A New Year’s Resolution

I have a theory that the key to a successfully kept New Year’s Resolution is to aim low.  One New Year many years ago, my husband and I formally resolved to hang up the bathmat after a shower – and we’ve been doing it every since.

Big projects are harder: losing weight, doing more exercise, cutting down the booze, giving up Candy Crush – finishing the book.

The trouble with academic work, particularly the important stuff, which is research and writing, is that it is so huge and amorphous.  All those filing cabinets (real or virtual), all those words to write, all those versions of the same chapter already written – gah!  It needs to be broken down into manageable gobbets.

Walter Stevenson Davidson.Portrait by Ferdinand Mulnier in Mitchell Library, Sydney

So here’s the plan.  As the blogosphere is my witness, I have resolved to spend a minimum of one Pomodoro a day working on my book.

Alan Mathieson Turing: where does the Mathieson come from?

Alan Turing has just received a Royal Pardon – better late than never, I suppose, though I’ve never really understood the point of posthumous pardons. So, in the absence of a proper blog post (it’s Christmas, sorry), here’s the post I wrote about him 18 months ago.

Historians are Past Caring

2012 has been announced as the Alan Turing Year.  Next Saturday, 23 June, marks the 100^th anniversary of the birth of Alan Mathieson Turing.  There have already been various events to mark the anniversary – on radio and television, and there will be a conference on Turing in Manchester this weekend. Turing was a mathematician, a very good one, possibly a genius – but nevertheless, most mathematicians don’t get this kind of celebrity treatment.

Turing’s fame depends on 2 periods of his life:

Firstly, during World War II, he led the team of cryptographers at Bletchley Park who cracked the German Enigma Code, thereby (according to Winston Churchill) shortening the war by 2 years.

Secondly, in 1952, the Manchester police charged him with ‘gross indecency’ for a consensual homosexual act.  He was given the choice of imprisonment, or a series of compulsory injections of oestrogen to cause ‘chemical castration’.  He…

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Kakadu and Sickness Country

There has been a spill of contaminated material at the Ranger uranium mine in Kakadu. It’s still not clear how bad it is (or if it’s the only one) but Energy Resources of Australia (ERA) assures us that no one was injured and no uranium leaked from the site. Who knows? As always, there are many conflicting interests, but everyone will no doubt be on high alert, especially now, during the wet season.

I visited Kakabu in the 1990s, so these photos are nearly 20 years old, but there is – or should be – something timeless about this beautiful place.  But of course the environment is vulnerable.   Nothing stands still, and this is an area already affected by various environmental catastrophes.

Fluidity and the Pitch Drop Experiment

It’s probably not the most important scientific research project to come out of Queensland, but it may well be the most famous.  In 2005 the University of Queensland Physics Department’s ‘pitch drop experiment’ won the Ig Nobel Prize.  According to the 2002 Guinness Book of Records, it is the oldest continuously running scientific experiment in the world.  It has its own YouTube site.

What is the difference between a solid and a liquid?  For most materials, the answer is simple – water is a liquid, ice is a solid – but for some materials, the answer is less straightforward.  Which category does glass fit into, for instance?  It is often thought that it flows very slowly, so that gravity gradually distorts the shape of stained glass windows so that they are discernibly thicker at the bottom.  This seems to be disputed: hand-blown medieval glass panels are distorted, but it may be that cathedral builders very sensibly placed the heaviest, thickest parts of the glass on the lower side of a panel as this would be the more stable arrangement.

In 1927, Professor Thomas Parnell, the first professor of physics at the University of Queensland, set up a demonstration for his students of the way that something apparently solid, pitch, is capable of behaving like a liquid, though a very viscous liquid.  He heated a sample of pitch until it was liquid and poured it into a large glass funnel with a sealed stem.  He waited three years for it to cool and consolidate back to its solid state.  Then, in 1930, he cut the glass stem of the funnel and the pitch began very slowly to flow.