Dame Jocelyn and the pulsars

“University is for the dissemination of knowledge,” said the Dean of Science at McGill on Tuesday evening. “We don’t keep it in a box.” Therefore members of the general public were invited to a lecture on Tuesday evening by Jocelyn Bell Burnell, former president of the Royal Astronomical Society and a Dame of the British Empire since last June. I was there because our son George is one of the pulsar researchers at this week’s conference and because I was interested in the topic in any case.

What is a pulsar? It’s a distant, dying, neutron star, the size of Montreal Island, but a thousand million million million million tonnes massive, spinning (for example) at eleven revolutions per second, and if you pick up that frequency on a radio telescope it sounds like an old tractor. However, a signal from the fastest pulsar yet discovered has just been observed by someone in the audience (a student at McGill), and that one emits a more definite note: a top E.

Forty years ago this month, Miss Bell was mapping the sky for quasars, while studying at Cambridge University under the direction of Antony Hewish (who incidentally was also in the audience; she referred to him as “Tony”). The students had spent two years constructing their own radio telescope from posts, wires and cables strung out over a field the size of 57 tennis courts. They only had one computer that was used for their interferometer and they had 30 metres of paper print-out to analyse every day. On August 6th, 1967, she noticed a peculiarity along the line drawn which was first assumed to be caused by local interference from a pirate radio station or a faulty piece of equipment. Only after eliminating these possibilities did the scientists dare to conclude that this signal was coming from outer space. Because “it makes one feel better to give something a name”, they jokingly called this source the LGM, Little Green Men, but the lack of a Doppler effect in the signal (which Dame Jocelyn dramatically demonstrated in the lecture hall by swinging a beeping kitchen timer round her head on a long piece of string) led the team to conclude that the pulsations detected must come from a rotating object with a very small diameter and a very big mass, some 200 light years away.

“The physics of these objects is extreme,” she told us. Pulsars are formed from the ultra compression of a massive star with an iron core, like the stars in the Pleiades cluster, which has exploded in a supernova (the Crab Nebula is the after effect of such an explosion) leaving a spinning remnant so dense that it is the equivalent of the six billion people on earth all crammed into a space the size of a thimble. This object has an iron crust and “God knows what in the centre!” as Dame Jocelyn put it. The work required to climb 1cm on such a body is approximately equivalent to the work required to climb Everest, on Earth. The atmosphere on a neutron star is only 2cm thick and its gravity bends light to an angle of 30° over its horizon. A clock (if you could make one!) would be forced to tick twice as slowly here as on Earth, and if you were so foolhardy as to approach the star-remnant you would suffer “spaghettification” of your body which wouldn’t do you any good at all.

How do they know such things? I wonder. They are still speculating about the shape of a pulsar’s magnetic field. It is assumed by some that this would be the same as for Earth, but “there was a big argument about this in our meeting today,” said George.

The weakness of the signal received on earth from a pulsar (about 1800 of which have been discovered so far) was demonstrated by the distribution of thin strips of paper to each member of the audience, on which was written the message:

In picking up this piece of paper, you have used a million times more energy than a radio telescope receives from all known pulsars per year.

Apparently pulsars have planets and are extraordinarily symmetrical, “round to 1mm in 69000 km … and an even rounder one has just been discovered.”

If my notes make no sense you should download the webcast of the lecture, click on the slide show, and listen to what the lecturer really said. She was an excellent speaker who finished her presentation by quoting the poem Planetarium by the feminist American poet, Adrienne Rich.

Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell is a Quaker from Northern Ireland who was educated at the Mount School in York and is now the president of its old scholars’ association. In our basement we happen to have a copy of the Swarthmore Lecture she gave at Aberdeen University in 1989: Broken for Life, which is an exploration of the “role of the person who is not whole,” and an attempt to answer the question, “can the wounded person offer something to the rest of us? Can brokenness be life-giving?” Her conclusion has nothing to do with astrophysics:

…the more we have faced pain the more whole we are, and the more capable we are of suffering and of loving … Through our vulnerability we become channels of comfort and consolation. By our faithfulness in risking ourselves we open barriers and enable God’s grace to flow in the world.

Midsummer night’s dream, New Edinburgh

Another event that took place yesterday, but this one after dark, was the Lumière Festival in the local Park. The children of the neighbourhood were out in force last night, the little (and not so little) girls in fairy costumes with gauzy wings, and nearly all of them carrying lanterns or glow sticks. From the opposite bank of the river the candle-holding lamps that lined the paths through the park could be seen reflected in the water ; interspersed with these, monsters and fantastic edifices were glowing as well as a goblin’s face or two, lit from below and grinning spookily from the bushes. One of the illuminated dragons was emerging from the river like a Loch Ness Monster. Fire-jugglers and oriental dancers performed on the grass to a circle of admirers, uninhibited little children joining in with the dancing, and a crowd also applauded a shadow-puppet show. Our visitors, George (who took the above photograph) and Daniel, walked into the labyrinth of paper bag candle holders laid out on the baseball pitch, but cheated by stepping over the bags when they’d had enough, without having followed the designated paths right the way through. The lady at the entrance told us that this maze was a metaphor for Life. “And people do cheat!” she said.

Flour bombs and a game of cricket

It was volunteer appreciation day at our Flying Club, yesterday, which gave the excuse for plenty of fun.

The target will be a circle 25 metres in diameter located on the airfield. Each aircraft will be supplied with ONE bomb containing ½kg of flour. Each aircraft shall have one pilot and one bombadier. The aircraft shall approach the field from a normal circuit and pass over the field at 500 feet INDICATED (500 ASL) for the bombing run. The pilot is responsible for maintaining a safe regime of flight while the bombadier is responsible for ensuring that the bomb is dropped in such a way as to remain within the confines of Rockcliffe Airport and does not hit aircraft or buildings or people. The bomb that is judged to be closest to the centre of the target will be declared the winner of the competition.

C-FPTN’s door came off quite easily, giving our crew an advantage over other competitors, although in the event our aircraft came third. A spot-landing was the next challenge: Good try, but Joe Scoles flying his tail-dragger was the actual winner.

For the third year running, the afternoon was rounded off with free helpings from Tony’s barbeque and a piece of cake served to the club volunteers and their friends and families, which in our case included our son George and a fellow astro physicist from Australia, Daniel. These two naturally livened up our annual “cricket” match, organised, scored and umpired by Chris, who had to remind Canadian club members of the rules before we began to play.

We did not follow the rules to their full extent and may have been a few cricketers short of a team (team loyalty was a rather vague concept in any case), the wicket so uneven that the (tennis) ball bounced around in an unpredictable manner, but it was a proper game all the same, complete with men and women caught out, stumped and bowled, bails flying into the air, players flying into the air too, though in some cases they landed rather heavily causing at least two injuries, but unlike last year there was no need for anyone to go to hospital this time and no aircraft were hit or damaged. A groundhog popped out of its hole to sit on its haunches and spectate, but perhaps finding the action rather ponderous, didn’t stop to watch the second innings. After a determined battle, the Mugwumpers beat the Dambusters by 23 runs to 18, even though they were the smaller team. Highest scorers were Bill, new to the game, with 12 runs, and George, scoring 9 runs. According to the score sheet I gather I was one of the Dambusters when not taking the photographs; to my shame, I never managed to hit the ball once and was out for a “duck.”

CPT2 to CYRO

The flight home from Killarney airport last Sunday at 6500ft is worth a blog entry to itself. Here are the four pilots planning their route,

part of which took us along the shore of Georgian Bay and its myriad of rocky islands.
After this, we headed across the Algonquin Park, preserved as a wilderness. From the air we could see large tracts of land with no sign of human interference.
The water in the muskeg gleamed with light. No wonder Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven painted scenes from this part of Canada with such enthusiasm.

To Georgian Bay

Last weekend eight of us flew over the Algonquin Park to North Bay and thence to Killarney, in the northeastern corner of Georgian Bay. On the way beyond the western end of Lake Nipissing Chris reported a forest fire we’d spotted, only to see, as we came closer, that fire fighters were already trying to put it out by means of water bombers that circle overhead, release their load of water, then fly to the nearest lake to scoop up some more in their pontoons. We’d seen one of these aircraft being prepared for take-off at North Bay, a Turbo Beaver: .

The scenery on our approach to Killarney airport was spectacular, with white quartzite hills and pink granite islands.

We stayed at the Killarney Bay Inn on the dried-up golf course on the edge of town, a short walk from the “world famous,” Herbert’s Fish and Chips sold at the wharf, the whitefish freshly caught somewhere in Lake Huron. They were worth the wait. In the afternoon we walked to the lighthouse at the entrance to the Killarney Channel—the stretch of water between the village and George Island—and scrambled and sat on the pink rocks there, washing our toes in the waves. On the way back, Jill found the carcase of a baby snake (massasauga rattlesnake?), squashed by a passing vehicle.

The following morning the Bay Inn kindly lent us a van to help transport our luggage back to the airport and let us have the use of it until after lunch, so Don took the opportunity to drive the rest of us a short way up the road (sitting on the plastic crates in the back of the van) to the Municipal Beach, where we could swim in the clear water of the lake. We missed a visit to the Municipal Dump, where bears are said to congregate.

Back down to the main street for a last chance to enjoy the peace and quiet of the place before we took to the air again.

A long winter’s (?) journey

I attended sixteen of the Chamber Music Festival events in total, which sounds excessive until you realise that there are regular patrons of this festival who make a point of going to more than thirty concerts during these two weeks. I’ve heard them boasting about it in the line-ups. Where they find the stamina I can’t imagine.

Chris took half a day off work in order to join me in the audience for this afternoon’s concert at St Andrew’s because attendance at this one was a must: a performance of Schubert’s Winterreise which he and I have now been studying at home for the past four years! In this case the singer was Alexander Dobson and his accompanist Yannick Nézet-Séguin, newly appointed music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic. Their interpretation, that won them a spontaneous standing ovation from a packed church hall after 70 minutes of uninterrupted performance, was absorbingly dramatic. Mr Dobson positively spat out the words of the songs between which there was not a pause; he hardly had time to draw breath between each one. The pianist hardly let the final note of one song die away before launching himself into the next.

The singer certainly looked the part, especially when complaining in Song No. 14 that his sufferings hadn’t yet turned his hair sufficiently grey (Der greise Kopf) or when turning up his eyes to watch the imaginary crow that circles above him waiting for him to die in Song No. 15, though I’m not sure he is quite old enough to sing Im Dorfe with enough understanding (“I have finished with all my dreaming” — “Ich bin zu Ende mit allen Träumen”) to give these words the right emphasis. He sounded at his best, I think, in the angry songs, such as Die Wetterfahne. He interpreted Gute Nacht as an angry song too.

The only snag was that we were having to imagine unmeltable ice and snow on a day when the outdoor temperature was 32 Centigrade and the indoor temperature in that church without air-conditioning possibly even higher. We sat close enough to the performers to see the beads of sweat dripping off their necks.

Quintets for children

Ayorama is an Inuit word, meaning: “So be it, c’est la vie!” The Ayorama wind quintet—flute, oboe, horn, bassoon, clarinet (all members of the National Arts Centre Orchestra)— played to an auditorium full of young children at the Museum of Civilisation, last Wednesday.

Mums and grandmas were already reading stories to their children before the performance began, though one very small child was more interested in the steps up the aisle and the velvety chairs. Would the musicians be able to hold the attention of this audience for a whole hour? I wondered. “Sally, come here!” said an anxious parent, while an excited little girl was saying, “Daddy, look!” (at the lights and music stands on the stage). I was thinking about my own little grandson who for the first time had reached out with a smile to touch my virtual face during our Skype call that day, only to be daunted by the solid glass screen. That was a poignant moment. Wish you were here, Alexander!

The wind players did hold most of the children’s attention, after all. The “narrator” who introduced them, Marjolaine Laroche, who is a double bass player as well as a recent winner of the NAC “Good Ambassador” Award, told the story of a Caribbean spider, How Tiger made Spider build a Web, to the accompaniment of suitably atmospheric music by Stewart Grant. Later came another story, this time in French (which made the anglophone children wriggly because they couldn’t follow it), this one a gripping Italian tale—Giovanni et le vent du nord—again illustrated by Mr Grant’s music. In between these two items the musicians played Mussorgsky’s Ballet of the Chicken in their shells from his Pictures at an Exhibition.

The piece everyone had come to listen to, though, was Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, arranged for this ensemble by the NACO’s 2nd flute player.

Olé!

“This is a sephardic tune,” said the singer, “that we flamenco-ised.” And so began what sounded to me like a Moorish wailing, such as you sometimes hear in Fado, that gradually accelerated into a rhythmic dance. Hands clapped in accompaniment, the guitar strummed furiously, the drummer tapped his drum and the dancing girl, lifting her long skirts above her knees, waved her fingers in the air like strands of seaweed.

Yesterday lunchtime I was a spectator at a performance of El Viento Flamenco, whose members dance, sing and play in a southern Spanish way (composing their own music), the three dancing girls wearing flowers in their hair and the figure hugging dresses with those flouncy skirts. Maral Perk, who according to the website is actually Armenian-Turkish, the one in red satin (see below), has a fine contralto voice as well as being able to dance. The tenor wore a suit and seemed to be suffering from the heat. No matter, he didn’t let it stop him; his voice was positively operatic. The percussionist, who apparently has “extensive experience with African and Cuban drumming, Newfoundland Celtic and Hard Rock kit drumming” could make an instrument out of the box (cajón) he was sitting on as well as beating his (djembe?) drum, and the guitarist joined in by drumming on his seat too, sometimes. One part of the show was all rhythm, no melody at all. They all clapped, drummed, slapped their thighs and stamped out a tattoo with their feet. It is similar to tap-dancing, but so rapid a movement with the heels that the dancer’s whole body visibly vibrates, especially the cheeks. Another item featured a guitar solo, all the other performers standing respectfully still with hands on hips as he played it.

I made a few notes: crescendo effects, fierce defiance, sinuous hips — belly dancing techniques! Twirling skirt, syncopation (first beat missing), jerking shoulders, closed eyes, complex rhythms. Dancer up on toes!

The dancer called Evelyn made two appearances, the first time in a red and black layered dress with long, ballooning sleeves and a black leather bodice, tightly laced, the second time all in black. She mesmerised everyone present (in the plaza on the corner of Bank and Wellington Streets). Towards the end of the show, Maral sang an Edith Piaf song, Emportée par la foule, and the tenor sang again in the Spanish style, but in English:

I’ll not refuse any man who brings flowers to me …
The man who brings me chocolates, his I’ll surely be …
O why has no man ever sung to me …?

Musique profane

This is the French translation of Secular Music, the title given to the performance by musica intima on the evening of July 24th. This is an ensemble (they’d probably be insulted if you called them a “choir”) of twelve professional singers, “self-directed”, i.e. they have no conductor and no accompanist. They rehearse in Vancouver. Each member of the group takes a turn to address their audience from the microphone and one of them began by explaining that the programme was of music from northern countries and by the way, “profane” doesn’t mean what we might think it means. “If you would prefer songs with profanities in them,” he went on, “write and tell us what you’d like to hear us sing in future!

The first item was a setting of a poem by e.e. cummings, the poet who despised capital letters, in very close harmony composed by Eric Whitacre. Then we heard Elgar’s My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land, which I’ve sung myself at one time or another. Not Elgar at his best—I’m afraid the smoochy section about how oft that month we watched the moon sounds rather corny—but that’s what people liked in 1889. Later we heard four of Poulenc’s Huit Chansons Françaises, which I liked very much. The girl who introduced this item told us that Poulenc, who thought of himself primarily as a composer of vocal music, was both “moine” and “voyou” (part monk, part hooligan). These songs were folksy and fun, the individual singers stepping forward to act out the various parts in the stories they told.

The main composer featured at this concert, though, was an Estonian, called Veljo Tormis. Laevas lauldakse, the first piece they sang, was an ancient-and-modern arrangement of a folksong, “Singing aboard Ship”, a girl’s farewell to a conscript. Tormis is interested in preserving the lost languages of the Baltic peoples and his Vepsian Paths are to be sung in Vepsic (a Finno-Ugric dialect!). Again these are traditional songs, arranged “atmospherically”, we were told, with animal noises, spoken words and shouts thrown in. We heard a selection, Kiisu-miisu (about a cat, presumably, full of miaows and purrs) and Vägisi mehele quite a funny one about a mother insisting that her unwilling daughter gets married. The music got more frantic (in a gradual accelerando) and higher pitched with every verse. If you click here you can find it in the list and listen to it, and the other songs, yourselves.