Powles - Lee

WASP-43 b

It may not be much to look at, but I think this is the most mind-blowing thing I have been able to capture with my telescope.

260 light years away, around a nondescript 12-magnitude orange star in the constellation of Sextans, orbits a "hot Jupiter".  This planet, called WASP43 b, is the same size as Jupiter and twice its mass.  But it orbits very very close to the star - about 2 million km, 1/25 the distance of Mercury.  This close, it orbits about once every 22 hours. 

What this graph records is the brightness of the star in a series of 1 min exposures I took over three hours last night.  The magnitude is listed on the left - you can see the variations are between about 11.83 to 11.88, only 5/100ths of a magnitude.  A real test of equipment and technique.

The big dip in the graph is a transit - the tiny reduction in starlight when the planet passed in front of the star. The whole transit lasted about 1.2 hours. 

I remember going to Sydney Observatory in 1979, for my twelfth birthday party.  I asked the astronomer whether we would ever be able to see planets in other solar systems.  "No way" he replied "not unless we build huge telescopes on the moon".

Well, actually, just 10", on my balcony :-)

Nova Centauri 2013: a crucial 24 hours

My long-suffering wife is clearly bemused why I keep getting up at 3.00 am to "go and look at the nova".  So I thought I'd try to explain some of the excitement.

I posted in some depth about the nova here.  So the short version is simply that a small, incredibly dense star -a white dwarf - has staged a gigantic runaway thermonuclear explosion, blasting clouds of hydrogen and other elements into space at incredible speed, while pumping enormous energies at visible wavelengths, X-ray and gamma ray wavelengths.  This started last Tuesday, nearly a week ago.  On Saturday it reached its peak brightness, and it's now fading fast.

This star is quite close to the top pointer to the Southern Cross - so invisible to most (Northern hemisphere) variable star enthusiasts.  The upshot is, I and a handful of Australian, New Zealand, South African and South American observers have been hauling ourselves out of bed to measure and observe the thing. 

A few of us have rudimentary spectroscopes - devices that can spread the white light of the star into its constituent spectrum. It's a simple filter which screws into the front of the camera.  With this one can measure the intensity of each wavelength of light, from deep violet into the red and infra-red.  You can see this at the bottom of the photo below:

The graphs simply plot the intensity of each wavelength of light.

So what does this tell us?  The key to the whole process is to understand that, for some fascinating quantum-physical reasons, particular elements radiate and absorb light at particular wavelengths.  For instance if hydrogen is heated or bombarded with ultraviolet or otherwise energised, it will radiate light at a very specific set of wavelengths - 4861 angstroms, (in the light blue part of the spectrum);  6562 angstroms (in the red zone); and others.  Other elements emit light at different wavelengths.  So, by analysing the spectra of glowing clouds of gas, we can work out their chemical compositon.

The same effect works in reverse.  If a cloud of cool hydrogen is in between us and a bright light source (like an exploding white dwarf star), the gas will absorb light at the same wavelengths.  This also applies to other elements and compounds.  For instance, the big dip in the far right of the spectra above, labelled "Telluric", has nothing to do with the nova: these are the wavelengths absorbed by the water vapour and oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere.

The red line in the graph above shows the nova's spectrum when it was at its brightest, on 6 December.  The red line is the spectrum a day later.  An awful lot has changed; as you'd expect given that the star is in the process of exploding. 

First, and perhaps least interesting - we can see what sort of elements the star is flinging into space.  This particular nova is a "Helium-Nitrogen" nova; slightly less common than the "Iron" novae.  We can tell because we see particular wavelengths glowing that correspond to ions of these elements.  Uninteresting - but it's pretty cool that I can measure the chemical composition of an exploding star 25,000 light years away from the comfort of my own balcony in Canberra. 

Next, we can build a picture of exactly what's happening to the star through comparing successive spectra.  First, let's visualize the explosion.  A cloud of gas has been blasted away from the surface of the star, and this cloud is then being bombarded by high energy waves from the star, casing the gas to glow.

This is a photo the Hubble Space Telescope took of a nova that exploded in 1992.  The ejected gas has expanded to the point where we can actually see it.  In the current nova in  Centaurus, the gas is far too close to the star for us to see it.  But we can observe it with our spectrographs.

As you can see, the gas is moving away from the star, and glowing owing to the intense energies it is being bombarded with,  This causes "emission lines"in the spectra.  You can see in my spectra from 7 December (the blue line in the graph) that the hydrogen line at 6562 A has begun to glow much more than was the case even 24 hours before (the red line in the graph). This accounts for the peaks in the spectra - the energetic gas expanding outwards from the central star.

But remember that elements also absorb energy.  Part of the expanding, glowing sphere of gas is coming straight towards us, and being "backlit" by the intense energy of the star itself.  In this case, the high-intensity light from the star itself is actually absorbed by the expanding gas cloud.

Now here's the best bit.  In the circled part of the red graph, you can see both the emission lines from the expanding cloud of hydrogen (the peak), and the absorption line that comes from the part of the cloud directly between us and the star, attenuating its energy (the trough).   These are at exactly the same wavelength - 6562 Angstrom.  But hang on - if both the emission and the absorption are at the same wavelength, why don't they just cancel each other out?

The answer is is the Doppler effect.  The emission lines come from the gas that is moving out at a right angle to us - so is neither getting closer nor further away.  But the absorption line comes from the gas coming directly towards us, so the emission line appears bluer than it is, because the energy of the velocity at which the gas is moving towards us is added to the energy of the light waves.  It's the same principle that causes the engine tone of a car moving towards us sounds higher, while a car moving away sounds lower.

By measuring the shift between the emission lines and the absorption lines, we can calculate how fast the gas is moving towards us.  The emission line is at 6562, while the absorption line is at about 6505.  6505/6562 = 0.99131.  Thus, the gas is moving towards us at 1-0.99131 = 0.00868 times the speed of light.  The speed of light is 299 792 458 m/s, so the velocity of the expanding gas cloud is 299 792 458 * 0.00868 = 2,604 km/s.  Which is about right for this type of nova; but bloody fast if you think about it.

A third pointer to the Southern Cross

For Australians and New Zealanders, the Southern Cross is an icon of identity.  The stars of the cross adorn our flags, and the constellation, together with its two bright pointers, has hung always visible in our southern skies. It has been a constant and unchanging beacon to indigenous peoples, to European explorers, and to all modern Australasians.

Until this week.

For a few nights only, there is a third pointer to the Southern Cross.  A new quite bright star has appeared very close to Beta Centauri, the topmost of the two pointers, effectively creating a third pointer to the Southern Cross.    This star is what is known as a “nova” (from the Latin for “new”).  In fact, an existing star – a very faint and hitherto undistinguished star invisible in any but powerful professional telescopes – has, over a period of mere hours, brightened spectacularly.  Last night, it was 25,000 times brighter than it was on Monday, and it’s still getting brighter.

The nova was discovered in the early hours of Tuesday morning by John Seach, an amateur astronomer from Chatsworth Island in NSW.  John regularly scans the skies for novae and supernovae, using a nothing more elaborate than a DSLR camera with a wide-angle lens.  He already has several discoveries to his name.  On Tuesday morning, it was still only barely visible to the naked eye, but 24 hours later near dawn on Wednesday it had become as visible as in the image above.

The study of novae is extremely important to astronomers.  A lot of the physics that underpins the formation, evolution and behaviour of star happens at such colossal temperatures and gravitational forces that they cannot possibly be duplicated in a laboratory.  Therefore, a lot of stellar physics is theoretical.  However, when a nova erupts, astronomers get a chance to watch the physics at work inside stars in real time.  Therefore, they closely monitor the emissions from stars in nova – visible light at all wavelengths, X-rays, infra-red – to build up a picture of what is occurring within.

In fact, stars that “go nova” are part of a binary system – two stars in close orbit around each other.  One of the pair is a normal star, much like our sun; or perhaps a bit larger and redder.  The other is what is known as a “white dwarf” star.  White dwarfs are extraordinarily small and dense – as much mass as our sun, packed into the size of a planet.  At these densities, matter becomes “electron degenerate” – the electrons become stripped from their nuclei, which float together in an ultra-dense soup.  One teaspoon of degenerate matter has a mass of several tonnes.  These two stars whirl around each other in an orbit that takes mere hours.

In nova systems, the gravitational force of the white dwarf continually pulls matter (mostly hydrogen) away from the larger star.  This matter gradually spirals down onto the surface of the white dwarf, where it accretes, and is compressed and heated.  Pouring hydrogen onto the surface of a white dwarf star is a bit like pouring petrol on a barbecue - eventually a runaway nuclear fusion reaction starts in the accreted hydrogen, which explodes cataclysmically and blows the hydrogen and other accumulated gases out into space at thousands of kilometres per second.  By examining the spectra of novae in outburst, we can determine the chemical composition of the gases hurtling into space; the temperatures of the reactions occurring; and much else of scientific interest.  By measuring the Doppler shift of the spectrum, we can even determine how fast the gas is being blasted into space.  So in a real sense, novae are astronomers’’ practical laboratories for observing stellar physics in action.

If it behaves as a typical nova, Nova Centauri 2013 might continue to brighten for another day or (if we are lucky) several days, before beginning a similarly rapid fade back into obscurity over the following weeks and months.  At this time of year the Southern Cross and its pointers rise a decent distance above the horizon in the hours before dawn.  So if you want to grab a look at the third pointer to the Southern Cross you’ll have to get up early over the next few days.

Staying power

Recently Alan Kerlin posted Peter Treyde's photo of M41 on the CAS blog which instantly brought back memories of when I first started out with Astronomy. It was 1986, I was 19, and we all had Halley fever ... I had my first job, and my first scope soon followed: a Vixen 5" f/5 Newtonian on a very simple GEM mount. I used to run into M41 while looking at Sirius - the unexpected ones are always better I even tried some astrophotography with my dad's old SLR (no 'D') - somewhere I have some pink smudges that were my proud attempts at M42 and Eta Carina.

I used the scope obsessively for a couple of years, then it gradually drifted into uncollimated disrepair. It came with me for ten years in the UK, and saw a lot of light pollution and not much else. But basically for the last 25 years has essentially been a spider breeding station and less of a light bucket and more of a rain bucket. It has been variously under the house, in the roof cavity, and outside on the verandah for the past 15 years. I just couldn't bring myself to throw it away. I always vowed that one day I'd return to astronomy.

So, last year I finally got the opportunity to get set up with some functioning equipment - an SCT 10" on a decent mount, with a guiding setup and a Canon 60Da. At the same time, out of nostalgia, and while waiting for my new scope to arrive (it actually arrived the day Patrick Moore died, 9/12/2012 - that's another story) I decided to clean up my old Vixen. I pulled it out, cleaned up the structure, replaced all the rusted screws, cannibalized the old 0.95" fittings to build something that would accept my new 1.25" eyepieces and camera adapter, and sent the mirrors off for recoating.

Earlier this year, while learning the ropes with the new state-of-the-art kit, I suddenly on a whim threw the old 5" Vixen on to my new mount and attached the camera. This image of the Horsehead was the result - 20 x 4 min subs. And you know, it's not half bad, especially for a dear old scope that cost $300 in 1986.




So now the old scope comes with me to Mt Stromlo public nights and is operated by my 15yo son while I run the 10" SCT. He had at least a hundred fascinated kids looking at lunar craters in September.

Not a bad way to have spent my first ever paycheque, all things considered.

Sorry for the rambling story. It just all came flooding back thinking about M41.

EV Ceti

I spent Saturday night watching an eclipse.

The faint (11th magnitude) star EV Ceti is in fact two stars, very close together, that orbit each other in less than a day. We can't see this directly - they are far too close. But we can measure the consequences. Mostly, the light we see comes from both stars in the binary pair.  But every ten hours or so one passes in front of the other and the total light drops.

On Saturday I took one 50s image each minute for four hours, and captured and measured the brightness of the star.  And of course duly submitted the observations to the venerable American Association of Variable Star Observers.

Music and Walking Pace

 Marching to a different tune: researchers unlock the motivational power of music

  This is the text of my article for The Conversation published there on 12 July 2013.

 “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak”, wrote William Congreve in 1697.  We take this for granted, and therefore often tend to overlook how genuinely mysterious it is that simple patterns of sound vibrations can have profound effects on our minds and bodies. This power of music to on the one hand soothe, but equally to energise, has long fascinated musicians and philosophers. Most recently, psychologists and neurophysiologists have turned their attention to music, and have sought to measure, and explain in empirical terms, how music can have so much influence our moods and levels of energy.

A Belgian study published today has shed some further light on how this might work. Marc Leman and colleagues at the Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music and Ghent University analysed the effects of listening to different pieces of music on the walking speed of 18 adults.  Researchers have long known that people will synchronise their steps with the tempo of music – after all, this is why we have marching bands.  So for this study, the researchers chose 52 pieces of instrumental music with contrasting moods and styles, but exactly the same musical tempo – 130 beats per minute.

Sure enough, almost all the participants stepped in time with the music.  What was more interesting was that certain pieces of music caused the participants to walk more energetically – to take larger strides, and cover a larger total distance – while other pieces caused the opposite effect.

For the record, the piece of music that created the most vigorous walking in the study was:

Falik, Ballad of El Efe

 

While the gentlest response was to:

Monsieur Saint-Colombe, Courante

After the walking test, the participants were then asked to rate the pieces they listened to in terms of opposed pairs of adjectives: was the piece good or bad? Stuttering or flowing?  Tender or aggressive?  Soft or loud?  Unsurprisingly, the participants walked with more of a spring in their step to music rated as stuttering, loud, or aggressive, while gentler, softer, flowing or more complex music had a relaxing effect.

This effect appeared to be independent of musical genre: the list of the most arousing music included classical, techno, world music and house, while the top ten most relaxing pieces ranged from Baroque solo viol music to contemporary Korean dance tracks.  The effect also seemed to be independent of the participants own musical preferences – the music had the observed affect whether or not the participants liked that particular style or genre.  Leman and colleagues speculate that this musical effect on the vigour of physical response might happen at an autonomous or subliminal level.  This suggests several possible practical applications of the research, for instance in sports performance or physical rehabilitation.

What makes this study relatively unusual is that the researchers then analysed these objective cognitive results in terms of a sophisticated music theoretical model.  They were attempted to discover exactly what the musical features were that were associated with the arousing or relaxing effects.  Nearly 200 sonic features of each piece were analysed – the loudness of various parts music, the sharpness of the attack, the structure of the beats, the distribution of pitches and so on – and this musical analysis was then correlated with the results of the walking experiment.  Surprisingly, only a handful of features were shown to cause arousal and relaxation, and these all had to do with the regular structure of the rhythm, which musicians call “metre”.  Put simplistically, music with a march-like rhythm (“binary metre”) causes more arousal, while music with a waltz-like rhythm (“ternary metre”) causes greater relaxation.

So when you next see a batsman stride to the crease or a boxer enter the ring to the blare of aggressive, pounding motivational music, it’s more than just theatre.  There’s a genuine physiological effect at work.  And it might be that the Blues’ best chance in next week’s State of Origin decider will be to make sure the Queensland team runs out to the sound of the Blue Danube Waltz. 

Four curiosities

Here are four slightly random images that I'm posting simply because they are slightly quirky, and I am rather fond of them.  The first is the Eskimo Nebula, an example of a rather particular type of nebula called a "planetary nebula".  The name is a misnomer: these objects have nothing to do with planets.  They are the remains of stars much like our sun, that die not with a bang but a whimper.  Instead of the fate of larger stars, which end as novae or supernovae, massive explosions and/or collapse into neutron stars or black holes, smaller stars like the sun simply puff their mass out into space as a series of cosmological death-rattles.  These puffs form a sphere of gas that expands outwards from the star over thousands of years.  They appear as small coloured discs - easily mistaken for planets.  Hence the name.  This particular nebula, the "Eskimo", NGC2392, is a rich blue colour not unlike Neptune.  It's the first example of its type I have photographed.

The next photo is f the Tarantula Nebula.  This is not strikingly exceptional as an emission and diffusion nebula - the (slightly colour enhanced) red elements are glowing hydrogen, while the blue/white sections are gas reflecting the bright light of internal stars.  The one really unusual aspect of this object is that it is outside our own galaxy, in the Large Magellanic Cloud.  It's actually a massive object, and if it were in our own galaxy - say, at the same distance as the Orion Nebula - it would take up half the sky and glow as bright as the moon.

The next is an image of a real neighbour.  This is Jupiter with her four brightest moons.  Actually this is a composite of two images - no single exposure can capture the detail of the bright planet as well as the faint moons, so I had to do a bit of Photoshop jiggery-pokery.

Finally, here is a fuzzy incomplete image of galaxy NGC1365 in Fornax.  For various reasons (clouds, trees, my own inexperience) I've only been able to collect 30 mins of total exposure time where it really needs about four times that much. The reason I'm posting it now is because last November a star in this galaxy (56 million light years away) went supernova.  It was quite bright last year, but is beginning to fade.  The star is still visible - it's the blue dot marked with the arrow.  The galaxy is starting to get too low in the Western sky to shoot properly - I'll image it again next year but by then the supernova will be gone.

A matter of perspective ...

This is my favourite astrophoto yet. I took it last week- 16 exposures for a total f 90 minutes. It is Centaurus A, a large, quite close galaxy that has its unusual shape owing to the fact that it is currently in the process of swallowing a smaller spiral galaxy.  At its heart is a supermassive black hole with a mass 100 million times that of the sun.  That sort of size puts things in perspective.

The other issue of perspective, and the reason I really like the photograph, is that you can easily see the foreground stars - the ones in our own galaxy.  The sense of distance is quite acute. 

I say it's a close galaxy, but I'm speaking cosmologically. It's around 13 million light years away, meaning the photons which hit the sensor of my DSLR left Centaurus A and began their long journey to earth at pretty much the same time as this chap, a Sivapithecus, came down out of the trees and on to the African grasslands, and began the complex process of trial and error that led to the tool-use and then ultimately to the invention of the DSLR ... 

The Jewel Box

As a child in the 1970s, I loved astronomy and space. It wasn't until I was 20, in 1986, that I was able to get a telescope. If you were alive then, and at all interested in what might rain down from above, ;-) you will remember that 1986 was all about Halley Comet fever. So in April 1986 I finally got a telescope - a modest 5" Newtonian - and with my reference materials (a newspaper article on Halley, a planisphere, and a Patrick Moore book on astronomy that I'd had for years) pointed my new treasure eagerly at where Halley was supposed to be.

Amazing! The eyepiece was filled with a glorious shperical burst of light. I couldn't believe what I was seeing:

 I looked harder at the image - interesting that the diffuse cometary halo semed to resolve into individual points of light ... And no sign of a tail, but then I had heard that this visit of Halley was disappointing. What I was seeing was anything but disappointing. But the longer I looked, the less it looked like what a comet was supposed to look like.

Well, eventually I realised that I was a few degrees off, and what I was looking at was Omega Centauri. Wonderful it was! I was looking for this comet, but was the sky really full of unexpected treasures? I started to slew the scope around (in those days, "slew" was something we did by hand) and came across something that literally took my breath away. There was a little pocket of gems in the sky that Aladdin had left behind. A sparkle of red, blue and green (I'm SURE I remmeber green!) stars in a tiny little treasure-chest just below the Southern Cross:

It was the Jewel Box, and it hooked my into the delights of the sky in a way that has lasted a lifetime.

So, nearly 30 years later, when I finally fulfilled a lifetime's ambition and acquired a new telescope and a camera, and after three months of technical bedding in during which I finally got autoguiding working, there was only one object I could possibly photograph. This little box of jewels.

Meade 10" SCT, F/10, with a Canon EOS 60Da. Next time I'll go for it with my focal recucer to F/6.7, which will enhance the sense of this little treasure of gems secretly buried in the deep south of the sky.

10x2' exposures, ISO 800.

Thanks for reading this far in the nostalgic musings of a lifetime star addict :-)

A digital trobairitz: musical chivalry in the cyberspace age

This post is the abstract for my paper at the Annual Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia in December 2012

Recent tectonic shifts in the economics of music (and by extension, its political economy) have generated unprecedented challenges: for the music industries; for those concerned with defining and applying musical intellectual property; for the technologies of the production and distribution of music, both live and recorded;  and for the artists themselves.  It is hard to believe that it has only been a decade since Napster first made headlines as a threat to the hegemony of the CD-based recording industry.  Ten years on, not only is the music CD in the last yards of its journey towards obsolescence, it is more-or-less accepted that the battle to control (and sell) the intellectual property of recorded music as a commodity has been lost.  Social media are rapidly challenging mainstream media as the conduit for distributing, accessing, discussing, marketing and discovering music and musicians.  Recorded music is now, to all intents and purposes, free.

Photo by Brian Adams, http://baphotos.com.

Marian Call is an Alaskan singer-songwriter who is one of a cohort of emerging musicians building a career and a creative oeuvre within these new realities.  Classically trained and university educated  (she is a composition graduate from Stanford), she writes and performs songs that span genres from medieval, classical, jazz, folk/acoustic and many others.  She eschews contracts and labels - her audience base is entirely self-generated through social media and a frenetic touring schedule.  On tour she prefers house concerts to traditional venues – she will typically crowdsource venues via Twitter in advance of a tour, and rely on her supporters and followers on social media to publicize the event locally.  She is currently (Oct. ’12) touring Europe on this basis – a major logistic collaboration between Call and her supporters that she describes as “like a barn-raising”. Audiences at concerts are encouraged, but not required, to make a donation; similarly, her music is freely streamed online, and payment for the recordings are essentially a matter of honour.

Essentially, Call’s artistic and business practice diminishes or removes the notion of music as a commodity, an object of transaction. Instead, the emphasis is placed on relationships, or community – she has critiques the description of her as an indie or independent artist, suggesting that a better term is an “interdependent” artist.  In this paper I argue that this shift from music as commercial commodity to music as community catalyst has profound implications not just for the business  models of music, but for its aesthetics and semantics.  Call’s authorial voice within her music speaks and sings to and with her audience on a number of levels – literally, in the case of “Good Morning Moon” in which she sourced the chorus in the song as sound files individually submitted by her supporters.  Her music has an authenticity of expression and an imaginative range that, I argue, stems from its basis in a communicative premise that is, at root, ethical in nature – a code of musical chivalry that underpins the virtual and actual encounters on her journey as a modern-day trobairitz.

 

A sonnet for Alan Jones

Some have said Jones' fall from grace is almost Shakespearean. So here goes:
When I have seen by silly cows defaced
The rich, proud pomp of righteous, right wing rage;
When lofty Liberal Members are down-razed
By Helen Razer writing in The Age;
When I have seen queue-jumping darkies gain
The cushy jobs real Aussies had before,
And middle-eastern youths have clearly lain,
With nice white girls from the upper North Shore;
When I have seen that Bligh bird screw her state,
And JuLiar find ways to make us pay:
I'd go on air, spray and pontificate -
And now they've come to take my merc away.
Oh, I am such a goose - and here's the point:
My own big mouth in fact destroyed the joint.

Universities and the Domino's Effect

How can the university sector best respond to the rise of online learning, and what will be the impact on teaching, learning, the student experience and the physical infrastructure of university campuses?

By and large, the rise of online learning has caught universities woefully unprepared. The "flipped" classroom, massive online courses, open educational resources, private-sector online commercial providers - at an institutional level these are all seen as recent threats to a university sector struggling to respond to a new reality. At the individual level, lecturers often seem to be fighting a losing battle for the hearts and minds of their students - dropping attendances at lectures, a reliance on recordings and online notes in lieu of face-to-face engagement; I have more than once seen lecturers vainly request for the university wireless network to be turned off during lectures to prevent the students logging into Facebook when they should be attending to the sage on the stage.

But this is curious. As research-intensive instituions, universities typically are among the first to embrace new technologies that support academic work - from the first electronic library catalogues, through discipline-based newsgroups and email lists, to online journals, new technologies have happily and quickly been embraced by the research community. So why have we as a sector so clumsily and cantankerously engaged with new technologies for teaching and learning?

The answer is simple: it's because education is not pizza.

Since the 1980s we have seen four factors working together to fundamentally shift the way we think about and organise higher education. A rapid increase in the percentage of the population which attends university has led to a "mass-production" model of teaching. University managers can now talk about "efficient mechanisms for content delivery" with straight faces - ignoring the fact that there is nothing actually delivered during learning; nothing changes hands. Second, the increasing cost to the student since the introduction of HECS has resulted in a far more transactional model of education: what do students "get" for their money? Thirdly, partly as a consequence of both students and the Government wanting to know exactly what they are paying for, we have seen increasingly prescriptive requirement for univesities and teachers to spell out exactly what students need to do, what they will learn, and how this will be assessed. Opportunities for learning to be subjective, to be about personal growth and the serendipity of epiphany, are squeezed out in favour mundane learning outcomes that can be measurably demonstrated by the majority of a student cohort. Finally, a much larger university population, with very diverse aspirations and equally diverse levels of ability, all of whom are paying substantial sums for their courses, has led to degree structures and options dominated by the market: students choose their courses from a menu available, and only popular choices are sustainable within an increasingly tight resource environment.

Attending a modern university is uncomfortably like placing an order with Domino's: choose your options online from what's available and affordable, and the university will attempt to deliver your educational content as quickly and efficiently as possible. Rarely will you have your content delivered by a pimply-faced youth on a motor scooter; more usually you will be placed in a lecture theatre with 400 other people and have your content delivered by a lecturer who for two hours bravely wades upstream through a river of facts. But the business model is the same.

Now, before you write me off as an old fogey pining for the bygone golden age of education (i.e. whenever I happened to do my own undergraduate degree), let me say that I am in complete support of the four factors I have identified. I believe Australia needs mass participation in higher education, which therefore needs to be sustainable, accountable, and demonstrate value for money. I also am in favour of student choice, as the research evidence suggests (unsurprisingly) that students learn better if they are studying a subject that interests them. However I believe that the factors dominating recent trends in HE have led universities to a model of education that is wrong-headed: one that sees education as about the "delivery" of "content".

Early misadventures in online learning enthusiastically embraced the notion of "content delivery". Put the content online for the students to download themselves and you don't even need to pay for the lecturer! How efficient a mechanism for delivery. But the experience of the last decade as shown us how educationally undernourished this leaves the students. Learning by absorbing content simply doesn't work very well, and the new online environments merely reinforce this point. Interestingly, the history of the internet parallels the history of online learning. The late 1990s and early 200s was the era of Web 1.0 - static online content: company web pages and large slabs of course content. The commercial and social web has moved on to 2.0 and beyond. The educational web hasn't, quite.

Educational theory and research-based practice is at odds with the "content delivery" model. Learning is fundamentally a social activity - it happens when your ideas are challenged or put to the test by others: teachers, tutors, authors, peers, even your own students. Ultimately we can never measure how much "content" has been absorbed by a student; we can't know what they know. We can only watch what they do - what they say, write, paint, play ... The origin of universities themselves stems from this recognition that learning comes through interaction, challenge and debate. Plato's Academy was founded on this principle that one learns though dialogue. The "colleges" of mediaeval Oxford and Cambridge were spaces in which intellectual fellow-travellers, "colleagues", came to learn from each other. Curricula are all well and good, but a good deal of research shows that a great deal of learning - perhaps the majority - occurs in the extra- and intra-curricular spaces where students, teachers and colleagues interact spontaneously and creatively.

The point many universities still miss is that online technologies are radical in that they connect people dialogically like never before. Social media such as Twitter and Facebook have allowed virtual colleges - communities of like-minded individuals - to spring up regardless of geographic and institutional borders. If I want to find something out, nowadays I'll go online and ask an expert. If I say something stupid, chances are I'll say it online and get called on it by a collegue in Newcaste-on-Tyne or Accra or Alaska (to think of three examples from last week). And I'll probably learn something as a result. As a music and education academic, I have two distinct professional and disciplinary spaces online. Even more interesting, the social community from which I learned the most - a multi-disiplinary gaggle of individuals who were my student colleagues at Magdalen College, Oxford, twenty years ago - has reconstituted itself online in recent years, and has resumed being one of the (now virtual) places where I learn. Not formally; but very deeply.

The pianist Arthur Schnabel once said this of his ability to perform profound and moving music: "I don't think I handle the notes much differently from other pianists. But the spaces between the notes - ah, there is where the artistry lies!". I could paraphrase this for education - "The content of university degrees is nowadays much of a muchness. But the spaces between the content - ah, that's where the learning happens!". Those spaces are increasingly online. And unless universities are able to rethink the fundamental paradigm and business model they use to manage education, from one predicated on "content delivery" back to one predicated on dialogue and communication, they will find that they will be increasingly on the margins of where the educational action is in the twenty-first century.

Music and physics – the connections aren't trivial

My ANU colleague John Rayner’s excellent recent article on the physics of music seemed to touch a nerve with the readership of The Conversation.

Although beautifully framed by the personal and anecdotal – John’s piece was subtitled “a love song” – the issues he explores about the relationship between music and physics go back to the ancient Greeks, and are as old as the disciplines themselves.

It certainly inspired me – a musicologist – to write something from the other side, to meet my scientific colleague in the middle in a speculative conversation about the parallels between our two worlds.

Musical meaning is tantalising and elusive. For most of us, music has the power to reach us profoundly and directly. The temptation is to speak of music as a language: the notion of music as a kind of “language of the emotions” is pervasive, centuries old, and nowadays has some limited empirical experimental support.

Most theoretical work now done on musical semiotics treats music as just another flavour of discourse, another language of signs; albeit one with its own special characteristics.

But this runs against an age-old notion: that music is a natural law. The medieval concept of “music of the spheres” held that the movement of the celestial bodies – what we now describe as astrophysics – was, at root, musical: the planets move in the heavens according to principles of harmony and resonance, with a set of common Pythagorean ratios governing both music and cosmology.

Indeed, we music academics are rather nostalgic for the time (in medieval universities) in which music was considered one of the four core disciplines alongside astronomy, geometry and arithmetic, and we held pride of place above the three lesser (hence “trivial”) language-based disciplines of logic, grammar and rhetoric.

Highs and lows

Physics permeates the language we use to describe music, and the concepts we use to understand it. For instance we talk about “high” and “low” musical pitch, perhaps without realising how deeply metaphorical this is.

There is no altitude to musical pitch: “high” pitches are caused by faster vibrations than “low” pitches. But we don’t talk about “fast” and “slow” music with reference to pitch (we use those metaphors for something else entirely).

And yet, the notion of musical altitude makes sense if we think about the energy states of the music. If, as in the excerpt below from Puccini’s opera Tosca, we listen to a soprano sustain a top B flat (as at 2:40 into the recording below), we are aware that she is sustaining a high-energy state, which must eventually relax.

The pitch seems invested with the kinetic energy required to produce it (of course, in Tosca’s case she has a literal encounter with the force of gravity, but that’s quite another story).

Singers, wind and brass players expend energy to reach “altitude”, while string players, keyboardists, guitarists and all the rest work no harder for the high notes than the low.

Yet, perhaps because of the centrality of the human voice to all music, this idea of fighting against musical “gravity” is ubiquitous, whether in a Paganini violin concerto or a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo, as per the video below. In music, as in physics, what goes up must come down.

And it doesn’t come down just anywhere. Most systems of musical organisation have a fixed point of reference – a pitch that functions as an attractor, pulling the music towards it.

In Western music, we call this the “tonic”, and most people, regardless of their level of formal musical training, can hear and sing the note to which the music is “pulling”. This idea of gravitational or magnetic attraction to a pitch was arguably the single most important characteristic of Western music between 1600 and 1900, and much music thereafter.

This may be a characteristic of Western music, but in other cultures' musics, the idea of a point of attraction is often even more powerful, as in the example below from Classical Indian music.

Not all music has a tonic, a fixed point of reference – in 1908 in Vienna Arnold Schoenberg famously departed from the principle with the “atonal” concluding movement of his second string quartet (as per the video below), thereby heralding a new and controversial musical age.

By coincidence, three years earlier, across the border in Switzerland, Albert Einstein had thrown the world of physics into disarray by similarly demolishing the idea of a fixed point of reference, in a paper on electromagnetism that described what later would become known as the Special Theory of Relativity.

Questions and answers

It’s worth observing that language has nothing resembling this notion of gravity or attraction: to understand this principle in music the metaphors must come from physics.

There are other concepts that bridge the disciplines in the same way. Balance and symmetry are also ideas that are fundamental to musical structure, and that seem to have more of a physical than a linguistic origin.

In classical music, perhaps the most common phrase structure is often described informally (and somewhat puzzlingly, to me) as “question and answer” – or more formally, as “antecedent-consequent” – two phrases that complement each other structurally, as in two phrases that make up just the opening eights seconds of Mozart’s Sonata in C KV545 (below).

There’s no question that rhetoric plays a role in shaping the way in which these two phrases echo each other. But on a structural level, there is an identity that seems almost mathematical in nature.

The two phrases are in balance: their (gentle) energies are complementary; their shapes are an image of each other; they are like two sides of an equation.

Time and memory

For me, the most important parallels between music and physics happen on a more philosophical level.

The late musicologist Jonathan Kramer started his book The Time of Music with the observation that small children play with blocks and toys to learn the fundamental concepts of space; by contrast, by singing and clapping, they play with music to learn about time.

There is something profound about the way in which music can accelerate, retard, bend and colour our sense of time’s passing. We can sit in a concert hall or opera theatre for an hour and hear 90 different people make thousands of noises on bits of wood, metal and flesh, and yet walk away with the impression we have heard one thing – a symphony, or an opera.

Music joins up time, and allows us to hear time as patterned and organised. These patterns allow us to predict the future – we listen in anticipation: that a melody will come to rest, or a harmony will move in ways that make sense to us, wordlessly.

Music is also a powerful stimulus of memory – overhearing a piece of remembered music can instantly rekindle long-forgotten memories.

It is much easier for most of us to memorise a song (words and all) than it is to memorise a poem. Music is a tool for grasping the order and sense between what has happened in the past, what is happening now, and what will happen in the future.

And to me, that sounds suspiciously like a definition of physics.

Threat and survival

Sadly, there is one last way in which music and physics are currently bedfellows. Worldwide, both disciplines are under threat at universities. In America and the UK, several physics departments have closed or are in danger.

Music education no longer receives government funding at UK universities, and in Australia recent controversies at ANU and Edith Cowan are symptomatic of the fact government funding for music is problematic.

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And the provision and quality of music and physics education in our secondary schools, crucial to support and enable undergraduate study, are always competing with the demands for more and more literacy and numeracy in the curriculum.

There is not yet a crisis – at least, not at the high end: it remains, at least for the moment, sexy enough in policy terms to fund the elite practitioners.

The select few physics virtuosi who will discover whatever comes after the Higgs boson, or their musical equivalents who will perform the Queen of the Night aria at the Sydney Opera house or Covent Garden, still capture both the public imagination and the public purse.

But the opportunities for students to study fundamental and abstract ideas – such as music and physics – as part of a liberal arts education that supports a civilised and educated society are becoming fewer and fewer.

John Rayner was right to call the relationship between music and physics a love song. Let us just hope it’s not also a swansong.

Further reading: This is a love song: the physics of music and the music of physics

Jonathan Powles does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.