Atmospheric Calorimetry above 1019^{19} eV: Shooting Lasers at the Pierre Auger Cosmic-Ray Observatory

The Pierre Auger Cosmic-Ray Observatory uses the earth's atmosphere as a calorimeter to measure extensive air-showers created by particles of astrophysical origin. Some of these particles carry joules of energy. At these extreme energies, test beams are not available in the conventional sense. Yet understanding the energy response of the observatory is important. For example, the propagation distance of the highest energy cosmic-rays through the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) is predicted to be strong function of energy. This paper will discuss recently reported results from the observatory and the use of calibrated pulsed UV laser "test-beams" that simulate the optical signatures of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. The status of the much larger 200,000 km$^3$ companion detector planned for the northern hemisphere will also be outlined.Comment: 6 pages, 11 figures XIII International Conference on Calorimetry in High Energy Physic

A Model of Creation? Scott, Sidney and Du Bartas

The copyright for this article belongs jointly to the Sidney Journal and to the author, and the Sidney Journal is willing to make the essay accessible via an institutional repository.William Scott’s translation from Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine, which follows Scott's treatise in the surviving manuscript, is an essential counterpart to the Model of Poesy. As well as being a practical demonstration of Scott’s technical principles, the translation provides the most immediate and enriching literary context for the Model’s arguments about the purpose of poetry. Shared images of making (e.g. gestation, architecture and agriculture) that describe the creation of poems in the Model and the creation of the world in Du Bartas evoke the analogy between the poetic maker and divine Maker, which Sidney had explored in the Defence. Yet the Model’s more positive assessment of the role of human reason in poetic composition contrasts with Du Bartas’ insistence on the poet’s dependence on prior creative acts. So how alike for Scott are composing a poem and creating the world? How far is a Model of Poesy also a Model of Creation? By pursuing interpretative questions like these, the Du Bartas translation emerges as a key resource for assessing how Scott wrote the Model, what makes his arguments distinctive, and how he assimilated insights from contemporary writers, especially Sidney’s account of the poet as maker

Recreation and William Alexander’s Doomes-day (1637)

Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC

The Natural History of The Silkewormes and their Flies

Images published with permission of The British Library Board (434.f.10), the Huntington Library and Proquest. Further reproduction is prohibited.Images published with permission of The British Library Board (434.f.10), the Huntington Library and Proquest. Further reproduction is prohibited.Images published with permission of The British Library Board (434.f.10), the Huntington Library and Proquest. Further reproduction is prohibited.Images published with permission of The British Library Board (434.f.10), the Huntington Library and Proquest. Further reproduction is prohibited.This study examines the overlap between natural philosophy and humanist imitation in two works by Thomas Moffet: his reference work Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalum Theatrum (written c.1589) and his poem The Silkewormes, and their Flies (1599). Both works draw extensively on contemporary and classical authors in order to create intertextual collages that look backwards towards the natural unity found in the Garden of Eden. This leads me to argue that The Silkewormes’ compositional style shares more in common with Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur Du Bartas's Sepmaine (1578, 1584) than with Virgilian didactic poetry. I consider throughout Elizabethan notions of authority, composition and originality, and conclude that Silkewormes merits critical attention for its skilful synthesis of diverse material in creating a work appropriate for Mary Herbert and her household at Wilton.Arts and Humanities Research Counci

Alternative Presents and Speculative Futures: Designing fictions through the extrapolation and evasion of product lineages.

The core question addressed by this invited keynote and conference paper is how fictions are designed to negotiate, critique and realise the multiplicity of possible new technological futures. Focusing on methods, processes and strategies the presentation initially describes how things/technologies become products, employing the perspective of domestication to describe the transition from extraordinary to everyday. This development suggests a product history, a traceable lineage that goes back through generations, each one a small iteration of the previous. By modelling this lineage, design fictions can do two things: 1. Project current emerging technological development to create Speculative Futures: hypothetical products of tomorrow. 2. Break free of the lineage to speculate on Alternative Presents. These fictions effectively act as cultural litmus paper, either offering vignettes of how it might be to live with the technology in question or challenging contemporary applications of technology through demonstrable alternatives. The presentation focused on how these two types of fiction are created, how they differ from science fiction, other modes of future thinking and technological critique - more specifically how both methodologies utilise designed artefacts. What informs the development, aesthetics, behaviour, interactions and function of these objects? Once created, how and where do they operate? How can we gauge and understand their impact and meaning? As a consequence of the presentation Auger was invited to run workshops and projects in Basel (Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst) and HEAD (Haute école d’art et de design), Geneva and is advising on the design of a new masters programme at the Basel Hochschule

The Environments of SLACS Gravitational Lenses

We report on an investigation of the environments of the SLACS sample of gravitational lenses. The local and global environments of the lenses are characterized using SDSS photometry and, when available, spectroscopy. We find that the lens systems that are best modelled with steeper than isothermal density profiles are more likely to have close companions than lenses with shallower than isothermal profiles. This suggests that the profile steepening may be caused by interactions with a companion galaxy as indicated by N-body simulations of group galaxies. The global environments of the SLACS lenses are typical of non-lensing SDSS galaxies with comparable properties to the lenses, and the richnesses of the lens groups are not as strongly correlated with the lens density profiles as the local environments. Furthermore, we investigate the possibility of line-of-sight contamination affecting the lens models but do not find a significant over-density of sources compared to lines of sight without lenses.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA