December 2011

Features

View to the north

Earlier this month, I heard of the sad loss of ‘Geordie’. He will be missed along North Road and I am left with fond memories of him wheeling fishing paraphernalia past the house, pipe in mouth. No longer will we smell the fragrant tobacco that lingered behind him. He has patrolled the fields and marshes for as long as I can remember and he had many tales of their secrets. . .

Although it is the end of November, it has been remarkably mild. The reeds on the marsh have redenned, but lily pads are still unfurling in the pond. Yesterday, I saw a red admiral butterfly in the garden and several ladybirds are still flying around. At the beginning of the month, a few swallows were still here, the latest in the year that I have seen them over the fields. Earlier in the year, I planted a crab apple tree. This was in the hope of attracting waxwings, which a neighbour has seen on his tree, but a charming bird that I have only seen in pictures. The berries are now ready for harvesting, but the resident blackbirds have found them and I am not sure if they will still be on the tree when the waxwings make it down from the north. Although there have been barnacle geese on the fields, they have only been there on a few days. Normally they would be present every day. On several occasions, they have been accompanied by four red-breasted geese. The pair of brent geese have departed from the Boating Lake, which still only contains a puddle of water. I have seen the occasional teal, but no sign of wigeon yet.

Along with the mild weather, there have been some very strong winds and the beach levels to the north of the Pier are the highest that I have seen them for several years. The high seas have also brought in lots of seaweed, which is strewn on the beach. The turnstones continue to amuse me as they dart amongst the rocks and pebbles.

I wish my readers a very merry Christmas and a happy and healthy New Year. Please let me know of anything that you would like me to concentrate on in my articles.

Halcyon

halcyon@southwold-northroad.com

www.southwold-northroad.com

The 69th in our series of articles specially written for The Organ by astrophysicist Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson.

The accelerating universe

This year, the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to two Americans and an Australian for the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. They did this by studying a particular kind of supernova in distant galaxies. Type I supernovae are caused when gas from a giant star in a binary system is dumped on a dead, compact, white dwarf star. White dwarfs are the end point of stars like the Sun, a dense core left behind when the outer layers of the star are ejected in the dramatic phenomenon of a planetary nebula. For the Sun, this will not happen for another five billion years or so, so we do have time to finish our cocktails.

The gas dumped on the white dwarf gets very hot and starts a deflagration wave of nuclear reactions that blow the star up. For a few months, the star becomes so bright that it outshines the whole of the rest of the galaxy in which it’s located. The nice thing is that these explosions are all very similar to one another and so we can use the brightness of the event to estimate the distance. Saul Perlmutter, from the University of California at Berkeley, who led the Supernova Cosmology Project team and receives half of the Nobel Prize, devised a strategy in 1988 to monitor hundreds of distant galaxies every month using 4-m telescopes and then following up the few in which a supernova exploded with 10-m telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope to get the redshift of the galaxy. Brian Schmidt of Harvard and the Australian National University started a second team, the High-z Supernova Search team, in 1994, and Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Institute in Baltimore played a leading role in this team. Schmidt and Riess each share the other half of the Nobel Prize.

In 1998, both teams independently found that the most distant supernovae were fainter than expected, so they seemed to be further away than expected if the expansion of the universe were controlled only by gravity. Instead of slowing down, as expected if only gravity were operating, the expansion of the universe is accelerating. The reason for this is not really understood but one suggestion is that the universe is filled with ‘dark energy’, which acts to turn gravity into a repulsive force on large scales.

It’s exciting that the Nobel Prize is being awarded for work on measuring distance in the universe, something that I have always been interested in. In the early 1980s, I spent several years writing a book called The Cosmological Distance Ladder, in which I tried to reconcile different conflicting estimates of the size of the universe. When the supernova teams announced their results, I have to say I was very resistant to the idea of dark energy and wrote a paper suggesting other explanations for their results. However, the teams robustly defended their claims and have now reaped their reward. The Nobel celebrations take place in Stockholm on December 7th-11th and the Nobel Physics Committee have very kindly invited your columnist to attend. More in a future column.

Stars’n Tides now has an e-mail address for you to send comments and queries: starsntides@southwoldorgan.com.

Past Stars’n Tides articles can be found at http://astro.ic.ac.uk/~mrr/starsntides/

© Michael Rowan-Robinson 2011

It's the Wine Talking
by Leslie J Brinton of 'In the Pink' 01986 872579

I was delighted when I read in The Organ that James Bolam and Mrs Bolam would be switching on the Southwold Christmas Lights this year: what an opportunity to unleash all those shrinking cap jokes for a start.

The last (and indeed only) time that I saw James Bolam was in 1990 when he played to perfection the part of journalist Jeffrey Bernard on Shaftesbury Avenue. The play was an uproarious depiction of one night in his life as imagined by Keith Waterhouse when Bernard was locked in for the night at the Coach and Horses pub in Soho – the focus it was said for the incapacities that required so frequently the phrase (and the title of this play) ‘Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell’ to appear in place of his regular column in The Spectator.

Locked in that pub it seemed to Jeffrey Bernard/James Bolam as though all his Christmases had come at once.

For our Christmas drinking, we may have to part company with a bit more of our hard-earned cash than that; for my suggestion, may I just highlight one part of your feasting this year, the smoked salmon nibbles at the start of your Christmas Dinner: the glorious chardonnay from southern Burgundy Domaine de la Bongran 2005, £17.50 from Adnams just oozes buttery flavours and golden cheerfulness . . . and gasps of approval from the assembled company are guaranteed. For those with a fancy for a white wine with the bird as well, this has the body to fit the bill.

For an alternative from the New World (and perversely for a New World wine showing a bit more elegance and subtlety), go for the Cloudy Bay Chardonnay 2008 at £21.99, usually available from Adnams.

I wish all readers of The Organ a Happy Christmas with plenty of good seasonal nourishment accompanied by the finest of wines gently sipped to both please the palate and also to bring back memories of bottles shared in Christmases past with friends and family who are no longer here with us.

Leslie J Brinton

inthepink@southwold.org

So you think you know Southwold?

As noted elsewhere, now is the time of year to curl up with a warm drink and a book in front of a fire. Failing that, why not try and warm your braincells on this quiz?

First up, the answer to last month’s challenge, which I know even had someone who prides themselves on their intimate knowledge of Southwold scratching their head.

So where was that late Victorian detail?

Let Brian provide the solution: ‘This plaque is located on the building next to the Spring Agency in Church Street. It can be seen just under the eaves. The “W P” stands for William Powlditch, who was a Plumber and supplier of gas and water fittings. He built the premises and started his business in the year 1896, as shown on the plaque. I thank Ronnie Waters for this information. He has done splendid research into the old businesses of the town.’

This month, which house in Southwold has these tiles under its first-floor window?

As always, you will be able to see them from the street in the town. The answer will be in next month’s issue.

In the interim, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all readers of this quiz! (And Season’s Greetings to you too Brian, the lynchpin of this operation.)