A long summer

Indeed it has been a long summer, though the good weather appears to be drawing to a close. Over the last few months, I have attended three cosmology conferences or workshops and also been on a two-week holiday in the Dolomites, where I occupied my time by doing things like this:

La Guglia Edmondo de Amicis, near the Misurina lake.

and enjoying views like this:

Cima Piccola di Lavaredo, from the Dibona route on Cima Grande.

This explains the lack of activity here in recent times.

Returning home a couple of weeks ago, I was full of ideas for several exciting blog posts, including a summary of all the hottest topics in cosmology that were discussed at the conferences I attended, and perhaps an account of my argument stimulating discussion with Uros Seljak. However, it has come to my attention that there are other physicists in other parts of the world who happen to be working on the exact same topic that my collaborators and I have been investigating for the last few months. The rule in the research world is of course "publish or perish" (though some wit has suggested that "publish and perish" is more accurate) – so most of my time now will be spent on avoiding being scooped, and the current hiatus on this blog will continue for a short period. Looking on the bright side, once normal service resumes, I hope to have some interesting science results to describe!

In the meantime, I can only direct you to other blogs for your entertainment and enlightenment. Those of you who like physics discussions and have not already read Sean Carroll's blog (a vanishingly small number perhaps?) might enjoy this post about Boltzmann brains. I personally also enjoyed this argument against philosopher Tom Nagel.

For people interested in climbing news, I can report that my friends on the Oxford Greenland Expedition that I mentioned once here have returned safely after a successful series of very impressive climbs. I found their regular reports of their activities in the expedition diary well-written and rather thrilling – not just the climbing, but also the account of the journey to Greenland by sea in the face of seemingly never-ending gales! Well worth a read, as is this.

Across the Himalayan Axis

I had promised to try to write a summary of the workshop on cosmological perturbations post Planck that took place in Helsinki in the first week of June, but although the talks were all interesting, I didn't feel very inspired to write much about them. Plus life has been intervening, so I'll have to leave you to read Shaun's accounts at the Trenches of Discovery instead.

I also recently put a new paper on the arXiv; despite promising to write about my own papers when I put them out, I'm going to have to postpone an account of this one until next week. This is because I am spending the next week at a rather unique workshop in the Austrian Alps. (This is one of the perks of being a physicist, I suppose!)

Therefore today's post is going to be about mountaineering instead. It is an account I wrote of a trek I did with my father and sister almost exactly seven years ago: we crossed the main Himalayan mountain range from south to north over a mountain pass known as the Kang La (meaning 'pass of ice' in the local Tibetan dialect, I believe), and then crossed back again from north to south over another pass as part of a big loop. In doing so we also crossed from the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh into Zanskar, a province of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and then back again.

The account below was first written as a report for the A.C. Irvine Travel Fund, who partly funded this trip, and it has been available via a link on their website for several years. At the time, the Kang La was a very infrequently-used pass, in quite a remote area and only suitable for strong hikers with high-altitude mountain experience. But in the seven years since my trip it has seen quite a rise in popularity — I sometimes flatter myself that my account had something to do with raising the profile of the area!

Anyway, the account itself follows after the break. There is also a sketch map of the area I drew myself (it's hard to obtain decent cartographical maps of the area, and illegal to possess them in India due to the proximity to the border), and a few photographs to illustrate the scenery ...

Oxford Greenland Expedition

I sometimes wonder about the mix of topics I mention on this blog – is there too much physics, or not enough? Well, today's post is about something completely different: it is a straight-up publicity plug for the Oxford Greenland Expedition. This is a sea-faring and rock-climbing expedition organised by a group of students, and is exactly the kind of exciting exploratory adventure to which the title of this blog refers, so I'd like to support it as best I can. They have a fundraising page here. As I'll try to explain, I think it is a great plan, and they deserve all the support they can get!

The climbing members of the expedition team are all current or former students of Oxford University, and members of the Oxford University Mountaineering Club, whom I have known for a varying number of years (I've climbed on the same rope as many but not all of them). Between them, they have dreamt up an outrageously bold and brilliant plan for a climbing expedition in the Arctic – as the 'Objectives' page of their website puts it, their goals are:

1. Sail to Greenland!
2. Climb the Horn of Upernavik!
3. Sail north! Find an 800 m pillar! Climb it!
4. Explore for new climbs!
5. Sail back!

(The rest of the website is quite amusing too, if you poke around it.) The Horn of Upernavik appears to be a very dramatic 1000-metre-high piece of rock rising straight out of the sea near Uummannaq:

The Horn of Upernavik.

It has apparently also been the objective of several previous expeditions to climb the Horn, but none of them have succeeded. So if this team succeeds, they will be making (a small amount of) history ...

Although all are very good climbers and mountaineers, they are definitely firmly within the ranks of the enthusiastic amateurs rather than elite professionals. I think this makes the audacity of the undertaking all the more wonderful, and appealing to romantic ideals.

Incidentally, two of the members of this team (Ian Faulkner and Tom Codrington) were last year part of a different and equally inspiring expedition to Krygyzstan, during which they, along with Ian Cooper, made only the second ever free ascent of the Mirror Route or Rusyaev Route on Peak 4810, after Alex Lowe and Lynn Hill. A report of this climb and some other stuff they did was published here. So they've definitely got a track record with achieving amazing things!

Anyway, best of luck to the team in their efforts this summer!

The Shining Mountain

At this sort of time every year I find my thoughts turning to the mountains, and today for no particular reason I wanted to write a little about a particular favourite of mine. There are a few peaks around that are sometimes claimed to be the most beautiful, inspiring or aesthetically pleasing in some way — the Matterhorn and Ama Dablam are ones that are mentioned very often — but for me, nothing quite matches up to Changabang in the Garhwal Himalaya.

Instead of attempting to describe the mountain myself, let me quote from the description in a book called Scottish Himalayan Expedition, written by the mountaineer and author W. H. Murray in 1950. By all accounts, Murray was a wonderful man with a deep love of mountains, and an ability to express that love in the written word that I've never found with any other writer. This little paragraph itself is one of the main reasons that Changabang features at the top of my personal list of favourite mountains:

The nearest of the great peaks, Rishi Kot, turned to us an edge like a cutlass but black as gun-metal, whereas Changabang, its neighbour, by day the most like a vast eye-tooth fang, both in shape and colour — for its rock was a milk-white granite — Changabang in the moonlight shone tenderly as though veiled in bridal lace; at ten miles' distance seemingly as fragile as an icicle; a product of earth and sky rare and fantastic, and of liveliness unparalleled, so that unawares one's pulse leapt and the heart gave thanks — that this mountain should be as it is.

Murray's description of the entire expedition sitting out in the freezing night air, wordlessly eating their dinner while staring transfixed at this glorious summit above them, has stayed with me ever since I first read it as a teenager. In fact the entire book is excellent; if you can find it anywhere, you should read it.

Murray and his companions would have been looking at Changabang from the south-west, its most spectacular profile. Here's a photograph of it from the same angle, taken by Doug Scott in 1974:

Bonington, Haston, Hankinson and Scott admiring Changabang, 1974. Photo by Doug Scott.

The ridge on the right drops down to Shipton's Col, named after the great mountaineer and explorer who first crossed it while mapping the Nanda Devi Sanctuary in 1936. (Shipton's connection with the name of this blog was explained here.) This photo is from the expedition by a team of British and Indian climbers who made the first ascent of Changabang in 1974, by the south-east face. I recently found Doug Scott's original report of the climb in the Alpine Journal online here. It contains several other beautiful black-and-white photographs of Changabang and the surrounding peaks. Here's yet another photograph with a slightly different view:

Dougal Haston in front of the West Wall. Photo by Doug Scott.

Towering above the climber, Dougal Haston — who, you'll notice, is carefully rehydrating himself in the medically recommended manner — is the famous West Wall of Changabang, with the left skyline dropping down to the Bagini Pass (apparently that's not the real Bagini Pass; see the correction in the comments below). Despite appearances, the West Wall is actually mostly too steep for any great quantities of snow to remain on it; its colour in the photo is due, as Murray noted, to the whiteness of the granite.

The West Wall played an important role in mountaineering history: in 1976, a two-man British team — Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker — made a dramatic and revolutionary ascent of it using 'big wall' techniques that no one had previously thought were possible in the high Himalaya. It took them 25 days. Part of their training for the route in England involved spending nights hanging in hammocks inside industrial meat freezers. Boardman's book about the ascent, The Shining Mountain, is one of the all-time classics of mountaineering literature — again, if you get your hands on it, read it. In some ways Boardman was not a dissimilar writer to Murray, his passion and the simple poetry of his language shining through (please excuse the pun) on every page. After their disappearance on Everest in 1982, the Boardman-Tasker prize has been awarded every year for outstanding mountain literature.

Viewed from the north, Changabang is in some ways less impressive, as at 6864 metres high it is somewhat lower than its immediate neighbour Kalanka (6931 m). This is what it looks like from the Bagini glacier:

Kalanka (L) and Changabang (R) from the north, the Bagini Pass on the right (not quite, see the comments below!). Photo: unknown.

Less impressive in some ways maybe, but from a mountaineer's perspective the grandeur of that sweeping vertical north face is awe-inspiring. Frank Smythe described it as "a peak that falls from crest to glacier in a wall that might have been sliced in a single cut of a knife." That north face was first climbed — Alpine-style, no less! — by Andy Cave and Brendan Murphy in 1997, though Murphy sadly died in an avalanche on the descent. In a neat symmetry, Andy Cave won the Boardman-Tasker award in 2005.

For the time being, I believe the northern perspective of Changabang is the only one available to mountaineers, since the Nanda Devi Sanctuary remains closed to expeditions (Though I may be wrong on this: it is possible that partial access to the Sanctuary has recently been allowed again, and it is also possible that Changabang can be seen from the southwest from some location outside the Sanctuary).

At some point in the future, I have promised myself a visit to Changabang. Not to climb it, which would be beyond my capabilities, but merely to see it for myself, from the Bagini glacier if the Sanctuary remains closed. Until then, I must content myself with other people's photographs, and Murray's words.

LftW: 18th June

Not many physics links this week, but plenty of other interesting stuff to make up for it.

• Like most people I know, I have been following the football games at the current European Championship in Poland and Ukraine quite closely. Generally speaking the football has been very exciting, but there has also been some scrutiny of the venues for the games, and quite a bit of discussion about racism and anti-Semitism in both countries. A lot of this possibly stems from the history of the region; in The Observer, Michael Goldfarb wrote about the Ukrainian city of Lviv, formerly Polish Lwów, Russian Львов and German Lemsberg. A few days before that, The New York Review of Books had carried a review of a film about Lviv by Polish director Agnieszka Holland. Well worth reading both for some historical perspective.
• On the topic of European political geography, there was a great YouTube video which went viral a couple of weeks ago, showing a time lapse of the changing political map of Europe from AD 1000 to 2006 in about 11 minutes, with notes about the main events and battles included. If, like me, you didn't know a great deal about the history of Europe but were fascinated by little tidbits such as the Spanish and Austrian dynasties being related, it was very educational. Unfortunately it has since been taken down by the copyright holders, so I can't link it here. Instead, you can have a look at the maps on this website, showing the boundaries at intervals of every hundred years, from AD 1  to the present. A poor substitute for the video, but pretty good nevertheless.
• The British government's self-imposed austerity policy was always an unnecessary, ideologically motivated gamble, which several respectable economists opposed from the start. As it happens, events have proven their fears right, but the Conservatives have been reluctant to change course, because to do so would be openly admit their initial mistake. Nevertheless, George Osborne has been giving a big economic policy speech this week, in which Jonathan Portes catches him implicitly admitting that he was wrong and the Keynesians were right all along. There's more on this from the polite-but-scathing Simon Wren-Lewis, and the simply scathing Paul Krugman.
• Germany will be playing Greece in the quarter-finals at the Euros in a few days, so perhaps it is worth recalling a previous game between these two nations (hat tip to Elton):
• And finally, James Felce's blog post The War of The Immune Worlds at partner blog The Trenches of Discovery has made it to the semi-finals of 3 Quarks Daily's science writing competition. Worth a read!

Links for the week: 20th May

I meant to put this out yesterday, but the supernova post took a bit longer to write than I was hoping. Anyway, here's a list of interesting links.

Physics links:

• Last week I linked to a paper by Moni Bidin, Carraro, Mendez and Smith that claimed to have detected no evidence for dark matter affecting the kinematics of stars in the solar neighbourhood. I mentioned that this was not without controversy, and indeed this morning there was a new preprint by Bovy and Tremaine on the arXiv, who claim the Moni Bidin et al result is due to a key assumption that is not supported by the data. I haven't had time to read the paper yet, so I'll just quote from the abstract:

"We show that this result is incorrect and that it arises from the invalid assumption that the mean azimuthal velocity of the stellar tracers is independent of Galactocentric radius at all heights; the correct assumption -- that is, the one supported by data -- is that the circular speed is independent of radius in the mid-plane."

• Suppose you have three upturned cups, and you are 90% certain that there is a ball under one of them. You turn two of them over and find no ball — how confident are you that the ball is under the third cup? Philip Gibbs gives a nice little argument illustrating Bayes' theorem, and uses it to argue that we shouldn't give up on SUSY yet.

• At Cross Sections, Rhys demonstrates that although neutrinos don't travel faster than light, they don't go a whole lot slower either.
• Last week would have been Richard Feynman's 94th birthday. Quantum Diaries carried a nice birthday tribute, and here's another, featuring a video of the great man himself.

Other links:

• The Guardian carried a pretty shocking report, called The wrong Carlos: how Texas sent an innocent man to his death.
• In the New York Review of Books, Jared Diamond reviews a new book by Acemoglu and Robinson on what makes countries rich or poor. Excellent reading.
• I recently discovered Simon Wren-Lewis's economics blog Mainly Macro, which I can highly recommend. Wren-Lewis is a professor at Oxford, in fact at my old college, Merton (though that isn't why I'm recommending his blog, and I don't think I ever even met him while I was there). Anyway, he asks Is it all Gordon Brown's fault? He also has several other interesting and well-argued pieces on economic policy here, here, here and here.
• Back in the Guardian, George Monbiot on more myths about marriage.