BRLSI News - January to June 2009

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A sustainable future? It's all in the mind.

Tuesday June 30th: Western economies are experiencing involuntary negative growth (aka recession) at the moment, but should we be abandoning the pursuit of positive growth anyway - and can future generations survive if we don't? It's a measure of the growing awareness of this issue (and the quality of speaker) that on a hot, muggy evening in the Duncan Room a packed audience stayed for over two hours to listen to the Transport and Built Environment Group lecture Prosperity without Growth?, presented by Prof Tim Jackson (right) of Surrey University, and discuss the ideas he raised.

Prof Jackson is well placed to speak on the subject, as he's both Professor of Sustainable Development at Surrey and the chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission's Economics Steering Group. He explained that the potentially life-threatening aspect of economic growth is its coupling with carbon emissions and other environmentally damaging effects, and that relative decoupling - a reduction in grammes of carbon per dollar of economic activity - is outweighed in absolute terms by population growth. On current growth projections the Government's target of an 80% reduction in CO₂ emissions by 2050 would require a reduction in grammes/$ from 768 to (at most) 36. In practice that's impossible to achieve, making fewer dollars of economic activity per head an essential part of any feasible solution.

A packed audience in the sustainably non air-conditioned Duncan Room.

With all that known, why do governments cling to the principle of endless growth? Prof Jackson, who's a government advisor, cited two principal reasons. One is that growth, and its corresponding cycle of 'creative destruction' and renewal (think steam engines to microchips) are essential for stability and survival in economies built around the current capitalist model. The other is us - our deep-seated (Darwinian, even) need to engage in the competitive acquisition of consumer goods, a trait which we're currently passing on to the developing world. No government, least of all elected one, wants to be the first to tell us that we've got to reign in our material aspirations.

The terrible irony is that, as studies repeatedly show, excessive material wealth doesn't bring actual happiness. Meanwhile the sustainable alternatives - reversing the culture of consumerism, investing in human capital rather than spending on capital goods - are known and being practiced by small groups. The challenge is getting everyone to accept them. Prof Jackson's still working on that one.

 

 

New Media exhibition illuminates Darwinian theme

Moroccan Garden #4 (Homage to Paul Klee) by David Lewis-Baker

Art is everywhere, which in Darwinian terms means it must provide a selective advantage to the artist and, quite probably, the audience. This idea will be explored by the BRLSI's Chair of Trustees, Professor Julian Vincent, on Tuesday July 7th in a lecture entitled (appropriately enough) The Selective Advantage of Art. Prof Vincent has a surprisingly (and refreshingly) specific answer to the question of what art's advantage is, and why creating and appreciating it indicates enhanced fitness for survival (and thus potential as a reproductive partner). To find out what it is, come along on 7th July!

Accompanying the lecture (and forming an integral part of the evening) will be the opening of a five-day multimedia exhibition by artist David Lewis-Baker, entitled Patterns in Nature - The Artists's Ancient Mind. This includes five Giclees (fine art prints produced using high-quality ink jet printing) based upon orphic cubist and expressionist abstractions, plus a multiple portrait of the artist and lecturer in the style of the graphic artist M. C. Escher. The exhibition also includes kinetic artworks in the form of videos, with moving sequences which reveal the patterns and forms upon which the Giclee pieces were based.

Starting as a traditional painter in watercolours and acrylics, David Lewis-Baker (pictured left) has in recent years moved entirely to digital 'new media', producing Giclee prints and, recently, kinetic artworks. His love for rich textures, colours and forms give his new media work a distinctly painterly style and finish. His works are in private collections across the globe, and have been used in a wide range of printed publications.

Patterns in Nature - The Artists's Ancient Mind runs from 7th - 11th July in the Duncan Room at the BRLSI. For more of David Lewis-Baker's work, visit www.flickr.com/people/david_lewis_baker_arts/.

Click here to see more images from the exhibition, including a video of kinetic work.

Friday 26th June: We regret to announce the death on June 23rd of Don Lovell, one of the founders of the modern BRLSI and a key figure in its development since the early 1990s. Don, who was 86, died peacefully at home in Bath while reading in his chair.

Among his many contributions to the Institution, Don was Secretary to the Programme Sub-Committee, which organises the BRLSI's lecture series, and editor of the annual volume of Proceedings. He remained actively involved with the BRLSI almost to the end of his life, briefly re-joining the Programme committee last year until ill health made attendance difficult.

A celebration of Don Lovell's life was held at the BRLSI on Sunday 5th July, attended by members of Don's family and many of his friends at the Institution. Click here to see a report.

Bob Draper writes:

Don Lovell was one of those quiet unassuming members who knuckled down and got jobs done without fuss. His background was in materials science, Carbon Fibres in particular, and he edited the Carbon Fibre Directory. He was the founder of the Transport Group at BRLSI, and arranged a very varied programme. One topic especially close to his heart was traffic in the Widcombe district of Bath, and he was an active member of the Widcombe Association, which campaigned to have Claverton St returned to its status as the village shopping street. He worked with Bath University and design consultancy Buro Happold to produce a proposal for doing this, presenting it at the BRLSI in 1998.

One of the more unenviable tasks to which Don committed himself was editing the BRLSI Proceedings, the annual volume of reports, abstracts and transcripts from the Institution's lecture programme. This is a considerable undertaking and he achieved it with quiet calm, gently cajoling copy out of Convenors where necessary. He also chaired the Publicity committee for a while and edited the newsletter. Quite recently he was still helping Betty Suchar with the lunchtime talks by collecting the money. He wished to do more to bring young people into BRSLI. Latterly his visits to BRLSI were accomplished with the aid of an electric buggy. This low-impact mode of transport was somehow appropriate after all the talks and discussions he had organised. We shall miss him greatly.

 

Co-discoverer of the Pulsar to visit BRLSI

BRLSI's Herschel Astronomy Group welcomes a scientist of global stature on Friday July 3rd, when Prof Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell FRS (pictured right), co-discoverer of the Pulsar, will introduce a screening of the Ulster TV documentary A Northern Star, about her life and work in astrophysics.

While a postgraduate student at Cambridge, Bell Burnell helped to construct a radio telescope to study quasars. In 1967 she spotted a 'bit of scruff' moving across the sky, and found that it was pulsing once a second. Later identified as a rapidly rotating neutron star, it became the first known Pulsar. Her supervisor was awarded a joint Nobel Prize for its discovery, amidst controversy over Bell Burnell's omission from the award.

A former President of the Royal Astronomical Society, Prof Bell Burnell was Dean of Science at the University of Bath between 2001 and 2004, and is currently Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and President of the Institute of Physics. As well as introducing A Northern Star, she will answer questions on the topics it raises.

 

 

Dramatic Lecture brings Lunatick Astronomy to BRLSI

BRLSI lectures can be pretty dramatic at times, but this Friday (June 5th) the Herschel Astronomy Group will be hosting the Institution's first formally-billed Dramatic Lecture, as BBC radio personality Andrew Lounds (right) speaks on 'Lunatick Astronomy', complete with costumes, props and music.

The 'Lunaticks' in question were, in fact, some of the late 18th century's most influential scientists and thinkers, who formed the Lunar Society (so called because it met during the full moon) as a forum for discussion and debate. Members included Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin's grandfather), Joseph Priestly, Josiah Wedgwood and steam pioneer James Watt, along with Watt's co-pioneer, the Midlands industrialist Matthew Boulton.

Andrew Lounds, who is also UK Regional Coordinator for The Planetary Society, will tell the story of the Lunar Society’s interests in astronomy - and in particular Boulton's passion for it - based on new research that has revealed some surprising facts. A veteran of lecture tours throughout Britain, the USA and (less obviously) Libya, Andrew promises to deliver his performance 'with 18th century flair'. Lunatick Astronomy starts at 7.30pm and costs £4 (£2 for BRLSI mebers and students) - don't miss it!

Play Boules at BRLSI!

If you've ever wondered why people keep throwing metal balls around in Queen Square, now's your chance to find out. On Tuesday June 2nd the BRLSI's French Culture Group will be holding a Boules demonstration in the Square, with the chance to have a go yourself. The session starts at 7pm, and there'll be wine afterwards. For more details contact BRLSI on 01225 312084 or admin@brlsi.org.

 

Euro-Candidates forum cut short as protesters shield BNP from voters' scrutiny

Friday May 22nd: It's become a tradition for the BRLSI's Economics Group, in conjunction with Unlock Democracy (formerly Charter 88), to hold Candidate Forums before elections, to give candidates a chance to make their case to the voters, and (more importantly) let the voters put their questions to the candidates. The forthcoming European Parliament election was no exception, and with 17 parties standing and politics in turmoil, it was set to be an especially worthwhile exercise.

Then the British National Party (BNP) read about it in the local paper, and insisted that their candidate should be allowed to attend (an offer the BRLSI couldn't refuse, since as a charity it's forbidden from showing any political bias). Opponents of the BNP read about that, and suddenly the forum wasn't about the other 16 parties, Britain's place in Europe or the future of the Lisbon Treaty, but about two groups on the outer fringes of politics, with the BRLSI as the venue for their latest skirmish.

The protest outside the building was peaceful and even quite good-natured (if sometimes fairly vocal), but turned harder as the meeting time approached, with a small group occupying the steps to prevent anyone from getting in. The police called for reinforcements and eventually cleared the steps, but by this time most of the non-protesters (and candidates) had given up and gone, and when the doors did open the few who came through included a significant proportion of BNP supporters who seemed intent on turning the evening into a rally.

The meeting went ahead, but with just four candidates, representing the English Democratic Party, Christian Party, Libertas and the BNP. The BNP candidate went last, with a performance characterised by raised voice, dramatic gesticulations and talk of opening floodgates to immigrants. He seemed particularly upset by the fact that the English Democratic candidate had refused to shake hands with him ("I won't forget it", he promised), and particularly proud that he, himself, had once "shaken hands with a negro". The BNP supporters loved it, but it was hard to believe that many non-committed voters would have been swayed by it - and hard to avoid the sneaking suspicion that the protesters might have furthered their cause more by letting the voters in than by keeping them out.

During the other speeches it was also hard not to reflect on what a valuable event this could have been if more candidates, especially from the mainstream parties, had been there to put their cases (one major party's candidate had, unfortunately, chosen to stand outside with a loudhailer supporting the protest rather than face the electorate inside). Was it a waste of time? On balance yes, but it shouldn't have been, and it was worth trying to give voters a chance to meet the people who want to represent them. Sometimes democracy is tough going.

Euro Candidates line up at BRLSI

The South West England European Parliament constituency includes Gibraltar Graphic:Wikipedia

After recent events in Parliament our elected politicians are under scrutiny as never before, and the European Parliamentary elections on June 4th are being seen as a key indicator of voters' intentions ahead of next year's General Election.

This Friday (May 22nd), the BRLSI's Economics Group, in conjunction with Unlock Democracy (formerly Charter 88), will be giving voters a chance to hear from Euro election candidates in the South West England constituency, and put questions to them about their policies.

BRLSI Economics Group Convenor Rodney Tye said, "In European elections you vote for party lists rather than individual candidates, and we' re hoping that leading candidates from at least nine of the 17 lists in this election will be attending."

Rodney also exlained that it's unusual to see such a large group of candidates in person at the same time, due to the physical size of the constituency. "The South West England constituency stretches all the way to the Scilly Isles and also includes Gibraltar. We're not expecting anyone from the Mediterranean, but we do have candidates travelling up from Devon and Cornwall to represent their parties. This has become a crucial election, for domestic and European politics".

The meeting starts at 7.30pm, with doors open from 7pm. Entrance costs £4, or £2 for BRLSI / Unlock Democracy members (£1 for students).

 

The Transformation Begins...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday 18th May: BRLSI Curator Matt Williams and artist Penny Grist start work on the transformation of the BRLSI's Murch Room into an interactive exhibition entitled Darwin: Colour and Memory (see story below). The exhibition opens this Saturday (23rd May) and runs until Sat 20th June, with a private viewing this Saturday, 23rd June (note new date) from 5.00 - 6.30 pm (all BRLSI members invited).

Soil Association Director to speak on a sustainable food plan for Britain

"Greenlight" is the title of an independent series of environmental debates and discussions which have been held at the BRLSI over the past five years, covering a wide range of green issues. They've had enormous support, with the main Elwin room sometimes so crowded that the organisers have had to pipe the speakers into other rooms. Bath Greenpeace and Bath Friends of the Earth have sponsored the meetings from the beginning, and local companies such as Triodos Bank, Fielden Clegg Bradley and Energy for Sustainable Development have also been sponsors.

The next meeting is about the future of our food supplies. As we approach Peak Oil - the point at which world oil production reaches a maximum and starts to decline, while demand continues to increase - we'll be forced to address a new and urgent problem. Modern agriculture and food distribution use enormous amounts of oil products at all stages, with farm machinery, crop sprays, animal feeds and food distribution all energy-intensive. What will happen when oil production starts to go down and oil prices increase? How will climate change measures affect food production?

Throughout the country new ways of making agriculture local and sustainable are being tried - community supported agriculture, organic farming, permaculture, community orchards, increased allotment use, garden land swaps and organic boxes are all heading in this direction. Patrick Holden CBE (right), as an organic farmer and Director of the Soil Association, is perfectly placed to help us address these problems and help us work out local and lasting solutions. The meeting is on Wednesday 3rd June at 7.30 - get there early for a seat in the Elwin!

Magical display brings Collection to life

From 23rd May to 20th June the BRLSI's Murch Room will be transformed into Darwin: Colour and Memory, an interactive exhibition by artist Penny Grist which will allow children of all ages to reach out and ‘catch’ 19th century illustrations of plant, bird and insect life.

The hands-on experience interprets “Werner’s Nomenclature of Colour” (1821), from the BRLSI's Jenyns library. The book provided a reference for early naturalists including Charles Darwin, who used it to describe the original colour of the specimens he collected, which frequently faded on the long journey back to the UK. Visitors enter a darkened room with the background noise of birdsong. Pools of coloured light are projected onto the grass-like floor and when the visitor steps on the light, images relating to the colour appear, along with related sound.

Penny Grist told us: “I wanted to make an installation that would explore the idea of visual memory and image/word association that is central to this publication. There is no computer screen or interface that separates the work from the visitor, and no visible technology: it works as if by magic, giving the viewer a real sense of discovery.”

The exhibition will be open from 10am to 4pm (excluding Sundays). There will also be a private viewing on Friday 22 May from 5-7pm - all BRLSI members are welcome.

 

 

Due recognition for the Greatest Bathonian

Wednesday 6th May: Take a poll for 'Greatest Bathonian' and you'd probably come up with postal pioneer Ralph Allen, 1980s rock band Tears for Fears and a variety of rugby players. A rather stronger (though less well-known) contender, however, would be Adelard of Bath (1080-1165), sometimes called "England's first scientist", whose accomplishments included bringing the zero to Western Europe (thus allowing us to dabble in mathematics),writing the first book to be printed in England, speaking four languages, tutoring the future Henry II and (perhaps less laudably) helping to devise the tax system.

Getting this major figure of 12th Century England the recogniition he deserves has become a mission for BRLSI member Michael Davis (above). He's started an Adelard Group at the Institution, and for its first meeting gave us an overview of some of the great man's achievements, complete with an online video of students using the abacus (a favourite of Adelard's) and a chance to examine the authentic Adelard costume, including trademark long green cape, which Michael himself wears on suitable occasions as part of his awareness-raising efforts (see picture, left, with BRLSI Trustee Marie-Louise Luxemburg).

The aim of the Adelard of Bath group is to put on lectures, exhibitions and other events covering aspects of Adelard's life and career, with a particular objective of letting the city's young people know about its eminent former resident. Michael's still assembling his team, so if you'd like to get involved contact him via the BRLSI office (admin@brlsi.org or 01225 312084).

 

An Itch for Science?

If all the stuff about Darwin and evolution this year has whetted your appetite for studying science, then you might like to come along to the BRLSI at 5.30pm on Friday 15th May, when tutors from the Open University will be on hand to talk about the science courses offered by the OU, and on studying at the Open University in general. It's all very informal (no need to wear your interview suit!) and entrance is free, so just drop in and have a chat.

Afterwards, Dr Paul Craze of the OU will give a lecture with the intriguing title Twisting by the Gene Pool with Polymorphic Snails. Dr Craze will explain how rapid climate change and the challenges of genetically modified organisms make a return to Darwin's methods of stydying organisms in their natural environment, as opposed to laboratories, imperative. He'll also talk about what we can learn from those 'twisting snails' and other studies, and how we can take part in the widest-ever study of this type. Admission to the lecture, which starts at 7.30pm, costs £4 / £2 students/ BRLSI members.

 

 

Is Technology Darwinian? Not yet...

Friday 1st May: It's not unusual for a speaker to pose a question in the title of their lecture, but less common for them to answer it definitively just ten minutes into the talk. This was, nevertheless, the course taken by the BRLSI's Chair of Trustees, Professor Julian Vincent (pictured right), in his Darwin and Beyond lecture Is Technology Darwinian?

The answer was a firm "No", on the grounds that technology is the result of behaviour rather than the blind process of random mutation. However it should perhaps have been "Not yet", since Prof Vincent went on to describe the way that a new breed of self-replicating, all-purpose manufacturing machines could indeed give technology a life its own.

First he gave us a run-through of the ways that stages in technological development have corresponded to those of evolving biological systems, with examples from car tyres to universal joints. One conclusion was that nature is able to use structure to make materials more versatile, for example using just two polymers for a range of applications that require dozens in the human-engineered equivalents. It's also very good a complex structural hierarchies, with as many in a human hair as in a laptop computer.

But what about those self-replicating, all-purpose machines? This was a subject close to Prof Vincent's heart (and office), since some of the leading work on them is being done by Adrian Bowyer and his colleagues at Bath University. The machine at Bath, called RepRap (Replicating Rapid-prototyper) can 'print in 3D' with plastics to form any object, including those with multiple components, in a single pass - an ability which it's already demonstrated by building a child of itself. What's more you can buy a kit of parts to make your own* for just 500 Euros (after which you won't, of course, need any more kits of parts).

In Julian Vincent's view this might - just might - lead to a world in which every village (or perhaps even house) has its own RepRap machine, churning out whatever manufactured goods are required without the need for large-scale industrialisation or transport infrastructure. And as one of his students in the audience pointed out, variations in manufacturing tolerances meant that mutations could occur, just as they do in nature. Given that the RepRap machine at Bath is named "Darwin", that's a possibility its designers seem to have anticipated.

* See the RepRap Home Page for full details.

 

Picture: Julia Hedgecoe

Dame Gillian Beer to speak at BRLSI

Dame Gillian Beer, the eminent writer and critic, will be speaking at the BRLSI on Wednesday May 20th, as part of the Institution's year-long Darwin and Beyond season. In her lecture, entitled Early Reactions to Darwin - Satire, Scandal and Poetry, Prof Beer will explore why so many of Charles Darwin's ideas scandalised his contemporaries, and how they responded variously with disgust, wit and satire.

Gillian Beer was King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University, and the chair of the judges for the Booker Prize in 1997. An authority on Victorian literature, she is the author of the highly regarded work of criticism Darwin's Plots, in which she focuses on how writers including George Eliot, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hardy responded to Darwin’s discoveries and to his innovations in scientific language. As she says, "sometimes Darwin's ideas were turned in directions he would never recognize and certainly hadn't foreseen."

Advance tickets to Dame Gillian Beer's lecture are available through the Bath Festivals Box Office - click here to book online. For full details of the BRLSI's Darwin and Beyond programme, click here.

 

Darwin and the Victorian Heart of Darkness

Marie-Louise Luxemburg with illustrations of the three Tierra del Fuego natives who
sailed on the Beagle with Darwin.

Tuesday 21st April: The Origin of Species was published just as Britain was reaching the height of its Imperial power, and Darwn's theories of ever-evolving species and ruthless natural selection were co-opted to underpin some ruthlessly Imperialistic attitudes to "lesser" races and social groups, at home as well as abroad. That was the theme of author and BRLSI Trustee Marie-Louise Luxemburg's lecture The Descent Of Man - Darwin's Shadow On The Victorian Imagination, in which she chronicled the change in attitude towards "savage" races in the latter half of the 19th Century, and the growing fear that the human species could degenerate as easily as it had developed.

Her story began with three natives of Tierra del Fuego who had been brought to England in 1830 by the captain of the Beagle and treated as minor celebrities, even meeting the King and Queen. They returned home on the same ship alongside Charles Darwin, whose observations of them helped to form his idea that "advanced" civilisations might have evolved from simpler ones, not been created, intact, by God. It was this idea of humans evolving like all other species, though only hinted at in the Origin, that caused the most furore following the book's publication in 1859. And it was a mininsterpretation of this idea which gave rise to theories that groups such as the Fuegians (not to mention Jews and the Irish), and the criminal classes of London and elsewhere in the "civilised" world, were less than fully evolved humans or, more worryingly, humans who had degenerated back to a more primitive form.

With copious llustrations, and citing sources as varied as Tennyson (inventor of the phrase "nature red in tooth and claw"), Karl Marx, Thomas Hardy, Florence Nightingale and Oscar Wilde, Marie-Louise Luxemburg showed how doubts and insecurities about our true origins permeated the literature and political thought of the era, as Victorian Britain descended from the optimism of the early century to the curiously dark and uncertain mood that accompanied the peak of its political power. In the 1890s the Fuegians were hunted like vermin to extinction. Ms Luxemburg's last quotation recalled the dying words of Kurtz, the ivory trader who has "gone native'" in the Belgian Congo in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, published in 1899: "The Horror, The Horror". Indeed.

 

Hydrogen, number one - fuel?

Monday 20th April: Hydrogen burns cleanly, emitting no greenhouse gasses, and can be used in high-efficiency fuel cells that generate electicity directly. It's also the third most abundant element on the surface of the Earth. So why aren't we all driving hydrogen-powered cars and running our homes on hydrogen-generated electricity? That's what Dr Tim Mays (right) of Bath University came to explain in his BRLSI World Affairs Group lecture Hydrogen - Number One Element, Number One Fuel.

First he made the rather surprising point that (the ever-distant prospect of nuclear fusion apart) hydrogen isn't, in practice, a fuel at all, but a means of storing and transporting energy. This is because almost all of the Earth's supply is locked up in substances such as water, and extracting it consumes as much energy as the hydrogen yields when burnt.

Add to that the fact that hydrogen has very low natural density so needs extreme compression (or cooling) to store it in spaces small enough for most applications, and that it's dangerous stuff with a tendency to combust spontaneously when it leaks (which it does very easily), and you might wonder why it's worth bothering with.

The answer, as Dr Mays explained, lies in those zero geenhouse gas emissions, plus the fact that, difficult though it (currently) is to store hydrogen, it's still much easier than trying to store electricity. This makes it feasible, for example, to use spare power from wind turbines to extract hydrogen from water, then burn the hydrogen when the wind dies down. There's still work to do though, and storage is where Dr Mays' work as Principal Investigtor for the UK Sustainable Hydrogen Energy Consortium comes in, with research into porous solids that lock high densities of hydrogen in, but release it again with relatively little coaxing.

It was, perhaps, not the message everyone wanted to hear - hydrogen as a way of storing energy from wind and wave farms rather than as a clean, limitless fuel that would make them unnecessary. Nevertheless, with climate change becoming a genuine, here-and-now crisis, it could be a planet-saver. There was also a disappointingly familiar message on funding - just £35 million in the UK (barely enough to bale out a branch of Northern Rock), although apparently China's taking it a bit more seriously. We may all have to soon.

Bath Poetry Cafe moves to BRLSI

Friday 17th April: The BRLSI's position as Bath's leading poetry venue was reinforced as Bath Poetry Cafe, an independent group supported by the Arts Council and B&NES, held its first meeting at the Institution. The group, which previously met at the Mission Theatre in Avon St, is aimed at poets who are either in print or aspiring to be. Organiser Sue Boyle told us "We're very much focussed on poetry as a printed form. The cafe provides a safe space where writers can present their page-poetry to readers and other writers, as part of their creative development." Sue stressed that the Cafe isn't an open mic session; "Poets new to the Cafe submit work by e-mail, so that we can maintain quality and assemble a varied programme for each evening", she told us. She also added that the BRLSI "couldn't have been more helpful" in assisting the Cafe's move to Queen Square (well, we try our best...).

From left: Paul Feldwick, Jimmy Lowther (who also edits literary magazine De Facto), Wayne Hill (B&NES).

The format certainly seems to work well. The Cafe was, literally, a cafe one minute, complete with coffee, wine and cake, then quickly switched to silent attention as Last Dance, Jimmy Lowther's long poem about lost life and love, was read by Paul Feldwick, himself a Cafe Poet. Paul's also Chairman of the Bath Minerva Choir, and his strong (and very sensitive) delivery explained why Jimmy, who was also present, had chosen to hand over the reading of his work. The audience, meanwhile, were able to follow the poem on text sheets provided by B&NES, and author and reader held a Q&A session afterwards.

With 14 items on the evening's programme, there was plenty to hear, read and think about. Bath Poetry Cafe's next meeting is on Wednesday 20th May at 7.30pm (at the BRLSI, of course). BRLSI also has two in-house Poetry series; the Poetry Group, with (mainly) evening meetings, and the lunchtime Uni-verse International Poetry series. For details of all meetings (including the Poetry Cafe) see our What's On page.

 

Mayor and Mayoress of Bath welcome BRLSI group to the Guildhall.

The Mayor of Bath, Cllr Tim Ball, gives BRLSI volunteers and staff a lively history of Bath and its Mayoral office.

Friday 17th April: The Mayor and Mayoress of Bath welcomed a group of BRLSI volunteers and staff to a reception in the Mayor's Parlour at the Guildhall, in recognition of the Institution's work in the city. Standing among some of the city's accumulated civic treasures (including the 'new' maces, a mere 300 years old), the Mayor, Cllr Tim Ball, gave the visitors a lively account of the history of Bath and its Mayoral office, including the real reason why Queen Victoria only came here once, the real-life Dickensian character (Mr Pickwick, landlord of the Saracen's Head) whose name appears on the roll-call of past Mayors - and what Mayoresses keep in the urn in the corner (answer - spare pairs of tights).

On a more serious note, the Mayor thanked the BRLSI, and in particular its many volunteers, for their contribution to the educational and cultural life of Bath. In return the BRLSI presented the Mayor with a CD containing photographs from the ever-growing list of visits he's made to the Institution during his term of office. The attendees, who represented all areas of the BRLSI's activities, then signed the vistitors' book and admired the special page signed by The Queen during her jubilee visit in 2002.

Also on display was the book of Mayor's Long Service awards, given to people who have worked for 40 years at a local employer. This was a familiar sight to one BRLSI visitor, House Manager Bob Draper MBE, who recently received his award (shown above right) for his 40 years service at Bath University.

Natural Selection - by search engine.

Tuesday 7th April. When a second distinguished speaker in less than a week mentions Internet search engines in the context of evolution, it's a sign that Google and Co are becoming established as part of the landscape of evolutionary theory. Last Thursday (see below) Prof Simon Conway Morris compared evolution itself to a search engine, seeking out a relatively few viable biological developments. Tonight it was the turn of one of the BRLSI's most popular speakers, Prof Susan Blackmore (right), who saw the search engines themselves as key players in a new evolutionary process.

In a BRLSI Philosophy Group lecture entitled Darwin''s Memes: Evolution in the Cosmos, Prof Blackmore reminded us of the concept of memes, defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene as ideas that propagate through the human population like genes, mutating as they go with their survival determined by natural selection. Famous for her entertaining and interactive presentation style, she had a member of the audience create a new meme on the spot (not one, it must be said, which stood a strong chance of survival) then got everyone else to replicate it, with varying degrees of random mutation.

An audience member creates a new meme on the spot.

This, she told us, was how all human ideas began and were propagated; even language, that defining characteristic of homo sapiens, began as a parasitic meme that spread itself among the population. It wasn't a comfortable time for those of religious belief, as religion was portrayed as a meme whose protagonists were especially adept at using 'meme tricks' (in this case a judicious mixture of promise and threat) to ensure maximum distribution, especially among the young. But then it wasn't a comfortable time for civil engineers either, as they were told that we hadn't built our road networks - they had built themselves, using us to do the physical work.

It was all designed to provoke thought, of course (which it certainly did). But where did the search engines come into it? Here Prof Blackmore confessed to being on new ground. To her the Internet, with its myriad chat rooms, forums, blogs and social networking sites, and the people, mainly young, who spent large chunks of their lives feeding it, were creating something beyond memes - what she called 'temes', or technology memes, ideas which took on a life of their own in cyberspace. She still wasn't sure whether they really were different, or just memes benefitting from a super-efficient distribution system; what was certain, however, was that search engines provided the most powerful mechanism of natural selection ever created. Get onto Google's top results page, and you've evolved.

 

Evolution - the ultimate search engine.

Prof Simon Conway Morris: "Evolution is a search engine"

Thursday 2nd April. The conventional view of evolution sees it adding ever more branches to the tree of life in a random process that has no predictable outcome except the survival of whatever happens to fit its surroundings best. Simon Conway Morris FRS (right), Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at Cambridge University, has a slightly, though significantly, different view, and the biggest audience of the Darwin & Beyond season so far crammed into the Elwin Room to hear him explain it, in a lecture entitled After Darwin: Where Is Evolution Going? jointly presented by Bath Geological Society and the BRLSI.

Prof Conway Morris's theme was convergence, the phenomenon in which multiple species independently evolve the same characteristics, including some fairly important ones such as the eye (evolved seven times at the last count). This leads him to counter the "but for chance" theory that says, for example, that an earlier extinction of a particular early Cambrian organism would have cut short the evolutionary chain that eventually led to humans, erasing us from history.

Instead he suggests that perhaps there is "deeper organisational set of rules" which define a relatively small set of viable developments, and that evolution is actually the process of searching for them, albeit in fairly (although perhaps not totally) random way. So if one ancestor of Homo Sapiens had failed to evolve another would have led to us instead, because we're one of the outcomes that evolution is pre-ordained to find.

It was challenging stuff, especially for 'true' Darwinians, but helped along by the biggest dose of humour seen in a formal Darwin lecture so far - the image of 50 waterskiers, allegedly Prof Morris's team heading for a conference in Venice, will stay in the mind for a while. And it kept the audience, on a warm
Spring evening in a rather warmer Elwin room, glued to their seats.

Elizabeth Devon, Chair of Bath Geological Society, with Professor Simon Conway Morris.

Time for Tea-rooms talk on Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Pic - Dave Souza

Iconic Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh first captured the public's imagination through his tearoom interiors for Miss Catherine Cranston in Glasgow. On Tuesday 21 April 2009, leading curator Alison Brown will travel back in time with an insight into exactly what the Glasgow public would have seen when the tearoom doors opened for the first time, at a talk hosted by the Bath Branch of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society.

This illustrated talk will provide an overview of the evolution of Mackintosh's tearoom designs at Ingram Street (1900-1912) and will compare these with his earlier contributions to the interiors at Argyle St, the 1911 Great Exhibition and his most luxurious interiors at the Willow Tearooms on Sauchiehall Street (shown above).

Glasgow Museums have also carried out extensive research, conservation and restoration work on the interiors at Ingram Street, and the talk will include details of the work undertaken since 1993 and the new knowledge this work has provided.

The talk, which starts at 7.30pm, will be held at the BRLSI. Tickets are £7, available on the door, and include a glass of wine or soft drink. For more information call 01225 443356 or e-mail crmbath@hotmail.com

 

Linnaeus's Lost Eden

Monday 9th March: It may come as a suprise to non-botanists that botany was considered a slightly risqué subject in the 18th century, with botanical texts often sought out for their unbridled content. Responsible in no small part for this reputation was the Swedish botanist and zooligist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) whose Clavis Systemis Sexualis, with its categorisations of plants as engaging in promiscuity, clandestine marriages and even incestuous coupling, quickly went through 12 editions.

It was with this entertaining (if slightly startling) observation that Dr Staffan Müller-Wille (right), of the University of Exeter, began the first Botany lecture of the BRLSI's Darwin and Beyond season, entitled The Economy of Nature - From Linnaeus to Darwin, Order And Disorder In Nature.

As Dr Müller-Wille quickly pointed out, there was much more to Linnaeus than mere tittilation. Today he's honoured as the scientist who began the process of compiling a global catalogue of species (a project to which Charles Darwin was later to make his own contribution) and perfected the binomial (Genus/Species) naming system. But he's also remembered as a leading advocate of a now largely discounted theory of a neatly ordered and balanced Economy of Nature, in which each species has its place, pre-ordained by the Creator, and is perfectly adapted to an endless, exactly replenishing cycle of birth, life and death.

Linnaeus held on to his idea of a global Garden of Eden until his death, but as Dr Müller-Wille told his audience, it was Darwin's more pessimistic vision of an unstable natural economy, with species' adaptation to a changing environment constantly tested by natural selection, that came to be seen as scientifically valid. Linnaeus's ideas weren't, however, entirely consigned to history - they live on in the science of ecology, and the idea that it might be better to try to achieve a balance with nature rather than exploit it with Darwinian ruthlessness. Darwin was (almost certainly) right, but Linnaeus may still prove to be the key to our species' surival.

 

A poetic vision of Darwin

Wednesday 5th March: BRLSI joined forces with Bath Literary Festival to bring acclaimed scholar and poet Ruth Padel (right), great-great granddaughter of Charles Darwin, to the Elwin Room.

Ms Padel read from her latest book, Darwin, A Life In Poems, in which she interprets aspects of her great-great grandfather's life in verse. From his schooldays in Shrewsbury to his voyage on the Beagle, the (eventual) rush to publish the Origin and the tragedy of his young daughter's death, the poems illustrated the complexities of life for a man who was both a husband and father and responsible for one of the great historic shifts in human understanding. The words, and Ms Padel's effortlessly flowing delivery, held the audience enthralled.

Click here to read Darwin and Beyond Programe Manager Martin Sturge's full report on the event.

 

A musical evening for O'Brian enthusiasts

Monday 2nd March: It's not all cutting-edge evolutionary science at the BRLSI - seen here is the Patrick O'Brian Enthusiasts Group, who meet monthly to discuss Mr O'Brian's novels of 18th century seafaring life. This month was a special treat as BRLSI member Michael Godwin gave an illustrated (audibly as well as visibly) talk on the music in the first four books of the Aubrey/Maturin series.

The series opens at a chamber music concert, and there are encounters with ballads, sea shanties, patriotic songs, plainsong, opera and folk music throughout the novels. In between their many adventures during the Napoleonic wars, Captain Aubrey plays the fiddle and the piano and sings many naval songs; Dr Maturin plays the 'cello, flute and flabiol and knows Irish and Catalan music. Both enjoy opera and the music of 18th Century composers including Corelli, Boccherini and Mozart, and this taste is at the root of their friendship.

The talk was well-attended by a keen crowd of Patrick O'Brian enthusiasts, who asked interesting questions including one on the difficulty of playing musical instruments at sea.

 

Updating the Origin - and the start of the fossil record

Friday 27th February: In a lecture entitled The Imperfection of the Fossil Record - Updating the Origin, Dr Phil Donoghue (right) of Bristol University's Department of Earth Sciences tackled the thorny question of the gaps in the fossil record which, in Darwin’s time, appeared to undermine Darwin’s claim of a continuous ‘tree of life’ linking all current life forms back to the earliest examples.

Dr Donohue began with the news that the gaps in the fossil records have now, indeed, been filled, many of them via the methods Darwin anticipated. However much of today's knowledge comes from other sources, and was discovered using technologies that Darwin couldn't have imagined. Meanwhile recent discoveries, in which Dr Donohue has played a part, have moved the start of the fossil record back by millions of years.

Click here to read the full story on our Darwin and Beyond mini-site.

 

BRLSI audiences swap rooms for a perfect fit

Monday 16th January: At the BRLSI we like to think that our middle name is 'adaptability' (along with 'Royal Literary & Scientific'), and so it proved on one of the rare occasions when two lectures occurred on the same night.

The Philosophy event drew an audience that fitted perfectly into the Duncan Room, while the World Affairs Group's fitted perfectly into the Elwin - the only problem being that each meeting was in the other room. A quick swap later, courtesy of a one-way traffic system devised by House Manager Bob Draper, and everyone fitted perfectly.

Both audiences were rewarded for their efforts with exceptionally high calibre speakers. The World Affairs Group heard Lord Oxburgh (right), former Chairman of Shell and the Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology, talk on World Energy Futures, a subject increasingly close to everyone's heart. He didn't pull any punches - we're in serious trouble unless we dramatically reduce our carbon emissions - but said there were plenty of potential answers to the problem, from improved biofuels that don't use almost as much energy to make as they yield to exotic future technologies such as synthetic photosynthesis. For the medium term though we'll have to keep burning fossils, with Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) an essential accesory to every power station.

Next door the Philosophy Group combined with the Young Thinkers Group to welcome author and broadcaster Dr Julian Baggini (left), who spoke on "Today's Slavery". Dr Baggini (tip - it's pronounced with a soft 'gg') is that comparatively rare breed, a philosopher non-philosophers can understand, and delivered his arguments with the same convincing clarity that Lord Oxburgh was achieving in the Elwin.

'Today's Slavery' turned out to be not about the human trafficking that goes on today and is recognised as such. Instead it was about relative judgements and, in particular, aspects of today's world that we don't consider comparable to slavery but which future generations may judge more harshly, just as we now judge 18th Century attitudes towards the slave trade. Dr Baggini cited a few examples, including our treatment of animals, but honed in on one major candidate - fair trade. One definition of slavery is being made to work for nothing, and some of today's trading relationships - almost always between developed and developing nations - may look pretty close to it when seen from even a few years time. The evening had provided plenty of food (FairTrade, of course) for thought for both its audiences.

World fisheries expert opens BRLSI’s major 2009 exhibition on Darwin’s 200th birthday.

Thursday 12th February: To mark Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday Dr Daniel Pauly (right), Professor of Fisheries at the University of British Columbia and a world expert on fish conservation, opened Darwin’s Fishes, the major exhibition of the BRLSI’s 2009 Darwin andBeyond programme.

After cutting a fish-shaped cake made specially for the evening by three local artists, Prof Pauly gave a lecture entitled From Darwin’s Fishes to Jenyns’ Fishes — Ichthyology and the Voyage of theBeagle, describing the marine aspects of Charles Darwin’s voyage around the world. Among the audience were the Mayor of Bath and a relative of the Rev Leonard Jenyns, Darwin’s friend and collaborator who left his library and collections to the BRLSI.

Click here to read the full story on our Darwin and Beyond mini-site.

Darwin and Beyond full houses continue with Key Stages in the History Life

Professor Benton kept a packed Elwin Room audience enthralled and entertained

Friday 30th January: The BRLSI's Darwin and Beyond programme delivered another Elwin Room capacity audience, who came to hear Professor Michael Benton of Bristol University (right) describe the wealth of scientific knowledge that has emerged since Darwin's time on how life on Earth developed from the earliest single-cell organisms to the far more complex life forms (including, of course, ourselves) alive today.

Prof Benton took us on a journey through the ten key developmental stages of the lecture's title, revealing that, perhaps surprisingly, the first seven, including the emergence of discrete cells and a reproductive code, had taken place in the primitive ''sludge' of early life forms. We learned how great extinctions cleared the decks and allowed new species to become dominant, and that while the Dinosaur extinction of 65 million years ago gets all the media attention, the Permian extinction, nearly 200 million years earlier, was the biggest and most significant of all. In that context the emergence of Homo Sapiens, a mere 150,000 years ago, appeared as very recent history.

A long and lively Q&A session rounded off what had been, by any standards, an outstanding lecture by one of the UK's most accomplished scientific speakers. What's more there are still 11 months of Darwin and Beyond to go - for more information on the programme, click here.

 

Eric Gabb exhibition brings welcome midwinter colour to the BRLSI's Jenyns Room

Friday 23rd January: The BRLSI's ground floor Jenyns Room received a welcome injection of midwinter colour as Bath-based artist Eric Gabb opened his exhibition of paintings. The large space enabled Eric to show how his career has progressed from early realism to today's abstract work and use of more vibrant colours. Click here to see works from the exhibition.

 

 

Did the study of languages show Darwin the way?

Dr Nicholas Ostler (left) with Darwin and Beyond Programme Manager Martin Sturge

Friday 16th January: Did the work of early philologists on the evolution of human languages sow the seeds of later work on the evolution of species? That's the question Dr Nicholas Ostler set out to help us answer in his lecture Dante's Infernal Problem - Linguistics as a Precursor to Evolution.

Another good-sized Elwin room audience were treated to a scholarly tour de force as Dr Ostler described the work of linguists from Aristotle in the 4th Century BC to Darwin's contemporary Franz Bopp, in what Darwin and Beyond Programme Manager Martin Sturge described as "a fitting second curtain-raiser to our Darwin series", following December's Victor Suchar Christmas Lecture by Prof. Brian Charlesworth.

For a full report of this lecture, visit our Darwin and Beyond mini-website by clicking here.

 

The reign of Constantine comes alive as BRLSI's Antiquity Group returns

Dr Caroline Humfress (left) with BRLSI Antiquity Convenor Lee Hooker

Thursday 15th January: If you think Antiquity is a dry and dusty subject, think again. The topic for the first Antiquity Group lecture following its long research break was Constantine and the Law of Christ, an important one since Emperor Constantine (272-337) is credited with reversing the Roman Empire's persecution of Christians and laying the legal foundations for today's relationships between states and Christian churches. The speaker, Dr Caroline Humfress of Birkbeck College, London University, addressed her subject not only with the scholarship it deserved, but also with a personal enthusiasm that brought alive a world of grand tours by 80 year old empresses, nails from the Cross, the birth of the Christian relic industry (complete with a phial of the darkness that followed the Crucifiction) and Imperial gifts to the great, the good - and pig farmers.

Constantine only converted to Christianity at the end of his life, and Dr Humfress's view was that this reflected the true nature of his role in the development of religious tolerance, in which his concessions to Christianity were just a part of a move to end persection across a wider spectrum. In fact there's no evidence that pro-Christian statutes were introduced during his reign, and it wasn't until the time of Emperor Theodosius, in 438, that a commission was appointed to collect and formalize into a system all of the laws and edicts from the time of Constantine .

The mark of a good lecture is a good question and answer session afterwards, and the BRLSI audience provided what Dr Humfress rather gratifyingly judged an excellent set of questions, which she answered with the same informed fluency as her formal lecture. With the heating now fully functional in the Elwin room it had been a warm evening, but anything but dry and dusty.

• Dr Humfress was the historical advisor to this week's episode in the Channel 4 TV series Christianity: A History, in which broadcaster Michael Portillo investigates the role of the Roman Empire in transforming Christianity from an underground sect to an official religion. The programme is broadcast at 7pm on Sunday 18th January. The next speaker in the Antiquity series will be Professor Joseph Davidovits, director of the French Geopolymer Institute, who will propose his theory that the Great Pyramids are built not of carved stone blocks, but of reconsituted stone moulded on site - a technique that many 21st Century civil engineers would recognise. The date hasn't been fixed yet, but we'll announce it here as soon as it is.

 

What's Your Poison? The use of poisonous plants in Medicine from Ancient Egypt to Allopathy

BRLSI Passions in Botany Convenor Martin Sturge writes:
On 12th January we began the third year of our Passions in Botany series with a wonderful talk by botanist Frederick Gillam (right), which he introduced with a chastening maxim from the Swiss physician Paracelsus (1493-1591): "All things are poison … only the dose permits something not to be poisonous".

Frederick Gillam took us on a thrilling journey, prepared with scholarship and passion, through the 4 Vedas of India, Sumeria, the 3 Papyri of Egypt ('Kahun' 1800 BC, 'Edwin Smith' 1600 BC, 'Ebers' 1550 BC), Dioscorides, Hippocrates, Nicander, Galen, Pliny the Elder, Celsus and many more, and through a myriad remedies (the 'Ebers' Papyrus lists 877) and a host of herbs that were used in their practise.

We learnt, for instance, how the mandrake (Mandragora officinarum) was boiled in wine to produce an anaesthetic tincture used in surgery from Egyptian times, some 3000 years ago, and of the huge breadth of ancient experience which remained the basis of medical practise well into modern times, and still plays its part today.

The quality of this lecture brought nearly an hour of questions. The event was an excellent illustration of how an audience can gradually develop into a group, producing speakers to take themes forward. I saw this previously in my Belief Series, with subjects being furthered by elaboration and challenge. It's one of BRLSI's sterling qualities. Most appropriately, our next Botany lecture, "Tuning the Organs 2", on Monday 9th February, will feature Corinne Sutterby's presentation of three more body systems : how they work, how they go wrong, and how common kitchen herbs can help put them right.

 

BRLSI's Art Exhibition organiser exhibits his art

Dr Rex Valentine (right), the BRLSI's convenor of Art Exhibitions and a recent speaker on Lucian Freud & Francis Bacon, showed some of his own work over Christmas at The White Room Gallery in Brock Street, Bath, run by Chris Wakefield.

The works in the exhibition, some of which are mobile, derive from Rex's interest in the scientific phenomenon of' the Moiré interference fringe and 'Mobius Strip' phenomenon. Rex feels this is in the spirit of the eclectic, arts-and-sciences nature of the BRLSI itself, and believes artists are justified in using scientific phenomenon but should not corrupt them.

With the BRLSI now developing connections with the Victoria Gallery and Holburne Museum, Rex feels the Institution could also connect with smaller galleries that may be suitable. Rex's work continues on display at the White Room until the end of January.

 

Chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages to speak
on linguistics as a mirror of evolution.

On Friday January 16th Dr Nicholas Ostler (right), the scholar, author and chair of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, will give a lecture at the BRLSI entitled Dante’s Infernal Problem – Linguistics as a Precursor and Mirror to the Study of Evolution. He'll describe how 14th century Italian writer Dante Alighieri (best known for his 'Inferno', the first section of the Divine Comedy epic poem) began the process of seeing language, like biology, as dynamic and self-evolving rather than the result of divine action. The lecture is part of the Institution's Darwin and Beyond programme, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of On The Origin Of Species.

Dr Ostler studied at Oxford and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the legendary linguist and academic Noam Chomsky. He is the author of Empires of the Word and Ad Infinitum (a biography of Latin), and speaks 26 languages. The Foundation for Endangered Languages, which he chairs, is a charity that supports the efforts of small communities worldwide to know and use their languages more.

Dante’s Infernal Problem – Linguistics as a Precursor and Mirror to the Study of Evolution begins at 7.30pm at the BRLSI, 16 Queen Square Bath. There will be a reception from 6.30pm onwards, with a chance to meet the speaker.

Bath-based artist Eric Gabb to exhibit at BRLSI

Eric Gabb (above), a local artist who has worked in Bath for more than 15 years, will be holding an exhibition of his work at the BRLSI from January 24th to 31st. The large display space available in the ground floor Jenyns Room means that for the first time Eric can show a comprehensive range of work from his early realism to his current experimental abstract pieces, allowing visitors to observe his shift in painting techniques and later more vibrant use of colour.

Eric had a career in Graphic Art and Advertising before returning to full-time painting and sculpture. He has exhibited in the Richmond, Putney and Wimbledon areas as well as various galleries in Bath including the Bath Society of Artist annual exhibition. Using broad expanses of colour his work now features subtlety of line and shape to express the subject and to hint at the unseen or intangible. He has given numerous talks to local art groups about his move from realism to abstraction. The exhibition will open from 10:00am to 4:00pm daily (except Sunday) at 16 Queen Square, and entrance is free.

 

BRLSI Antiquity Group returns with the first Christian Emperor.

After a long research break the BRLSI's Antiquity group, chaired by Lee Hooker, returns on Thursday 15th January with a lecture on Constantine and the Law of Christ. Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, has had some very bad press down the years concerning his motives for backing Christianity and his tardiness in converting. So what is the most recent evidence, and did the building of New Rome in the East mark a real shift towards Christianisation of Roman Law?

The BRLSI is fortunate to have secured as speaker Dr Caroline Humfress (right), who is fresh from a year spent researching in Rome. Dr Humpress is Reader in History at Birbeck Colllege, University of London, and one of her specialist areas is the history of law and legal practice.

The following Antiquity talk will offer the controversial proposition that the Giza pyramids were not built of large stone blocks but poured and moulded on site. Impressive scientific evidence for this will be offered by the Director of the Geo-polymer Institute of France. The date for this talk will be announced soon - keep an eye on our What's On page for details.

 

A galactic start for BRLSI's 2009 lecture season.

Friday 2nd January 2009: Astronomers aren't afraid to venture out on dark winter evenings, and there was a good turnout for the BRLSI's first lecture of the year, a Herschel Group talk entitled 'Bubbling Cauldrons - Super-Massive Black Holes in Clusters of Galaxies' given by Dr Robert Dunn of the Technische Universität in Munich, Germany.

Black holes are best known for swallowing matter, but as Dr Dunn explained they also emit energy in columns, often thousands of light-years long, which interact with surrounding clouds of super-heated gas, giving black holes a surprisingly active role in shaping the material environment around them. All this is best measured by observing X-ray emissions rather than visible light, which poses the challenge of how to focus radiation which passes straight through most equipment (the answer - a 3-metre long 'cone' of mirrors, each deflecting the rays by a tiny amount). The results, seen by European and American X-ray space telescopes, are cavities in the gas clouds identical in shape to bubbles formed by air in water, but light years in width.

Dr Dunn, fomerly of Cambridge and Southampton universities and now an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Munich, gave a lively presentation which managed the difficult task of balancing in-depth information for the many specialists in the audience with some first principles for the less knowledgeable, aided by possibly the most impressive animation and video-equipped PowerPoint presentation yet seen at the BRLSI.

The Herschel Group is a collaboration between the BRLSI and the William Herschel Society, and meets at the BRLSI on the first Friday of each month (except March and August), with visitors always welcome. For more information on the group, click here.

Dr Robert Dunn with Herschel Group convenor Dick Phillips.

 

Click here for BRLSI News from 2008