Uppsala domkyrka ska få en ny orgel nästa år och i samband med detta behöver man bygga en ny läktare i norra delen av kyrkan. Som vi tidigare har berättat har man där under golvet inte bara hittat en massa utspridda ben från 1300-talet och framåt där under golvet, utan man har även funnit ett intakt gravvalv från slutet på 1600-talet.

Joakim Kjellberg, arkeologen som leder utgrävningarna, är av flera anledningar rätt säker på att det är Uppsalaastronomen Anders Spole som begravdes där den 1 November 1699. För det första finns det ett epitafium ganska högt upp på domkyrkans vägg ungefär ovanför graven som hänvisar till honom. För det andra har man en gammal karta från 1700-talet över gravar i domkyrkan. Spole finns med där men den angivna platsen stämmer inte helt. Dock stämmer läget i förhållande till andra gravar i närheten. Dessutom har man med hjälp av Spoles ättlingar fått information om vem ur hans familj han skulle ha begravts med och det stämmer bra med antalet kistor (minst tre) som man kan se genom ett titthål in i gravkammaren. Hundra procent säker kan man inte vara att det är Anders Spoles grav utan att öppna den helt. Detta kommer dock antagligen inte göras.

Förra veckan visades utgrävningar upp för pressen och vi från Populär Astronomi var på plats (se bilden nedan). Den 16:e september är det enda tillfället där allmänheten får tillgång till utgrävningsområdet i samband med en festmässa. Då får man även chans att titta i den nyupptäckta källaren några meter ifrån Spoles grav. Denna var mest fylld med byggmaterial från arbeten i slutet på 1800-tal och som kommer antagligen användas för att gravsätta de utspridda äldre benen av odentifierade individer.

Utgrävningsomåde bakom Uppsala domkyrkans norra entré. I mitten syns Anders Spoles grav. Under den lösa stenen på ovansidan valvet finns det ett titthål in i graven, genom vilket flera kistor syns. Mannen i röd tröja är en ättling till Anders Spole. Ben från flera tiotal människor har hittas i området som syns framför och vid sidan om Spoles grav. De förvaras i kistorna bakom utgrävningsomådet. För att se fler foton, klicka på bilden. (Bild: Thomas Marquart)

Läs mer om utgrävningen i UNT och hos Radio Uppland.

Imorgon bitti åker jag ner till Kanarieöarna, närmare sagt till ön _La Palma_, för att använda teleskopet NOT under två nätters tid. En kollega från Stockholm och jag ska observera ett par stycken galaxer.

Jag kommer att blogga en hel del därifrån för att ge ett närmare intryck om hur det går till. Alla inlägg om detta kommer dyka upp här under

"http://thomasmarquart.net/observationer":http://thomasmarquart.net/observationer

och det finns även ett eget "RSS-Flöde":http://thomasmarquart.net/observationer/rss.

I will attend the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Prague next week and blog from there. This will by nature be a very short-lived blog, so please help spread the word about it quickly and maybe link to it, if you have a website.

Note: This blog is no longer updated, but instead continued at apparentbrightness.net.

Because they have lost interest in "real life", just like we will soon. Maybe.

For the time being, I am on La Palma and carry out astronomical observations at the Nordic Optical Telescope.

The image below shows part of the mirror of the nearby MAGIC telescope. The other images that I have taken so far can also be seen and this gallery will grow with time.

I just read this excellent article in which three renowned scientists explain their view on science and its relation to beliefs and religion. Very good read!

Yesterday evening was the first clear night since weeks here in Uppsala. I took the opportunity to spend a few hours at my institute's old building where the old double refractor still resides. It is a beautiful instrument from 1892 and I although I have been here for more than three years, I had not made it to the old observatory until a few weks ago. There are regular shows for the public and since I am going to take over some of these from next week, yesterday was a good opportunity to practice the usage.

The point is that all modern professional telescopes that I have used so far (like the NOT or the VLT) let you concentrate on your science and of course they can find the objects for you. You simply put your coordinates into the computer and say "go there". As you can imagine, this is not the case with this old telescope, so you have to convert the general coordinates into your local coordinates that depend on your location and on the time and then move the telescope by hand until the scales show the right value.

That can easily be done if a clock that shows sidereal time is available, but I took the lazy way and brought my laptop with xephem on it, an astronomical software that can show you the sky and does the cordinate transformation for you.

Since it was near full moon yesterday, that was a prime target. Especially when looking at the border between light and shadow, one can impressively see the craters' three-dimensional structure. Second most prominent target right now is Mars, which was in opposition recently and is still very bright. In addition and before we froze too much, we looked at the Plejades and the Andromeda Galaxy. I am looking forward to having people and kids up there and show them things and explain what they see...

Ok, it seems that I survived the crash of the harddisk at work (see last post) without data loss. Too good to be true? You're right, of course: yesterday, another harddisk crashed, this time at home. In addition, there is some problem with the DNS after they worked on the network. I did not have the nerve to have a look into all this yet, since I was busy preparing my talk today for the Swedish Astronomer Days. The title of my short presentation was "The Dynamics of Blue Compact Galaxies: Gas and Stars" and you can have a look at my slides if you are interested. I had a significant hangover after yesterday's dinner and subsequent pub and I am still not sure if that made my talk better or worse than it would have been otherwise. At least I was relaxed and not nervous at all. :-)

I just stumbled upon Feynman on Wikiquote. My favourite one:

I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things; by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose— which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me.

Religion is on some kind of renaissance nowadays isn't it? Be it islamic fundamentalists or christian ones - the topic is all over the media and has been for quite a while now. The movement in the USA even seems to be strong enough to threaten science education (im particular evolution) and to make scientists fight against attacks from religious agitators. See here or here for two of the better known science blogs.

The initiative by these people to antagonise pseudo-scientific rubbish is surely to be welcomed and I certainly do not want to diminish their work, anyway, I am quite amazed that this is necessary at all. Shouldn't religion be on it's way to be forgotten and just remembered as what it was - a collection of funny ideas on how the world works (in lack of better understanding) and a means to find comfort for those that need it?

I admit, counting world-wide, it is probably a small minority of people that would agree with me, that there is no god and that all religion is invented by man. This does not make believers right, does it? Mind that I do not distinguish between the different religions - as soon as they propagate some kind of dogma that everyone has to believe because "it's right", they fall into my classification.

Just to make this clear, here comes a differentiation anyway: Of course, I do not care about what the private beliefs of people are and how they even can be helpful to many to find support in our far-from-perfect world. The kind of religion that I want to talk about is the offensive one, the one that evangelises, the one that propagates beliefs and teachings that oppose critical thinking and that try to revert the Age of Enlightenment.

I think Rushdie is right with this excellent article (I read it in German) in saying that religion is far from being a friendly player in the game and that it is to be battled against on every occasion.

For myself there is no question that religion is utterly useless nowadays and that little good and much more bad stems from it. I would also consider it a waste of time to even think or write about it, would there not be that frightening possibility that man's stupidity could win over reason. That may not happen.

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics has just been announced. From the little information that is given, it seems that the laureate's research is in Quantum Optics. During their stay in Stockholm to recieve the prize on December 10, the laureates usually come to Uppsala as well, to give a lecture just downstairs from here. Very practical.

I had been thinking about writing about this a while ago, when I got a phone call with exactly this question (sitting in an astronomy department makes you get all kinds of phone calls), but I then forgot about it. Over at Cosmic Variance, they have done it for me :-). Baseline is: you can choose any coordinate system you want and that you find convenient, also ones in which the earth is at rest and everything else rotates around it.

Although I stated at the end of my little scorcher yesterday, that I will not have time to listen to the defence of the thesis that I found highly suspicious, I just invested half an hour anyway.

First of all, I was surprised to know the author. She took a course together with me last spring about ohw to give talks and things like that. In my opinion, her talk then was as suspicious as her thesis is now (although people disagreed with me on that then), so maybe I should have remembered her.

Anyway, thanks to the fact the she is a good speaker, her talk gave an overview on what she was trying to accomplish. My main points of critics however remain. She even said herself that this "wholeness" she talks about is some extra layer connected to the explicitly measurable world by some unmeasurable process. Well, then I am sorry to say that this is philosophy at best (and esoteric at worst) but not science.

She claims that there is some connection to physics, in particular she questions the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Physics and made some vague comments about entropy increase. When the opponent started with his questions, he pinpointed exactly my argument immediately: Do any new physically measurable things fall out of her work? How does the double slit experiment look in her wholeness picture. She had no real answer - she claimed that standard physics and measurements represent only the "trivial case" in her picture and that one has to develop a new definition of measurement in her wholeness picture. Something that she had not done, unsurprisingly.

In spite of her being a very nice person (judging from the few times I met her), I have to remain at my scathing criticism, namely that her thesis most probably has nothing whatsoever to do with science, but instead is a collection of philosophical ideas that one may find interesting or safely ignore. Then again, I haven't read the whole thesis and my judgement may be rash, so feel free to comment if you disagree...

Ok, here is a difficult one: I got this email the other day that invited to join a PhD defense tomorrow morning. The title is "Physics from Wholeness - Dynamical Totality as a Conceptual Foundation for Physical Theories". Now that is interesting, isn't it? To be honest, it sounds dubious to me, to say the least. Some kind of strange mixture of philosophy and physics which usually does not work very well. I got the whole thesis from here and tried to read the abstract.

I cite the first two sentences: Motivated by reductionism's current inability to encompass the quantum theory we explore an indivisible and dynamical wholeness as an underlying foundation for physics. After reviewing the role of wholeness in the quantum theory we set a philosophical background aiming at introducing an ontology, based on a dynamical wholeness.

This proved me right in the sense that the author tries to do science by mixing philosophical terms into it. By skipping through the text and finding chapters on philosophy and the like I find myself reconfirmed. Now my personal opinion is that, although philosophy is fun sometimes and may even not be a waste of time, it has nothing to do with science and cannot help it in any way. After all, it boils down to falsifiability of any theory and I doubt that any new scientific insights can be gained from this thesis. The use of advanced mathematical terms does not necessarily make the whole thing more correct or scientific.

Nevertheless, it may well contribute to philosophy but fact is that this thesis is submitted from the local department of engineering science and some well known theoretical physicists from here are mentioned in the acknowledgements.

Please keep in mind that I may be totally wrong with my obliterative judgement. Either the subject is too advanced for my ignorant mind, or it really is crap. Go judge for yourself.

Unfortunately, I won't have time to attend the defense tomorrow morning...

These People claim in their paper that the miniscule differences in time that each computer has compared to others can be used to identify machines no matter now far and independent of NAT, provider etc. I heard of this from an article in the German tech-magazine c't and if it is true and can be implemented in a practical and usable way then this raises severe privacy issues as well as security concerns (think about finding out how many machines are behind a router or about discriminating virtual from real computers).