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Today has been the shortest day, and tonight is the longest night, when the sun set in line with the axis of Stonehenge – built nearly five thousand years ago, quite possibly to mark the event. Tomorrow, the sunset will be just a little further north, the day will be longer and the night slightly shorter.
And tonight, as a wonderful bonus, there was a beautiful full moon. God knows what the new year will bring, with Trump and Putin running the world, and the terminal disaster following the European referendum. But whatever happens, there will be a new year, with a summer, whether or not there is anyone left sane (or even alive) on Earth to see it. The solstices and equinoxes will revolve on regardless as they have done for billions of years, with or without us.
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I enjoyed listening to Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell being interviewed by Jim Al-Khalili on The Life Scientific, although sorry that it was dominated by her difficulties as a woman scientist in a man’s world, and her famous – or rather infamous – failure to receive the Nobel Prize.
In the early ‘seventies while at Southampton University, I attended Jocelyn Bell’s lecture on pulsars – which she had discovered just a few years previously while a PhD student at Cambridge. Painstaking attention to detail in the analysis of signals from a radio telescope had found some unidentified ‘fuzz’ which her supervisor, Anthony Hewish, dismissed as artificial and earthly in origin. She persisted, and found other signals, named LGM1, LGM2 etc. (Little Green Men); the signals were quite definitely interstellar, and so regular that they were thought initially to have been artificial. Soon, the signals were identified as emanating from a new type of astronomical object, a rapidly rotating neutron star henceforth known as a Pulsar. Hewish, received the Nobel Prize for the work; Jocelyn Bell did not. Hewish was unrepentant; his justification was something like: he was the captain of the ship, Jocelyn Bell was just the lookout who first saw the uncharted land … It was sad that in a half-an-hour programme, so much time was spent on Jocelyn Bell’s difficulties in academia – she was ragged during lectures at Glasgow University (because she was female), and Jodrell Bank would not take her on as a postgraduate student because Bernard Lovell had decreed: No Women! History though will judge her generously; she will always be known as the person who discovered pulsars – and was denied the Nobel prize for it. She will join the ranks of great women scientists largely ignored in their lifetimes – Henrietta Leavitt who discovered the relationship between luminosity and period in Cepheid Variable stars which enabled Hubble to discover the expansion of the universe and Rosalind Franklin whose X-ray diffraction images enabled Watson and Crick to discover the double helix. It is just possible that anyone who reads this might be aware of a running 'battle' I have had with the Oxford English Dictionary since around February 2017. I have, since that date, been trying to get them to update the entry on 'Inferno' to include its usual meaning and not just the reference to Dante's Inferno: life-imitates-art-hell-and-the-oxford-english-dictionary.html
Well, I am most pleased to say that the December 2018 release of the OED contains, at last, a draft update including the common definition of Inferno. And it has only taken them 22 months... |
AuthorWelcome to the Mirli Books blog written by Peter Maggs Archives
December 2024
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