E really does equal MC squared

I don't suppose that many people will spend 100 years or more proving that something I either said or wrote was true. That I suppose is because I was never a patent clerk in some deathly dull small Swiss town in the early 20th century, before technology, when all I had to do for hour after hour was prove some mathematical construct involving three things that I called E, M and C. Three things that had never been thought of much before and the purpose of which could never be used for decades if not centuries. But then again my name is not Albert Einstein.

So instead of inscribing into huge books in the patent office endless patents of new Swiss clocks, or chocolate recipes or yodelling tunes.. or whatever it was Einstein should have been doing at work, this shirker came up with:

The equation — E = mc2 — means "energy equals mass times the speed of light squared." It shows that energy (E) and mass (m) are interchangeable; they are different forms of the same thing.

In a previous post, I mentioned that I gave up science in favour of Latin and classics generally at age 11 so I have not the slightest idea why this is important, revolutionary, or even interesting. But it is, for just this week, yet another group of scientists proved it again. Or rather a part of it anyway.

Here's the full article and it really does make me happy to know that something that was done so long ago simply trying to solve a tricky mental hypothesis, and really on the back of an envelope (maybe addressed to the patent office by some hopeful trying to register a new patent for fruit and nut chocolate) is so relevant today. And... and this is the really amazing part to me... using only the most cutting edge technology and equipment that wasn't even thought about when Einstein originally developed his theory.

'It's been nearly 30 years in the making, but scientists with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) collaboration in the Atacama Desert in Chile have now measured, for the very first time, the unique orbit of a star orbiting the supermassive black hole believed to lie at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The path of the star (known as S2) traces a distinctive rosette-shaped pattern (similar to a spirograph), in keeping with one of the central predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.'

A spirograph. Many planets do have orbits like this.

There's more to it than this of course, but this is the essence of the piece. Relativity has been something that had been doing the rounds for quite a while, but it was Einstein who tied it down.

'When Einstein developed his general theory of relativity, he proposed three classical tests to confirm its validity. One was the deflection of light by the Sun. Since massive objects warp and curve spacetime, light will follow a curved path around massive objects. This prediction was confirmed in 1919 with that year's solar eclipse, thanks to Sir Arthur Eddington's expedition to measure the gravitational deflection of starlight passing near the Sun. The confirmation made headlines around the world, and Einstein became a household name.'

Mercury's orbit... just like a spirograph

This is just wonderful! Well done again... no, yet again, Albert!

Binge Watching

Another thing that being in lockdown provides is the time to binge watch TV shows and box sets. Typically we don't like to watch programmes when they are ongoing as once started we just want to go through the whole thing. We recently did this with Game of Thrones (GOT).

What we have noticed with other long running series is that the best ideas typically come in the first season when the budget is smallest and it is when the networks pick them up for more seasons that the storyline feels like its getting weaker whilst the budget is bigger enabling the writer to come up with more and more fantastic set pieces. GOT falls into this characterisation I think.

More and more as we watch through the seasons, I like to go onto Wikipedia and find out not so much about where the story is going, but more to who the cast are and who the writer is and where it all takes place. For GOT the scenery is simply fantastic and even though it says Northern Ireland, I simply don't believe all those scenes were filmed there. OK I do know that it was filmed in other places too.... but I have been to most of those places and for the life of me cannot remember seeing any of them. Anyway that's a side thing but during this Wikipedia trawl I took a look at the writer (one George R.R. Martin) and discovered he's a sci fi and fantasy writer.

One of my favourite all time books is Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien (same middle initials? coincidence??) and obviously it is a book of its time. Written in the 1940's at the time when Britain was on the verge of losing WWII to Nazi Germany and using Tolkien's harrowing experiences in the trenches of WWI as backdrop. Clearly his writing, whilst superbly eloquent and articulate is coloured by his experiences and the time in which it was written.

Scroll forward to Mr. Martin who is 71 (according to Wikipedia).  That's only a few years older than me so his life influences are pretty much the same as mine, except of course he is American and I am not. That means the Beatles, rock and roll, the A/H bomb, Vietnam, swinging 60's, drugs, feminism amongst other things. Now I haven't read the books which is something I will correct as simply by watching the HBO series, I am amazed how much swearing, basically soft porn and really violent and gory action takes place. The stories have loose similarities but the context is totally different. I am amazed each episode has any story in it at all given the need for multiple sex scenes, ritual dismemberment and generally people standing around swearing their heads off. So I do wonder if that is how the books are written. I'll find out.

I did enjoy the earlier series more than the later ones. In the early ones, the dialogue just cracked along. Every one of the 'hero' men were as a friend of mine describes as being 'strong as horse, dumb as tree' and made clearly massively wrong decisions every step of the way. I am amazed that any survived through 8 series at all. All the women, no actually only most of the women, were far smarter and could easily out think their male counterparts. By the final series I was pretty worn out listening to all of Daenerys Targaryen's ridiculous titles particularly when things came to important moments when she or someone else had to shout out 'you are in the presence of...' and 5 minutes later came to the end. I suppose it did pad out the shows to their full time allotment. And those eyebrows.... don't get me going on that!

The baddies got all the good lines. I did like that however as the series went on and on, the dialogue became more serious and even the baddies' lines ran out of steam and sting. At the start, the most fun characters were Jaime Lannister and his diminutive brother Tyrion but as things wore on, they became far more serious and consequently less entertaining. In reading the Wikipedia entries, I couldn't make out whether Mr. Martin had actually written any of the later series (I know he didn't write the last one) or if it was just the HBO screenwriters talking to him to 'agree where the story line was going'. As an avid reader of Robert Heinlein in the sci fi genre, what made his stories so great was not necessarily the sci fi aspect rather it was the energy that he brought to the writing even when the books went on to very great length. He never let up which is rather in the end what I think happened with GOT.  Anyway, like I said earlier I'll read the first book now.

I'd like to think that left to himself Mr. Martin may have come up with something like this in the later series.

The F Word

Having time on my hands means that I can read much more and as my personal favourite topic were I to be asked onto Mastermind is 'Mindless Trivia', I of course followed an internet string that began with the words 'First Use of the F-word in Recorded Literature'.

Whilst the history is fascinating enough it is what it all portends that made me laugh like I hadn't for many years. And given our present situation in lockdown, what we all need is a darn good belly laugh.  Here's the headline:

"WAN FUKKIT FUNLING" —

500-year-old manuscript contains one of earliest known uses of the “F-word”

The Bannatyne Manuscript is an anthology of some 400 medieval Scottish poems.

Whilst the spelling is not contemporary, the feeling is perfectly encapsulated in those three words which mean.... well, er, this is where it gets tricky for these words came about during a bout of 'Flyting' between two gentlemen by the name of William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy.

Flyting is a poetic genre in Scotland—essentially a poetry slam or rap battle, in which participants exchange creative insults with as much verbal pyrotechnics (doubling and tripling of rhymes, lots of alliteration) as they can muster. (It's a safe bet Shakespeare excelled at this art form.)

Dunbar and Kennedy supposedly faced off for a flyting in the court of James IV of Scotland around 1500, and their exchange was set down for posterity in Bannatyne's manuscript. In the poem, Dunbar makes fun of Kennedy's Highland dialect, for instance, as well as his personal appearance, and he suggests his opponent enjoys sexual intercourse with horses. Kennedy retaliates with attacks on Dunbar's diminutive stature and lack of bowel control, suggesting his rival gets his inspiration from drinking "frogspawn" from the waters of a rural pond. You get the idea.

And then comes the historic moment: an insult containing the phrase "wan fukkit funling," marking the earliest known surviving record of the F-word.

It all sounds wonderful! I wish I had been there but as the manuscript itself was put together when this Mr. Bannatyne was locked down with the plague (rather like as now except that the plague killed somewhere between 30% and 80% of populations that became infected), perhaps not. In any event this brings to mind immediately Monty Python's Oscar Wilde sketch which although really funny also was based (although very loosely) on real events that regularly took place.

Now this is flyting!

Rockers Class of 2019... RIP

Each year I write a short post remembering those rockers who made a musical difference to me that passed away the year before. I am very late this year, I know, but here goes for 2019.

Neil Innes

Neil wasn't a real rocker but has a significant place in my memory because he wrote so many great songs for the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (who can forget Urban Spaceman?), Rutland Weekend Television and of course Monty Python. If you remember the 'Holy Grail' movie, Neil sang the 'Brave Sir Robin' song amongst others. A wonderful story surrounding his time in the Rutles (with Eric Idle of MPFC fame) was when struggling for a musical interlude in a show, they asked George Harrison from the Beatles to come on. He agreed but refused to play his then Number 1 song 'My Sweet Lord' on the show, which ended up in total disarray. Wonderful stuff.

Iain Sutherland

Back in 1971, I went to a day concert at The Oval in South London to see a host of different bands but mainly to see Frank Zappa who had his orchestra with him for that tour. The opening act was a band called Quiver and they were terrific. A year or so later they joined forces with a Scottish duo, the Sutherland Brothers, and I went to see them in Southend at the Queens Hotel, a dark and dingy basement club that always had great music. You never knew if they were open, or who was playing, but you knew if they did it would be on a Sunday night and this night they were open and the Sutherland Brothers and Quiver played. They were tremendous. Their big song wasn't even a big song for them but for Rod Stewart (Sailing), a song I never really liked, but they had tons of other great songs. Great band, great songs.

Ginger Baker

I first heard this maniac drumming I think in 1966 and wondered what the hell was all that noise about. He just kept on going and going and going in all directions at once. Powerful, yup. Melodic, yup. Played with the best group of ALL time, yup. That was Cream, by the way, but he also played in Blind Faith. I saw him first in Southend with a band called the Baker-Gurvitz Army. Lots of silly stories about his previous band Air Force but this one played all the old Cream songs. The band were actually pretty terrible but seeing Ginger was a pleasure all by itself. What a player.

Robert Hunter

It was my brother Jan that got me first to listen to the Grateful Dead. The LP was Live Dead, in retrospect a magnificent record and great intro to the Dead. I wish I realised at the time that even though the songs were 24 minutes long and seemed connected one with the next all through the record, that that was a pretty good thing. Many years later I managed to listen to the show all the way through without having to turn the record over every 20 minutes or so and it was fantastic. Robert wrote the lyrics to most of the tunes the band wrote, mostly with Jerry Garcia but also with the others if they needed it. So Trucking' with Bob Weir and Jerry, Box of Rain with Phil Lesh. Many others too. Great lyrics. So much more than girl meets boy, falls in love, etc. Made the songs sound interesting and also in many cases downright weird. Just what do the lyrics from Dark Star mean --- 'transitive nightfall of diamonds' -- or Box of Rain, or...

Gary Duncan

Before the Monterey Pop Festival brought Jimi Hendrix and The Who to America, US rock bands had a different edge to them. Listen to the older Big Brother and Quicksilver albums and you'll immediately know what I mean. They played and sort of played in a classical manner. Then came Jimi and The 'Oo and everything changed. Among my first introduction to San Francisco music prompted by the Dead and Jefferson Airplane, I found 'Happy Trails', a live album by Quicksilver Messenger Service. What a record. What a band. What great guitarists. Yes John Cipollina of course but also yes Gary Duncan. Great player.

Peter Tork

It was only the really young teeny-boppers that liked the Monkees but OK yes some of us others also liked them but didn't really admit to it. I liked the songs. I thought they were really good, catchy tunes, really nice harmonies, all the rest of it. I didn't care if the actors really didn't do the playing. I still don't know what instrument Peter Tork played. Some episodes had him on keyboards, others some sort of guitar, others still nothing just that goofy grin. Peter Tork was definitely my favourite Monkee.

Others

As the years pass and I acknowledge how old I am, I then have to add on a few years and pretty soon it gets to three score and ten, 70. Lots of the old rockers who are left are comfortably past this landmark. Mention goes out to Larry Wallis of the Pink Fairies (just listen to The Pigs of Uranus, that's him), Larry Taylor of Canned Heat, Ian Gibbons of the original Kinks, Dr. John and Dick Dale, the original surfing guitar guy. Also Peter Fonda of Easy Rider fame which movie brought the world Steppenwolf and many other great classic rock bands of the 70's. RIP all.

Anyway I'll leave the last word to Neil Innes and George Harrison from Rutland Weekend TV.

Time On Your Hands... Lots of It!

I've been humming and hawing about writing about coronavirus but for the life of me cannot think of much to write about that isn't flippant (the entire thing is not funny), sad (why would I want to write about something sad? This is meant to be entertaining... well at least for me anyway), intelligent (I failed Biology O Level 3 times) or on point (see above comment in addition to which I have been trying to follow the politicos online and all seem to waffle a bit and then pass the microphone over to an expert who scares the hell out of me with explanations I don't understand that well). I think I am not alone in this.

So, rather than write about it, I will write about another one of those marvellous things that have no point at all but which I find massively interesting. This time it is about why are there 360 degrees in a circle. I can do maths, so find stuff like this inordinately fascinating.

In school we learn there are 360 degrees in a circle, but where did the 360 come from? When it is pointed out that the Babylonians counted to base-60, rather than base-10 as we do, people often ask if there is a connection. The short answer is no. The longer answer involves Babylonian astronomy.

So it was mostly the Babylonians ... But then also the Greeks.

It also involves calendars and most importantly a phenomenal amount of data gathering. Interesting parallel with you know what today as the experts from today go on all the time about the need for lots more hard data before they can know how to deal with things.

The Babylonians began observing the stars and various constellations around 2000 BC (according to the earliest texts), in the southern city of Uruk referring to a festival for the goddess Inanna so it was probably earlier than that. It all started with Venus being the brightest 'star' (no telescopes so look at the nearest/brightest object in the sky) and pretty soon they figured out that Venus along with the moon and other planets they could see lie on the same great circle, called the ecliptic, which had as its reference point the Sun as seen from Earth during the course of a year.

In order to record all this accurately, they needed a calendar as well as a method of recording positions along the ecliptic.

So calendars. The clever Babylonians figured out that it was the different phases of the moon which formed a rhythm in the life of their (and in fact all ancient) cultures, so that's where they started. Day 1 would be the evening of the first crescent at sundown.

With good visibility, a lunar month lasts 29 or 30 days and by about 500 BC, the Babylonians had discovered a scheme for determining the start of each month.

This used a 19- year cycle: 19 years is almost exactly 235 lunar months and the scheme works on seven long years (of 13 months) and 12 short years (of 12 months). This led to a fixed method of interleaving long and short years, still used today in the Jewish calendar and everything in the Christian year based on the date of Easter.

This phenomenally almost impossible to believe calculation (certainly when you think that our calendar these days is fixed and probably like me, most people wonder why the days of Easter, or Chinese New Year or some other dates change every year, well now you know) were derived by these amazingly clever Babylonians who started to record their observations.

The records that helped them discover this cycle began in the mid-eighth century bc, when Babylonian astronomers wrote nightly observations in what we now call ‘astronomical diaries’. These continue until the end of cuneiform scholarship in the first century ad, yielding eight hundred years of astronomical records: a terrific achievement, far longer than anything in Europe to this day. It facilitated great advances, notably their discovery of the so-called Saros cycles for predicting eclipses. Each one is a cycle of 223 lunar months, perpetuated over a period of more than 1,000 years. There are Saros cycles operating today first seen in the eighth and ninth centuries. They remain the basis for eclipse prediction and appear in detail on the NASA website.

800 years in those days was maybe 30+ generations given an average life span, enough for even the pickiest expert who wants data to prove a theory. Also a phenomenal achievement of relentlessly recording what to many must have seemed to be arcane nonsense but which today has a basis in almost everything that we do.

Once they had the calendar and could see that an annual cycle of life encompassed broadly 12 months, they were on the way but had to move onto problem two: method of recording positions along the ecliptic.

As it happened, the Babylonians seemed to like the organisation of 12 so split the months into smaller units of measurement. Obviously one day is one day but what about the time during the day? Again obviously you have before midday and after midday, so they decided to split both these periods into further units of 12. They also liked 30 as 30 was the usual number of days in a month so they further split up these units of 12 by a further 30 so as to be able to record data in their astronomical diaries more accurately, using fractions.

As for the sky, the firmament, the stars along the eliptical, well that was easy too now. They split the elliptical up into 12 sections:

the ecliptic was divided into 12 equal sections, each split into 30 finer divisions (also called uš), yielding 360 uš in total. For finer accuracy an uš was broken down into 60 divisions. Each of the 12 sections they labelled by a constellation of stars and, when the Greeks took on Babylonian results, they preserved these constellations, but gave them Greek names – Gemini, Cancer and Leo – most of which had the same meanings as in Babylonia.

My sign Pisces

Sadly for them at least, by this time the Babylonians passed into memory and were overtaken by the Greeks who thankfully had similar interests and courtesy of no TV or internet, plenty of time on their hands too. So they developed Geometry single handedly bringing order to many things at the same time as creating a method by which children of the future could legally be tortured (actually I liked geometry and particularly the acronyms by which we remembered various geometrical terms and calculations).

The quadrants of a circle. How we remembered which quadrant at school was ASTC which stands for All, Sine, Tangent, Cosine or in schoolboy parlance All Sausages Turn Cold. Moving one step further into the calculations of the various functions: Sine is opposite/hypotenuse, Cosine is adjacent/hypotenuse, Tangent is opposite/adjacent. This was wonderfully learned as Some Old Hags Can Always Have Their Oats Anytime. I did enjoy Geometry.

As Greek geometry developed, it created the concept of an angle as a magnitude – for example, adding the angles of a triangle yields the same as two right- angles – but in Euclid’s Elements (c.300 BC) there is no unit of measurement apart from the right-angle. Then, in the second century BC, the Greek astronomer Hipparchos of Rhodes began applying geometry to Babylonian astronomy. He needed a method of measuring angles and naturally followed the Babylonian division of the ecliptic into 360 degrees, dividing the circle the same way. So, although angles come from the Greeks, the 360 degrees comes from Babylonian astronomy.

So there you have it. Why 360? Fascinating. Here's the full article.