Live long and prosper

I'm having a bit of a clear out. Eating 5 a day, drinking lots of water. Choosing the better food option when things are available. I eat fresh home cooked food anyway and I've virtually given up on alcohol all together. Small changes.

I even thought about taking more exercise. Until I read this. I'm supposed to do five hours of exercise a week. I'd be happy to take a 30 minute stroll a few times a week, do a bit of gardening and play on my nintendo wii. But this means I need to go mad. It's the single most offputting piece of health advice ever put across. It says if you want to maintain weight you're in for it and forget it if you want to permanently lose weight.

Say I live for another 40 years. This means I need to spend 87 days solid doing exercise. That's a quarter of a year or 0.6 % of my remaining life. I know what you'll say; the benefits far outweigh the effort. I'll live far extra than 87 days, I'll have healthier later years (apart from the hip replacement I'll need from running) and I might even enjoy exercise and feel happier and more energetic. But the thought of pulling on my running shoes on those dark cold winter evenings or coming out of the swimming baths when it's blowing an ice cold gale or jumping out of the car on a sweltering hot day to go back out running makes me depressed.

Profound apologies...

...for the lack of recent content. In four weeks I have to go to Warrington to do three weeks of experiments. As soon as I get back we have a visitor from Japan who is going to do two weeks of difficult experiments with us. So in the next four weeks I have to prepare for all of this. The problems we had with our equipment earlier in the summer have set us back quite a bit and it is a race against time to get things up and running and tested before all the key experiments start.

And after all this I get the Christmas break... followed by a month in Japan doing experiments. Phew!

P.P.S. On top of all this I just got married and we have a reception in the UK coming this weekend which takes a bit of planning.

Electron beam heater

For the past two weeks I've been painstakingly rebuilding an electron beam heater. It's used to heat up materials that you can't pass current through. It works by dumping hot electrons onto the object. This all sounds very fancy but in reality it's just been fiddly. Like threading four needles at once in the dark. With an oncoming wind. Now it's fixed and you can see our material glowing hot in the chamber. We put the samples in the chamber so that we can pump all the air away and keep our samples clean. This particular chamber houses a scanning tunneling microscope, used to produce a topographic map of the electronic envelope surrounding the surface atoms - it takes a 'picture' of the atoms if you like. See my earlier post for an example of what it does.

Academic Literature

Science is a collective effort in which we build on and expand the work of others. One of the most fundamental steps in the scientific process is the literature survey. If a scientist has an idea for an experiment or a theory they go and check all the published scientific work to see if anyone else has tried it. Keeping up with the literature is crucial because it can generate new ideas for work; so-and-so has some evidence for this but they need more proof using a different type of experiment or 'I wonder if they measured this or that'. Having access to the body of scientific journals is, therefore, crucial. In the olden days paper copies of each volume of all the journals would be kept in the library or academics would send off for copies of articles the library didn't have.

Now things have changed. The library here at York is getting rid of a lot of its journal volumes. They don't need the space. York has just had a second huge library built next to the existing one. They claim it is because no one loans the journals out. This is ridiculous. Of course no-one borrows the journals. They just photocopy the one article they need then put it back on the shelf. But why is this a problem? Aren't the journals available online now I hear you ask? No. We only have access to articles from 1995 in some of the main journals. We here in the surface science department only have access to articles in the journal Surface Science from the last 12 years even though there are important articles in that journal from way back. OK we have paper copies in the library but the process of thinning out resources means that for some articles there is no overlap and we have to send away for copies. This used to be free. Now they are to charge £2 per article. That's £2 of public money for a photocopy of a few A4 pages. The upshot of all this is that academics might be tempted to stick with the journals they have easy access to . Hard to obtain articles will only be brought in when the author is certain of their use. Important work or ideas might be ignored or not noticed and the well could dry up.

Targets in Academia

Target driven culture has had negative effects in hospitals, schools, with the police force and most other places. Physics academics are primarily measured by the number of papers they publish and how prestigious the journals in which their articles appear are. One way to play the system is to publish the same piece of work several times. I have seen some research groups take the results of the same research project and publish them with slight differences a year apart. Or even the same work published in two journals at the same time; one short article in a better journal and another lengthier explanatory article in a lesser journal. Surely this does not aid scientific communication and wastes the time of everyone involved?

Away on an experiment

So I've been away from home for the last six weeks doing an experiment (with a week in Germany for a conference, see earlier post). The experiment was done in a room the size of a sports hall and we were sat in a little shed on stilts. Outside the shed was a big ion source that makes a noise like a jumbo jet taking off. The job of the ion source was to make a beam of hydrogen atoms. As these entered the shed we directed them onto a crystal we had made and from the way the ions bounced off the crystal we could work out the crystal structure. All very good in principle but in practice there is a lot of waiting around. A piece of kit so big is ripe for problems. If it wasn't the beam going down it was the detectors not working right (counting atoms that weren't there) and if these two both worked then our crystal preparation recipe hadn't worked. Out of the five weeks in the lab we got about a week and a half where things were good and we worked all day to get as much data as possible. Now I have to analyse the data and see if we got anything good and try and work out if we managed to make anything new and interesting.

Practical joke

Here's a good one. Put a can of shave foam in some liquid nitrogen. After about 30mins take it out and peel off the can. Put the frozen block of shave foam in the back seat of a car before the journey starts. As the foam heats it will expand and fill the whole of the car and scare the driver witless. He he. In many ways I'm quite a small minded person.

Well that's cleared that up then

From Wikipedia;

"A real or complex Hilbert space is a real or complex inner product space that is a complete normed space (Banach space) under the norm defined by the inner product."

Great. Er, what does it mean? Mathematicians are crap at explaining things in laymans terms. This definition is OK if you already understand the thing. Wikipedia should be there to inform everyone and have several layers of explanation; beginner, middle, expert. Mathematicians seem to write in this dense way just to impress other Mathematicians with how succinct they can be.

Germany

I'm back from my conference visit to Dresden in Germany. It was fantastic. We were shown great hospitality and everything ran very smoothly. Dresden airport was closed on the way in but it didn't cause the sort of chaos we would expect in the UK (on the way in and out the UK airports were hell. At Gatwick we were just making a transfer but they made us go out through security and then back in again! Why? We had our fingerprints taken and our shoes were scanned even though we had just come off an internal European flight. Dumb.). In Germany our train journey from Berlin to Dresden was superb. The train arrived on time, there were seats and luggage space, we had air conditioning and best of all the journey was smooth and silent, like floating on air. Why can't the UK get these things right? We had excellent meals for about 10 Euros (£7 or $14). Back in the UK we called into a service station on the motorway and were met with inedible and expensive choices of food. On the way out we spotted a car being broken into by two kids right across from the transport police offices where I spotted several cops sitting having a cup of tea as we drove past. The good thing about travel is it makes you realise how much better things are elsewhere.

News Roundup

Last night the BBC Horizon science programme was fantastic. It was about the Large Hadron Collider, a $6 billion machine built underground to look for the Higgs particle, which is responsible for some particles having mass and others (like light particles) being zero mass. The content was superb, the explanations clear and interesting and the usual overegging of the CG effects was toned down. Great TV. Why don't horizon do programmes like this all the time (see my earlier posts about skyscraper fire safety and what if the dinosaurs were alive today).

I was at the Crucible yesterday to watch a quarter final session of the World Snooker Championships between Shaun Murphy and Matthew Stevens. I saw two century breaks and a comeback from 3-0 down. The BBC has an article up today describing what a visit to the crucible is like. Seeing snooker live is an absolute joy.

If English football fans are attacked tonight in Italy then Italian teams should be evicted from Europe for a few seasons. There is no excuse. AC Milan shouldn't be in the Champions League this season anyway after all the corruption last year. Travelling English fans have been warned not to use the subway, not to speak English in public and not to wear England flags or Man Utd shirts. I do hope the Italian police do their job and that they have some English speakers amongst their number this time. We shall see...

Atoms and surfaces

Think about it; every time you touch something solid you touch the surface. Any time something like light wants to penetrate a material it has to first get past the surface. This picture shows atoms on a surface of silicon. It was taken using a scanning tunneling microscope. This works by putting a sharp metal tip near the surface. A small voltage between the tip and the surface makes a current flow across the tip-surface gap. This current depends very sensitively upon the tip-surface distance. As the tip is moved across the surface it might hit a bump - an atom and the current goes up slightly. By recording where the tip has been and what the current was we can build up a contour map of the atoms on a surface.

We use our STM to look at how materials grow on semiconductor surfaces. This is important because metals grown on semiconductors are found in the little circuit boards in most electronic devices. When electricity passes from the metal to the semiconductor the interface region might have an effect on the current. Knowing how well materials grow on surfaces helps to clarify this. This is just one corner of surface science, whose influence stretches far and wide and whose applications involve multi billion $ industries.

BBC Horizon

The flagship BBC science documentary program Horizon last night broadcast a program about fire safety in skyscrapers.

Enough said.

Life, The Universe and Everything

When you think about it the Universe is a pretty odd place. I mean, here we are, stuck on this rock for no paricular reason completely at the mercy of any passing asteroids or black holes. We have little or no idea how the whole Universe thing is put together or how it works and if there is anything looking in from somewhere else and having a giggle at our stupidity. Chances are that it is all meaningless. This thought loop is so depressing that most people choose not to think about it most of the time and just get on with the being alive part or they make stuff up without proof to make them feel better and give them something to do on a weekend. The being alive part consists of breathing, food, drink, sleep, sex, house, job, car, sport, shopping, TV and pyramid teabags. Instead of getting together and working out how to pass things around evenly so we all have it half good the system is rigged so that some people get rich and powerfull and never have to worry about anything other than how to stay rich and powerfull and most of the rest of the world are just slaves of one form or another. The world gets by and keeps itself busy by having wars and terrorism and arguments over territory like two neighbours coming to blows over the height of a hedge. And the number one reason to fight is over which theory of it all based on no evidence is right which surely proves that we are just slightly smarter than chimps and confirms that it is all just meaningless evolution from some gunk in a puddle with no higher purpose. Still, you've got to laugh.

Girls in Science

There are fewer girls studying Physics than boys. Is this a problem? Everyone seems to think so. Cue lots of silly suggestions like lowering the A-Level grades required of girls for admission to University Physics courses. This issue is very similar to the attempts to increase the number of people from working class backgrounds at Oxbridge. Barriers should be removed but positive discrimination should not occur. It should not be a case of 'it's OK that you went to a poor school and didn't learn much because we are going to let you in anyway because we think that if you went to a good school you would have got great grades in your exams'. Then what is the point of exams if subjective judgements and leftish social ironing are going to overrule them? The same applies to girls in science. Don't positively discriminate. Just remove the barriers. Like the notion that Maths and Physics are boys subjects. And Maths teachers who ignore the girls. Physics and Maths are hard subjects and they require a person with a specific set of skills. If a group of people are not studying the subject then so what? Just because there are few men doing womens studies or sociology doesn't mean that there fundamentally should be.

PhD viva success

In my oral exam today I successfully defended my PhD thesis which means I will be able to start calling myself Dr. as soon as it is formally confirmed. I would like to thank my external examiner Prof. Woodruff and my internal examiner Prof. Godby. Even more so I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my supervisors Steve and Matt and the other members of our group who have helped me so much along the way. Also big thanks to my family and friends for keeping me sane. There is one person who has done the most. During this past year my fiancee Nicola has been my stable foundation and I hope to repay her support over many years of marriage. That sounds like a car loan or something doesn't it... Erm I mean I'm glad I had you around Nic to share my highs and lows.

I can't believe I ate the whole thing

My PhD viva exam is approaching and I'm hard at work preparing. My hair is getting long and I need a shave. At the moment I most resemble Homer in his highschool yearbook. During the exam on Tuesday I get quizzed at length about my work over the last four years. I have to convince the examiners that I wrote the 200 page thesis and that I have a good enough overall knowledge of Physics and my field to merit the qualification. Eek. See you on the other side.

Science on TV

Science is in crisis. University Physics Departments are being closed down. Just today we have a talk in our University Department about how to attract more students to study Physics at University. There could be many reasons for the slump but one factor is the way Science is portrayed in the media.

Take the TV. When I first got interested in Science there were three flagship science programmes. Documentaries were shown regularly and on the schools programmes. On the commercial channels there is now no science. We are just left with Horizon on the BBC. This used to be a good show but it has steadily been dumbed down in recent years with more explosions and CG effects. This series, in an effort to chase ratings, the science has been watered down to the point of being pointless.

The nadir is the episode to go out tonight which will examine what the world would be like if the dinosaurs had survived.

WTF

Cue a pointless excuse to show dinosaur CG effects in a modern setting. I am going to watch this show just because I know I will spend an hour shouting at the TV for being pointless. At least it'll make me react.

Coffee

A new study suggests that a morning coffee will not make a person more alert. The buzz is in getting the hit as the withdrawal symptoms kick in after a nights sleep. Nothing we didn't know already then. I don't drink coffee as a stimulant. I like the rich multi-facetted taste. It's nice and refreshing to drink warm liquid in a morning. It wakes the senses. There is a downside to being a coffee drinker; headaches, 50 calories of sugar and milk at a time and the diuretic effects driving me to the mens room every hour. But I can manage these side effects of my addiction. I won't be mugging anyone to pay for my habit. And my mantra of coffee in the morning and tea in the afternoon means I don't lose sleep. Unless coffee has long term mental effects like cannabis then I'll continue cleaning out my French press pot every morning.

PhD Viva

Three weeks today.

Colours of nature (part 2)

The other major colours you see in nature are green from foliage and blue for water. The sea looks blue because it reflects the sky. Water itself is transparent. Small depths of water look transparent (like a bathfull) but if you look through enough water (like when you are underwater and can see a long way) things look blue because there are so many water molecules that they absorb most of the colours completely. The only colours that can can more than about 20 metres are blue and a bit of green - that's why things underwater seem blue-green. From land the sea looks blue because it reflects the sky. So when the sky is grey the sea looks grey.


Plants are green because they absorb all colours except green. They break up water and carbon dioxide molecules and fit them together to make oxygen and sugars. They do this using a molecule called chlorophyll. If you give a chlorophyll molecule just the right amount of energy it will give you an electron. This 'just right' energy just happens to be the same energy of a blue particle of light. You can also get an electron if you give it a red light particle. This will have a different energy to a blue light particle but it turns out that this energy is also just right to get another electron from a different part of the structure. When chlorophyll has all these electrons loose they get passed around between loads of chlorophyll molecules until eventually they hit water and carbon dioxide molecules and help them to break down and reform into sugars. So blue and red light get absorbed by chlorophyll and green gets scattered back - green particles don't have the right energy to release an electron. That's why plants are green. Not all plants use light to make food. Funghi and mushrooms decompose dead or living tissue to make food. They often grow in fields or woods where little animals die and rot or the leaves and bark from trees rot. They don't need light and are rarely green.