterious! Next year will be the Galaxy, the Solar System, Stellar Structure and Evolution, and Electromagnetic Radiation in Astrophysics - these are all more familiar to me and I can't wait to take them, but since it will also be my dissertation that year, I'm glad to be getting the difficult things out of the way now.

It's a part-time course because for one thing I want to go slowly and for another and MSc course is expensive, as is living in London. So I'm also looking for a job. If you happen to know of any science or science communication related jobs, please let me know. Science communication would of course be my ideal, but I realise I can't be choosy! As well as astronomy I have some background in Environmental Science and Chemistry, plus teaching English and Science, plus other supervisory roles, plus an awful lot of admin. Oh, and some experience of working with vulnerable people - which has been the subject of a lot of my outraged-at-injustice posts the last year or so. Oh, and I'm a very good proofreader and editor. (This is not a post in which I'm going to bother to be modest.)

I'm hoping to get myself together and get blogging more; it's been a topsy-turvy year and I haven't done much for some time. Meanwhile, because I owe so much to Galaxy Zoo for getting me into astrophysics, and because it's so much more fun to feel as if I'm doing the course for hundreds of other people as well as me, and because it'll make sure I myself keep up to date, I'm writing about what I'm learning here on the Galaxy Zoo Forum. Please come along to ask questions and join the lively discussions it's prompting!

Apologies, also, for not writing an Ada Lovelace Day post. Today is Ada Lovelace Day, in which we celebrate women in science, and women who have influenced us. Can I make the excuse that I've been busy starting off on what might one day make me, myself, a female scientist? (I don't know if I will aim to do that or not yet. Let's just say that it looks a lot more possible than it used to.) Carolyn Porco recently tweeted a list of inventions you probably didn't know were made by women, and I also want to make a tribute to Wangari Maathai, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who died a few days ago. Her loss to the world is great: she has done amazing things for women, for politics and for the environment; you can read more about her at the Green Belt Movement.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day, and may neither men nor women ever be put off from learning!