Around 2000, after I had been working in Australia for 6 months, several friends came to Sydney airport to see me off back to Britain. They all commiserated with me , having to return to such a dreadful place where it rained all the time and the sun never came out (to say nothing of the awful food). ‘Wait a moment’ I thought to myself ‘I love living there’.
That would have been the end of it, but then the flight was delayed for 9 bloody hours. So I sat in the lounge and pondered the question : “Which is the best location on Earth to live — geographically speaking?”
I tried to be objective and to list the most desirable features one by one. Six weeks later I had a very clear and surprising answer — Britain. What delayed me most was the matter of climate — which led to a fascinating detour into the subject of ‘Human Thermodynamics’ which I had to more or less invent for myself.
I was shocked by the answer. I had suspected that the final choice would alight on somewhere close to the Mediterranean, in Southern France perhaps, or Tuscany. Not so; it was clearly and unequivocally Britain, not even Ireland, and I have never had cause to change my mind since.
Of course we are talking entirely about geography here, not history, politics or culture — which are all far too subjective.
If you want to see why Britain is so preferred, and unique, take a look at:
We were all suckered in by the myth that America joined Britain in WWII to ‘Save Western Democracy’. Instead it appears that America was suckered into Pearl Harbour by the KGB — which wanted to release Russia’s Manchurian army to save Moscow from the Nazis — which it did.
What America really wanted to do was make vast amounts of money out of that world war, as it had out of the first, by picking both Britain’s and Russia’s pockets. Which it did. How else did America emerge so humungously rich from that war, and Britain so raggedly poor? Britain was still paying off its war debts to the US (for the First WW!) as late as 2015 whilst America’s total Marshall Aid Plan to Britain, so much trumpeted, amounted to barely one per cent of Britain’s losses. And at Bretton Woods in 1944 America forced Britain to give up Imperial Preferences, the basis of its economic success in the 1930s. It’s no accident that the almighty dollar has ruled the financial world ever since.
Then America shamelessly picked Britain’s brains to become, what it certainly was not before — an industrial superpower. Amongst many other gems, it got its hands on: the Cavity Magnetron, the Atomic Bomb, Anti-biotics, the jet engine, solid-state amplifiers (which led to the transistor), Electronic computing, Operational Research, sophisticated Code-breaking, the Proximity fuse, Asymmetric gears…… All Britain asked in return. was the Nordern bombsight — which Roosevelt personally refused to them for what he said were “political reasons”.
In 1946 the US passed The McMahon Act, depriving Britain of access to the atomic bomb — which Britain had largely taught the Americans how to build. It was a foul act of treachery, though we couldn’t say so at the time, which left Western Europe at the mercy of Stalin’s vast tank army poised on the plains of Germany, and of America’s goodwill. So poor Britain had to hastily cobble together a deterrent of its own.
When I was researching The Battle of the Atlantic for my forthcoming book about that titanic encounter (“Strangle“) I became more and more puzzled by the US Navy’s enigmatic role in it. One could even ask whose side they were on. Roosevelt’s stooge, and head of the USN, the incompetent Admiral Ernest J King, made no bones about hating the British, and without reason or warning pulled his forces out of the North Atlantic just as the crux of the battle was approaching. There is still much to ponder on here.
So Britain won the war, but America won the peace.
Of course America was perfectly entitled to an anti-British foreign policy, and to extract vast sums out of Britain if it could and which it did. After all there were large numbers of Irish, German and Italian Americans who had no good reason to want a British victory. Before Cburchill got rid of him, Joe Kennedy, the US ambassador to London, and JFK’s father, did all he could to get Britain to yield to Hitler. But it seems to me that the Brits need to wake up, forget all that hogwash which emanates from Hollywood, and stop talking nonsense about a “Special Relationship”. That was a piece of pure Churchillian rodomontade.
I have to admit that all this rather shocked me when I looked into it, because personally I owe America a lot and have some very good friends over there. And I would be the first to admit that it is controversial. But almost all my sources here are American. You can find references to them in a chapter entitled ‘The Baleful Shadow of America’ from my book History of the Brits, which is here:
Morgan, the protagonist in the Written in the Stars quartet, and I, have spent our working lives studying Galaxies. This is the first one he saw when he was looking through the 36-inch telescope at Steward Observatory atop Kitt Peak in Arizona, back in 1969.
Spiral Galaxy NGC 7331 in the constellation of Pegasus, at top. Courtesy, Vicent Peris, University of Valencia.
This particular image was taken much later with a huge telescope 3.5 meters in diameter fitted with an ultra-sensitive electronic camera integrating the light for two whole hours. So imagine how little if anything Morgan would see with the naked eye which integrates for all of a tenth of a second, through his much smaller telescope: virtually nothing at all. That’s why he struggled for half an hour to even convince himself that it must be there, and why he felt that studying galaxies could become the lifetime challenge he was looking for. And so it came to be.
NGC 7331 just happened to be the nearest Spiral overhead his telescope at the time. All the spiky stars are stars in our own galaxy the Milky Way, just hundreds of light-years away, while the spiral lies 45 Million light years beyond them, yet is one of the closest such giant spirals to us.It is about a hundred thousand light-years across! The smaller galaxies lower down are even farther off. Morgan was to spend most of his astronomical life studying galaxies whose light had set out towards him when dinosaurs still ruled the Earth, and some so far away that the Sun and Earth didn’t even exist when their light was emitted.
Even now we know little about these beasts; they are full of mysteries. For instance they spin so fast that they ought to fly to bits. So what holds them together; certainly not the stars we can see in them — their gravitational force would be far too weak. Some astronomers mutter about “Dark Matter”, but what is that, and why have we detected no sign of it after 50 years of searching with every ingenious means we can think of? Then we have no idea how galaxies formed, not if the Universe is really expanding, for their infant stages would have been far too fragile to survive the Big Bang. Galaxies remain a challenge for any young person who would like to spend their lives trying to understand what is out there.
Hard as it was to see, it turns out that NGC 7331 is one of the most visible galaxies there are. Over the course of 50 years Morgan and his colleagues were to find much much dimmer specimens using radio waves instead of light. The next montage shows some typical specimens first located with the Parkes Radio Telescope, then imaged in visible colours with the Sloan optical Telescope in New Mexico, both absolutely state of the art instruments. Its worth studying this montage:
Galaxies first found independently of their light signal in the radio, then imaged optically in several colours (Courtesy Julianne Dalcanton, University if Washington, Seattle).
Believe it or not every postage-stamp contains a galaxy, some so dim one can barely spot them. This illustrates the “Visibility of Galaxies” problem which Morgan discovered in that caravan on the Teifi estuary back in 1975 [See my book Against The Fall of Night]. The problem is that, dark as it appears, the night sky is not absolutely dark so that any galaxy dimmer than our sky would be invisible. And why not? Could most of the structure of the Universe be hidden from sight? Morgan, Cotteridge, Cockle and other astronomers spent their careers wrangling over that question. There’s a great deal to think about here.
Broadly speaking there are two types of giant galaxy, Spirals as above, and Ellipticals. As we can see next, Ellipticals look like giant swarms of bees ( actually very old stars).
The Coma Cluster of Galaxies centred on the supergiant Elliptical NGC 4889 taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, courtesy ESA/NASA.
Ellipticals are just as mysterious as Spirals but in somewhat different ways. For instance NGC 4889 seen here fades imperceptibly into the sky; so where does it end and therefore how big and how massive is it? And why are Giant Ellipticals only found in Clusters? And where have the cold gas and the young blue stars gone that light up Spirals? And why do some of them, like this one, have colossal Black Holes in their cores? And how do these giant Clusters hold together when the gravitational forces required are hundreds of times too weak , if only visible material is responsible. Once again we run into speculations about “Dark Matter” which sound a bit like The Emperor’s New Clothes to me. In other words we are mired in mysteries which challenge anyone with Curiosity. By the way, this colossus is about 300 Million light years away, its light having set out towards us even before Dinosaurs evolved and 50 million years before the great Permian-Triassic extinction, which wiped out 90 percent of the the species on Earth. Yet in astronomical terms it’s almost next door, only seven times as far away as our Spiral friend NGC 7331.
We said most galaxies dwell in Clusters containing anything between a few and tens of thousands. Here is a very large Cluster Abell 1689, 2 Billion, not Million, light years away:
Galaxy Cluster Abell 1689 imaged with the Hubble Space Telescope (Courtesy ESA/NASA)
The further away we search , the further back in time, the greater cosmic mysteries become. For instance what you can actually see here is about one per cent of the Mass actually present. We know that because the galaxies in the cluster are whizzing about so fast that the cluster would have dispersed unless there are overwhelming amounts of “Dark Matter” holding it together [Or else there’s something even more mysterious going on.] This dramatic tendency of galaxies to cluster made it very difficult indeed for Tom Morgan and his friends to find “Hidden Galaxies” because the hidden ones would tend to get lost amid a crowd of ‘Visibles’, requiring great precision to get at the truth.
This, believe it or not, is the identical galaxy NGC 7331 to the one at the top of this post, though the image is flipped left to right..I have put it in for several reasons. First it is in colour because it was made up from several images taken through different colour filters with camera WFC- 3 ( Morgan & co.) on Hubble . This colour information paints a very different picture of the galaxy, which is evidently choked in smoke, so that much of it is hidden. Using the old photographic plates little of this was evident and astronomers were convinced galaxies were transparent. Morgan was practically the first astronomer to realise they were not, largely because he had early access to one of the first electronic cameras. Then there is the atmosphere which blocks off all the ultraviolet, and most of the infra-red radiation included in this picture taken from Space. The general point is that our understanding of the universe is very much constrained by the instruments we have to study it. Space astronomy has widened our spectrum by more than a billion and it may take generations to understand the implications. It’s all too easy to rush to judgement, and to see only what we want to see. Copyright ESA/NASA
When we professional astronomers talk to the public we tend, for sociological reasons, to emphasise what we do know, as against what we do not. Now that I’m retired I can admit that most of the time, at least in extragalactic astronomy, we have little idea of what is really going on. Yes there are fools only too ready to rush in with half-baked explanations such as “Dark Matter” or “Dark Energy”, but I doubt that many will stand the test of time because they ignore Ockham’s Razor, a very profound and vital principle of Common Sense [See my book Thinking For Ourselves or a post on this site entitled Fuzzy Thinking and Ockham’s Razor]. In the mean time they not only rob us of mystery and wonder but they can hold up the search for deeper truths. For instance the invention of fictional “Land Bridges” held back the discovery of Continental Drift by a century.
I hope this post encourages readers, especially the young at heart, to retain their sense of mystery because, as Einstein put it : ” The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science”.
You can look up hundreds of more wondrous images of galaxies by going either to stsci.edu, NASA’s Space Telescope institute, or eso.org the European Southern Observatory which runs the world’s largest optical telescope (The ‘VLT’) in the Chilean Andes. But beware of beautiful coloured images which look like pizza advertisements; real galaxies don’t look anything like that, they’re far more subtle and infinitely more difficult to decode.
My arresting fascination with bird flight started in 1968 while crossing the Atlantic by the cheapest possible means — an old rust-bucket called The Aurelia. To discourage the passengers from eating, the captain would steer the vessel from one weather system to the next. During one such diversion I was amazed to see a tiny warbler, with its characteristic swooping flight, appearing and disappearing amongst the gigantic waves. Eventually he landed on the ships rail and we got him as far as Long Island in a shoe-box. Alas he never made the final lap, falling dead as he flew up and off towards the shore we could already scent.
As a scientist I felt I had to understand Christopher’s ( we called him after Columbus) amazing feat, Even if he didn’t succeed some of his kind do. How could such a tiny ounce of pluck and feathers make it three thousand miles across the vasty deep? I taught myself aerodynamics, took up gliding and exploited my occupation as an astronomer to watch birds performing aerial miracles in all corners of the globe: Condors in the Andes, Albatrosses off New Zealand, Siberian Storks in Africa, Frigate Birds in the Caribbean, Terns on the Barrier Reef, Sandhill Cranes in New Mexico, Vultures in the Caucusus, Ravens above the Black Mountains, Shearwaters from Skomer, gulls theramalling in front of my glider half way across Britain in search of………
Eventually (it took ten years) the penny dropped as I was washing up after Christmas dinner: The Christopher Equation. How shocking it was, how beautiful…. how totally unexpected! There is a taster on simple aerodynamics, including a derivation of the Christopher Equation at
Above is a Great Wandering Albatross circling a ship far down in the Southern Ocean. With its 12 foot wingspan it can fly tirelessly at 60 mph without beating a wing .Surely it is one of the true wonders of the world. It is being wiped out by Long-line fishermen who couldn’t care a f**k. After all there’s no money in Albatrosses. Copyright Mike Hill/getty images.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
When one sets off on a quest in Science one can have no idea where it might eventually lead. One day I dropped in to the magnificent Natural History Museum in New York. There, hanging from the ceiling, was the fossil skeleton of a pterosaur twenty feet across, with bones like an ox. By then I knew enough avian aerodynamics to know that it couldn’t have possibly flown. Never, never never! Physics and physiology were all against it. Why then did it have colossal wings and vestigial hooks for legs? Here was another mystery profound which was to lead eventually to the idea of Recyclable Oil; an idea which could eventually save this Earth.
I couldn’t get anyone to listen. The idea of Recyclable Oil was just too outlandish, especially when it was linked to the even madder idea of Pterodactyl’s Blood. And yet every year since, palaeontologists have been digging up ever larger pterosaurs in Texas, some ten metres in wingspan. There has to be a scientific explanation. I sometimes think Christopher was trying to whisper a secret in my ear, a secret that might save the natural world, and all those wonderful species, from the Orang Utang to the Great Wandering Albatross, that Man is harrying to extinction.
If you are interested in bird flight, and its wondrous implications, you might try my novel Pterodactyl’s Blood (Amazon paperback, 2020 £!2.99). It’s described elsewhere on this site.
My son son Mathias and I have tried to present our ideas, in the form of scientific papers and seminars to the scientific establishment — but they won’t listen. The problem is really one of academic burrowing. No academic presently has the disparate mix of skills, ranging from aerodynamics to palaentology, to even referee our papers. But that’s no new thing. Creeping in between existing specialisms has often been the only way for science to advance. But while we’re struggling with that you can look at one of our papers at:
Until my family moved to the city when I was ten I had never been in a library. Thereafter Kings Norton Public Library became the theatre of all my dreams and ambitions; real teenage life in Birmingham seeming tame by comparison. Books became my wings and I soared off like a young albatross in search of its destiny. One day, so I dreamed, I would become an Explorer, a World Traveller and, of course, ‘The ‘Great Novelist’. Then I had a stroke of luck , though it certainly didn’t feel like that at the time. At thirteen I was diagnosed with a “ progressive and incurable disease of the spine” and incarcerated in a ‘hospital for incurable children’ deep in the countryside. There I aged 30 years in 6 months and suffered a mid-life crisis early enough to really do something about it. Having had my dreams so nearly snatched away I emerged from hospital implacably resolved to live them out. Although cured, the problem was that I was too late: I learned that every bloody corner of the Globe had been explored already ! Then Sputnik came to the rescue. To Hell with the Earth; I would explore the Universe instead. And so, eventually, it came to pass. The dreamy boy became the dreamy astronomer who travelled the world in order to observe his beloved galaxies from remote mountain-tops from The Warumbungles to the Russian Caucasus. But even they weren’t high enough and the dreamy astronomer became the luckiest man alive when he was invited to join the team that would design, build and eventually use The Hubble Space Telescope. What an adventure that would turn out to be: disputes, disasters, surprises and discoveries the equal of any experienced by Marco Polo or Ferdinand Magellan. That Space Telescope saga is a tale that has to be told, and could only be told convincingly, by one of the lucky crew. But life was now far too hectic and thrilling to leave any time to do more than keep a diary of the events. Indeed the voyage turned out to be far more exciting than the romantic boy had ever dreamed in that quiet library long, long ago: a beautiful princess rescued from behind the Iron Curtain; a tiny warbler whispering profundities in his ear in mid-Atlantic; the secret of the Scientific Method appearing down on a coral reef off Tonga… you couldn’t make it up; nobody could. And yet it all really happened; it did.
Eventually however the frenetically busy astronomer semi-retired with his princess and sat down to write… and write … and write. The intended Great Novel became instead a saga of four – the quartet “Written in the Stars” (WITS). It had to be semi-fictional because a factual account of a voyage lasting fifty years would be far too tiresome to read. Elisions had to be made, shortcuts taken, complexity simplified, continuity of character and narrative maintained, while the true cast of thousands was pared down to a manageable caravan of family, friends, colleagues, rivals and enemies travelling through time together. Anyway the story insisted on writing itself. Year by year the characters took over control, while the cheeky Imps which sit on every author’s shoulder intervened from time to time and sometimes couldn’t be denied. However I did manage to insist that at least the Scientific side of the venture should be utterly faithful to the facts. In any case why fictionalise that science when the facts exceeded anything that fantasy could conjure up?
Prospective readers might be put off by books with a scientific background, imagining that they will be full of Frightfully Clever nerds doing Frightfully Clever things. But mine definitely are not. I am not FC myself (failed 11 plus) while, in my experience, successful astronomers are exceptional only in their outsized curiosity, their enjoyment of their occupation, their dogged tenacity and perhaps their search for some meaning to unusually obsessive lives. As the physicist Steven Weinberg put it: “The effort to understand the Universe is one of the few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy”. Being Frightfully Clever simply doesn’t cut it. However I do confess to a fascination with characters who do, or try to do, very hard things, whether it be climbing a precipice, rescuing a spacecraft or operating in an almost hopeless case. So there are many such in my books. I suppose the fascination here is that they too are explorers, but of the far deeps of the human heart and mind, looking down there for connections that the rest of us up here cannot see. Thus Henri Poincaré, the true inventor of Relativity, confessed that he did the best of his very great works when he was fast asleep.
Although the saga took a dozen years to write I am almost ashamed to admit that I really enjoyed the process and was sad when it came to an end. I hope that enjoyment comes across to the reader as something we can both share. My iconic novel is “The Wind in the Willows”– in which a group of friends explore their world, have adventures together and enjoy a great deal of reflective fun. Isn’t there a bit of Mole, Ratty, Badger and Toad in all of us ? There certainly is in me – mostly Toad I regret to say. And I can assure you, having done a great deal of both, that simply mucking about in telescopes is even more fun than simply mucking about in boats.
My third boyhood ambition was to Travel to wild and romantic places, and observational astronomy allows one to do that in spades. Practically anywhere on Earth is on the way home to Britain from Chile, New South Wales or The Cape. So I indulged myself and in WITS include many adventures and encounters which took place in faraway places such as Cherkessia, the Rub al Khalid, the Bay of Fires, Garafia, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Castel Gandolfo, the Masai Mara, Ootacamund, Immarettia … By contrast most of us also have a profound need for a territory of our own. Far too many Brits simply do not appreciate how bloody lucky they are in their home land. Having been ‘nearly everywhere’ I contend that our island has no superior as a territory in which to live, especially Wales where I come from and reside. I have thus tried to convey, throughout WITS, that widespread sense of ‘longing for home’, which the Welsh call ‘Hiraeth’ . If we are not proud of our home territories, we won’t look after them properly, as we desperately need to do, especially now so much of the world is rapidly going to hell.
I am an old man now, born in 1937, with eight books on Amazon, rather rushed out during 2020/1 when Covid 19 struck. The next big challenge is to get anybody to read them. I am convinced that one book could change the world (‘Thinking for Ourselve’s or TFO), optimistic that five could entertain it (WITS & Strangle), and hopeful that one (‘Pterodactyl’s Blood’ , PB ) might save some of those wonderful species that mankind is hurrying towards extinction. I’m afraid that I’m hopeless at marketing – indeed feel it is a faintly shameful activity – especially when one is trying to peddle one’s own stories, as here. But I’m bound to try – otherwise what was the point of ever writing them down? The Odds can’t be good but… who knows?
VIDEOS If you want to see the author talking about Cosmology and galaxies there is a 45 minute Youtube video of him being interviewed by the Physicist and Author Alexander Unzicker about 3 years ago at
The Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales Australia after it had been fitted with the new Multi-beam receiver system designed to pick up the Hydrogen signals from galaxies with about a thousand times the speed of any previous instrument. It has 13 separate dual-beams and 26 receivers cooled down close to absolute zero (minus 273 degrees C) up in the receiver cabin which is the size of a small house. Up there the very weak signals are mixed with a maser and the lower frequency output signals are sent down to the tower where they are processed by specially designed and very powerful digital correlators to look for the characteristic 21- centimetre wavelength signal of Cosmic Hydrogen. With it Morgan and his Australian colleagues surveyed two thirds of the sky and found over 5,000 such sources among which they hoped to find Dark Galaxies.[See Written in the Stars quartet of novels under ‘My Books’ Category]
The Dish has a romantic background. It was built by Taffy Bowen who, together with Hanbury-Brown, devised the night-fighter radar system which put an end to the Nazi blitzes in 1942. Starting at Bawdsey Manor in 1936 they devised means to cram radar systems into aircraft — which was fiendishly difficult to do in those days when radar waves were 10 metres long. But somehow, supported by Air Marshall Dowding, the head of RAF Fighter Command, they eventually did so.
In 1941 Bowen was sent to the US with his notorious ‘Suitcase Full of Secrets’ to teach the Americans how to build effective radars [See my book ‘History of the Brits‘ for that story ]. Later Bowen came to Sydney to direct the CSIRO Radiophysics Lab and the grateful Americans gave him half the money to build the Parkes dish which was completed in 1961. In 1962 Cyril Hazard from the University of Sydney used it to locate the first Quasar when the radio source 3C-273 passed behind the Moon. The disappearance and re-appearance of the radio-signal enabled Hazard to get a very precise position for it — which corresponded to that of a moderately bright star. An optical spectrum of that star showed it to have a high redshift and so to be an enormous distance away. The first Quasar Stellar Radio Source, or ‘Quasar’ had been discovered — starting off a whole new branch of Astrophysics — leading eventually to the discovery that they are Super Massive Black Holes.
Hanbury-Brown — after whom the term “Boffin” was coined, also made his name later as an astronomer in Australia. He it was who completed the night-fighter radar system which did for the Blitz and saved Britain [He features extensively in my Second World War scientific novel ‘Strangle‘ described in ‘My Books’ Category] .
The main weakness of radio telescopes is the non-existence of a ‘radio-camera’ which can look in more than one direction at once. The big box you can see at the focus was the first successful attempt at one. It has got 26 receivers looking in 13 adjacent but different directions at once — which allowed us to survey two thirds of the entire sky for Hydrogen gas in deep space — in the hope of locating Hidden Galaxies (see our Post ‘Hidden Galaxies‘). Unfortunately we then totally cocked things up by mis-identifying all the 5000 such sources we found with conspicuous optical galaxies , which is all too easy to do when galaxies are so highly clustered together in Space. Actually many of the Parkes sources are indeed dim or dark galaxies or gas clouds. Astronomy is hard….but very exciting!
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