Favourite Places

The finest restaurant venue in London - Gaucho Riverside, Richmond

The Scientist and the Universe III

Here in a dry California valley, outside a small town, a cathedral of light is to be dedicated on Friday. Like the cathedrals of antiquity, it is built on an unrivaled scale with unmatched technology, and it embodies a scientific doctrine that, if confirmed, might lift civilization to new heights.

“Bringing Star Power to Earth” reads a giant banner that was recently unfurled across a building the size of a football stadium.

The $3.5 billion site is known as the National Ignition Facility, or NIF. For more than half a century, physicists have dreamed of creating tiny stars that would inaugurate an era of bold science and cheap energy, and NIF is meant to kindle that blaze.

In theory, the facility’s 192 lasers — made of nearly 60 miles of mirrors and fiber optics, crystals and light amplifiers — will fire as one to pulverize a fleck of hydrogen fuel smaller than a match head. Compressed and heated to temperatures hotter than those of the core of a star, the hydrogen atoms will fuse into helium, releasing bursts of thermonuclear energy.

In February, NIF fired its 192 beams into its target chamber for the first time, and it now has the world’s most powerful laser, as well as the largest optical instrument ever built. But raising its energies still further to the point of ignition could take a year or more of experimentation and might, officials concede, prove daunting and perhaps impossible.

NIF is to fire its lasers for 30 years.

A mock capsule of hydrogen fuel is all of two millimeters wide, or less than a tenth of an inch.

'When it heats up, it blows in at a million miles an hour, moving that way for about five-billionths of a second. It gets to about the diameter of your hair. When it gets that small, that fast, you hit temperatures where it can start fusing — around 100 million degrees centigrade, or 180 million degrees Fahrenheit.'

The individual beams, he said, have to hit “within a few trillionths of a second” of one another if the fuel is to burn, and be pointed at the target with a precision “within half the diameter of your hair.”

The holy of holies is the room surrounding the target chamber. It looked like an engine room out of a science-fiction starship. The beam lines — now welters of silvery metal filled with giant crystals that shifted the concentrated light to higher frequencies — converged on the chamber’s blue wall. Its surface was dotted with silvery portholes where complex sensors could be placed to evaluate the tiny blasts.

“Of course it is,” he said. Taking on big projects that challenge the imagination “is who we are as a species.”

Extract from the IHT

The Scientist and the Universe II

Extracts from a speech made by the then President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, at the official inauguration of the Southern Africa Large Telescope (SALT) November 2005


Even those of us who know nothing about astronomy have awaited this day with great anticipation, feeling, perhaps instinctively, that this giant eye in the Karoo would tell us as yet unknown and exciting things about ourselves.

We have felt our heartbeats quicken as we were told that SALT would have the power to tackle fundamental questions about the Universe, such as:
* what was the universe like when the first stars and galaxies were forming?
* what kind of worlds orbits other suns?
* how are the stars in nearby galaxies different from those in the solar neighbourhood?
* what can these stars tells us about the scale and age of the universe?
* how do quasars and gamma rays outshine trillions of stars like the sun?

This observatory is a place dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. Its sole purpose is the discovery of the unknown, and therefore the further liberation of humanity from blind action informed by superstition that derives from failure to fathom the regularities and imperatives of the infinite natural world.

Hopefully, the daily voyages of discovery into outer space that will be undertaken from this place of scientific inquiry will help millions in our country, our continent and the world to repudiate the fear of knowledge that the Englishman, Thomas Gray, an Old Etonian, sought to celebrate when he said, in his “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”,

To each his sufferings: all are men,
Condemned alike to groan,
The tender for another's pain;
The unfeeling for his own.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.

Out of this place, enveloped by the quiet peace of the Karoo and its starlit skies, must and will come the message that thought is humanity’s stepladder out of Hades - that ignorance is nothing but condemnation to live for eternity in the world inhabited by the souls of the dead.

By communicating to all humanity the evolving and ever-changing truths about the universe, this observatory, empowered by cutting edge science, engineering and technology, and staffed by the most excellent and daring inquiring minds, must help to free us from the seductive grip of the astrologers and the false consciousness that wears the fine apparel of pernicious common sense.

Thus would we gain further mastery over our actions as human beings, as did Edmund, son of the Duke of Gloucester born out of wedlock, when, in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”, repudiating the falsification of the influence of the universe of the stars on his fate, he said:

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune - often the surfeit of our own behaviour - we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whore master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon's tail; and my nativity was under Ursa major; so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardising.”

The great minds gathered here today to inaugurate the Southern Africa Large Telescope have the possibility to peer into ordinarily unimaginable vistas of time and space, to discover what the universe was like, when the first stars and galaxies were forming.

You will therefore not find it difficult to understand our excitement that even as we probe outer space from here, elsewhere in our country, the host of SALT, we also have the possibility to continue investigating what happened on the tiny planet we call the earth, relevant to the formation and evolution of plant, animal and human life as we have come to know them.

Let me illustrate what I am talking about. Fossils of some of the oldest organisms on earth have been found in the Barberton sequence, towards our North East, dated at approximately 3 billion years. In the period before some of the world’s first dinosaurs walked the earth, there was already abundant plant and animal life in the same Karoo basin where SALT stands, leaving behind an unsurpassed record of the ancestry of mammals.

The largest collection of synapsids (mammal-like reptiles) are to be found in the Karoo succession, documenting step by step, over a period of 50 million years, the origin of mammals from primitive reptilian stock.

250 million years ago during the late Permian age, this area consisted of an inland sea surrounded by a vast alluvial plain. At the time, several Mississippi-sized rivers flowed northwards out of a mountain range some 1 000 km to the South. The most common animals living on the flood plains during this period were therapid reptiles, more commonly known as mammal-like reptiles.

Fossils found here and South America has provided evidence to substantiate the hypothesis of continental drift, and therefore the existence in the distant past of the so-called super-continent of Gondwanaland.

Three million years ago, South Africa was also home to a vulnerable new line of primates, the Australopithecines, which eventually gave rise to humans. Adding to the long list of South African hominids, which include fossils of Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus robustus, Homo habilis and Homo sapiens, the oldest identifiable Homo sapiens fossils in the world (dated at approximately 110 000 years) have been found here.

It is on the basis of this vast paleontogical storehouse, supported by additional evidence from elsewhere on our continent, that scientists have come to the firm conclusion that our country is the Cradle of Humanity.

It therefore seemed right, and a perfect expression of the discovered symmetry of the evolution of nature, that this extraordinary construct of the human intellect, the Southern Africa Large Telescope, constructed to probe the formation of our Universe, should be based here, the domicile of so much that represents what constitutes historical and living reality of all life on Planet Earth, itself the product of billions of years of the evolution of the Universe.

To us, as South Africans, it has seemed right that for us as human beings to continue the search for the origins of the infinite beginnings of the universe, we should locate that inquiry, as represented by SALT, in the very geographic space that gave birth to homo sapiens.

We have said this to ourselves knowing that the outward journey of homo sapiens from Africa into the rest of our planet, though resulting in the formation of a diverse human family, has nevertheless never subtracted from the fact that the Cradle of Humanity remains, still, the home of all humanity, as demonstrated by the population inflows since our liberation in 1994.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet was outraged to discover the cold disloyalty of his mother, who would not give even limited time to mourn the death of her husband and Hamlet’s father, the King of Denmark, before entering into an amorous relationship with the King’s brother, Hamlet’s uncle. These goings-on seemed as unnatural as they were unconscionable.

Seeking to escape from this confirmed but painful and unbearable knowledge, Hamlet cried out:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.

The scientific journey on which we will embark from today onwards at this Large Telescope will take us far beyond a world that presents itself as an unweeded garden that grows to seed, populated by things rank and gross in nature.

It will not give birth to images that suggest that the uses of the universe are but weary, stale, flat and unprofitable.

Surely, this new journey will speak of a world made exciting by the rapid progression away from everything that is weary, stale, flat and unprofitable in human knowledge, the lifting of the dark and menacing shadows of ignorance and prejudice about the origin of the universe, that circumscribe our very ability to eat, live and think.

With thanks to Philip Wetton (who has endowed the Chair of Astrophysics at Oxford) for pointing me to this speech - as well as describing his visit to CERN

For a view with which Mbeki might disagree, see The Scientist and the Universe

Favourite Places - Westminster Abbey

An organ recital in Westminster Abbey by Alistair Reid, the assistant organist at Coventry Cathedral. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to video it.

Coventry Cathedral - the Sutherland Tapestry

The Sutherland Tapestry and the pipes of the huge Harrison organ. Click the heading for some more photos.

Another visit to Coventry Cathedral, following the induction of Sir Alfred Herbert into Coventry's Walk of Fame. The cathedral yields more with each visit; this time close-ups of the Sutherland tapestry 'Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph' as well as the Beardsley Cross. Sutherland’s work took ten years to design, contains over 900 colours and weighs over one tonne. It was woven by the Frères Pinton at Felletin in France, and at 74 ft high, it was the greatest tapestry in the world when it was first installed.

Coventry's Walk of Fame

Coventry has created a 'Walk of Fame' in Priory Place near the Cathedral where the most famous of those with links to the city (as chosen by the public) are commemorated by plaques set into the pavement.

On Saturday 26th May, Sir Alfred Herbert's plaque was unveiled at a ceremony at which my brother Piers and I represented the family. Click here for Herry's speech.

Sir Alfred's gifts to the city were many, and some are enumerated in the brochure accompanying the first opening of The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum.

Rudyard Kipling's 'If'

Rudyard Kipling

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son.
Rudyard Kipling

How similar this is to these sayings attributed to Mother Teresa

And related to Henry Newbolt's famous poem Vitaï Lampada

Henry James said of him: "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known." In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English language writer to receive the prize, and to date he remains its youngest recipient. Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he declined.

Kipling was born in India. I have always found these lines most moving, knowing the scene well myself. 

Fine Cell Work at the Leathersellers' Hall

Fine Cell Work, the charity that teaches fine needlework to prison inmates and sells their work on their behalf, is holding a Christmas selling exhibition and fund-raising reception at Leathersellers Hall on the 19th of November 2009. After benefiting greatly from the support of the Clothworkers and Drapers Companies at similar occasions in 2007 and 2008, an annual “Livery Company” event is becoming a fixture in the charity’s calendar.

The reception is intended not only to raise revenue for the charity’s expansion of its work to more inmates but also to raise awareness about the current plight of our overcrowded prisons.

Fine Cell Work is a uniquely creative charity established twelve years ago to train prison inmates to do professional embroidery and quilting in the long hours when they are locked in their cells. The charity now employs 340 inmates (eighty percent of them men), many of whom stitch for as long as 40 hours a week. Many send the money they earn back to families or save it for their release.

It is well known that ex-offenders who have some financial resources and have been able to maintain their links with families are less likely to re-offend. One said, “You feel you’re supporting yourself. It’s a comfort to know that. I feel proud I’ve been given something to achieve to get pride and self-respect.”

The inmates’ beautiful cushions, rugs and quilts have sold on three continents and received coverage in more than sixty publications. In 2008 Fine Cell Work sold £177,425 of soft furnishings hand-made in prison, proving that offenders are capable of producing the highest quality work. The inmates received a third of sales and numerous thank-you letters from customers. This is immensely good for their self-esteem and their employability after release.

Designers with and for whom Fine Cell has worked include Nina Campbell, Chester Jones, Allegra Hicks, Nicholas Haslam, John Stefanidis, Melissa Wyndham and many others. Prisoners are currently also working on commissions for quilts for the V & A and a wall hanging for the Jerwood Foundation, not to mention commissions for several livery companies and for English Heritage itself.

Hello

A photo of my PC running Hello in January 2005. Don't you love the pre-iPhone technology and my old Revo - which actually handled my address book better than any stuff today...

I have come late to the realisation that Hello, a free Picasa add-on from Google, is no more. It was for a few short years undoubtedly the best photo and chat-sharing program available, and even now, despite the creation of great programs such as Flickr, it has not been approached - let alone bettered - in power, ease of use or life-enhancing facility.

With Hello one could select any photo (or many) on one's hard disc and with a click, could send it (or many) practically instantaneously to any friend who had downloaded the software, while at the same time carrying on the easiest of chats in a large and secure space alongside. The photos appeared hi-res, and would be automatically downloaded to 'My Pictures/Hello' on the recipient's computer (PC only), obviating the need to save anything. Even the chat was permanently and automatically saved. And if one sent a photo by mistake, it could be recalled. How cool is that?

Delightful touches abounded: if one happened to type 'love', a shower of hearts would fall across the friend's screen.

I don't know for sure, but I think Hello used peer-to-peer technology, as there was almost no lag in transmission and it was totally private.

Nothing as simple, moving and effective has yet been created to take its place. Why on earth has Google discontinued it?

Join the 'Bring Back Hello' Group on Facebook!

Favourite Poetry - La Strada

La Strada

A dollar got you a folding chair in the drafty lecture hall
with a handful of other wretched grad students.

Then the big reels and low-tech chatter of a sixteen-millimeter projector.

La Strada. Rashomon. HMS Potemkin. La Belle e le Béte, before Disney got his hands on it.

And The Bicycle Thief, and for God's sake, La Strada.

You can't find them at the video store anymore. Only the latest G-rated animated pixilated computer-generated prequels.

That's just the way it goes.

Even if you could, you'd see them on DVD, restored, colorized, scratch-free,on a plasma-screen TV.

With your wife, your dog, your degree. You'd get up to answer the phone, check on the baby.

You're just not young enough, or poor enough, or miserable enough anymore to see--really see

Les Enfants du Paradis, or Ikiru, or The 400 Blows. Or, for God's sake, La Strada.

George Bilgere