Guest Post: What the magi had in common with scientists

by Roger Barlow, University of Huddersfield

Picturesque and exotic, with their crowns and camels, the three kings regularly appear on Christmas cards and in nativity scenes. But how much is original, and how much is later addition for the sake of a good story?

All we know is what Matthew’s gospel tells us, and that does not include their number. They brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, but to suppose that three gifts means three givers is no more than a guess. More importantly, they were not kings. In his account Matthew consistently describes the visitors as magoi which is the same as the English word “mage”. It’s an unusual word and is often translated as “wise men”.

The early church upgraded them to royal status, perhaps because of descriptions in Isaiah 60 and Psalm 72 of kings worshipping the messiah – but Matthew himself, whose gospel is full of references back to the psalms and prophets, does not make this link, and he would never have let such an opportunity drop.

What they saw

They had seen a star, which shows they were astronomers – or astrologers as there was no difference back then. What was this star? Some scholars have posited that in 7BC there was a triple conjunction (when the planets catch up and overtake each other: quite a dramatic sight) of Jupiter and Saturn, in the constellation of Pisces. These three elements were linked in astrology to royalty, the messiah and the Jews respectively.

Some astronomers, for example Patrick Moore, are unhappy with this theory and suggest that the star the wise men followed was a nova, a comet, or meteors. But there is no firm evidence for any of these. They point out that conjunctions are rare but not unique, and ask why were there no emissaries to Israel on other occasions. Perhaps there were – we only have this single record because of its link to the larger story.

I think what really worries them is that if you accept this interpretation it implies accepting the validity of astrology, and today’s astronomers really hate astrologers (never ask an astronomer what their star sign is). But you don’t have to. Even the sceptical can accept that a visit to Jerusalem and Bethlehem by foreigners looking for the messiah would have made a good story which would be told and retold – and eventually get attached to the birth of Jesus. Matthew wrote his gospel for a Jewish readership, and the Jewish religion then was hostile to astrology, so the suggestion that he just made up the story as propaganda is implausible.

A familiar approach

We can imagine the situation. The star was not a surprise: conjunctions are predictable – today lists of upcoming ones are available on the internet – and even if this was not available 2,000 years ago, astronomers then made careful observations on which they could make predictions using geocentric theories which were fundamentally wrong but which nevertheless seemed to work.

Stonehenge astronomical observatory

For months and years beforehand the “wise men” will have discussed and organised the expedition: the practicalities, the funding. We know how they must have felt, planning a project, looking for money to pay for it, arguing whether their theory’s predictions were really firm or could have some other interpretation.

At this point we realise that we have a better word to translate magoi – a word not available to the translators of the Authorised Version of the Bible in King James’ reign, as it was only invented in 1833.

The word is scientists.

Looking back 2,000 years, they and we are not so different. They used their understanding of the universe to predict what would happen in the world – and, working as a group, they investigated their predictions, despite the cost and trouble and hardships. This is something any scientist today can recognise and identify with. Their understanding of the universe is crude and primitive in our eyes – but what will today’s scientific theories look like in 2,000 years time?

So, when we see pictures of the three kings at Christmas, we should spare them a thought, as colleagues who believed in their theories and followed through the consequences, despite the trouble and expense and personal effort involved. The strength of their conviction and their resolution to follow it, 2,000 years ago, can be an example to us today.



Roger Barlow, Research Professor and Director of the International Institute for Accelerator Applications, University of Huddersfield

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

Guest Post: 2016 lasts a little longer thanks to a leap second

by Darryl Veitch, University of Technology Sydney

To the time-poor of the world: take heart, for 2016 is a generous year. Not only were you granted a leap day on 29 February, you will soon score a New Year’s Eve countdown bonus, a leap second, to hold off 2017 for a final sip or regret.

Whereas leap years add a day to align the calendar with the seasons, leap seconds align our everyday clocks with the Sun’s position in the sky, that is, with the Earth’s rotation.

Currently our planet takes roughly 86,400.00183 seconds (on average) to turn, instead of the expected 86,400 seconds you get by multiplying 24 hours by 60 minutes by 60 seconds. This may not sound like a great difference, but it amounts to a full second every 18 months. If left unchecked, it would become noticeable over time, and ultimately become problematic.

How did we get into this awkward situation? Why not just define a second so that there are exactly the right number? This sensible idea was tried in 1874, but hit a snag: the Earth keeps changing.

In terms of today’s standard SI second (defined via atomic physics), the above discrepancy is due to the fact that the day is losing about 0.0015 seconds per century, due largely to tidal friction.

Not only that, it also changes quite erratically due to mass redistribution.
For example, it is slowed by oceanic thermal expansion due to global warming, just as a playground spinning seat slows, via the conservation of angular momentum, when you place your body farther from the centre.

Leap seconds are used to make sure our usual timekeeping system, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), never gets more than 0.9 seconds away from the Earth-tracking alternative, Universal Time (UT1).

But unlike leap years, leap seconds cannot be calculated centuries in advance. Because the Earth moves erratically, it must be observed closely, and leap seconds scheduled on an as-needed basis.

In UT1, seconds actually vary in duration, being stretched and compressed to match the Earth’s variations. In UTC, all seconds are standard SI seconds, which is much simpler, but it means that if you want to slow down or speed up UTC, there is no alternative but to jump.

All the leap seconds so far have been “positive”, meaning that an extra second is inserted, corresponding to jumping the clock back, and so slowing it down.

Time’s up for the leap second?

The leap second system has been with us since 1972. It represents an important chapter in the entangled history of civilian timekeeping, and of the definition of the second itself. Its days, however, may well be numbered.

For a number of years, support has been growing within the International Telecommunications Union, the standards body governing leap seconds, to abolish it.

The chief reason is complexity. Simply put, hardware and software can and do get things wrong. And the potential impacts are serious, from failures in navigation leading to collisions, to erroneous financial transactions, computer crashes and the inability to specify UTC times reliably into the future, because the leap second times are not yet known!

Because UTC jumps back at a leap second, effectively the second before the leap is repeated. Managing such “time travel” is inherently complex and error prone, so much so that in many cases the recommended action is to simply shutdown the system and restart it after the leap.

A dramatic illustration of the problem can be found in the internet. All computers have software clocks that generally rely on communication with time servers over the network to synchronise to UTC. Network timekeeping is a core internet service, and at its heart are the Stratum-1 servers, which have direct access to reference hardware such as atomic clocks.

We collected data from around 180 such servers around the world during the June 2015 leap second event, and assessed them from two points of view.

First, the clocks themselves: did they jump cleanly and sharply exactly as required?

Second, at the protocol level, that is with respect to the messages the servers send to the computers that rely on them: did they inform them properly of the upcoming leap?

Overall, we found that, at most, 61% of the servers were performing correctly. Many of the servers are well known and highly utilised, potentially impacting thousands of clients, possibly resulting in security vulnerabilities.

An expanded experiment is currently underway for the 2016 event, involving almost 500 servers, including from the widely used ntppool project.

This is part of a broader network timing project at UTS led by myself together with Dr Yi Cao, which aims to refashion the global system, and in particular to make it scale in a trusted way to the Internet of Things.

Finally, we must point out that leap seconds occur simultaneously across the globe, and it can’t be midnight everywhere.

Thus, as I confirmed with Dr Michael Wouters, responsible for Australia’s reference time at the National Measurement Institute, for us it will occur at 11am AEDT on January 1, 2017. Save the last sip till then.



Darryl Veitch, Professor of Computer Networking, University of Technology Sydney

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

Frank Kameny: Not a Star but an Asteroid

Alex Knepper & Frank Kameny

Until last week, I had never known anyone who had had a planet named for him.

Now I have. The late Franklin Kameny, a Harvard-trained astronomer who became a civil-rights pioneer, now has a namesake planet -- a minor planet, to be sure, which is a technical term for asteroid, but still a planet.

Frank Kameny, a World War II combat veteran, died last October at the age of 86.  His career in gay-rights advocacy began in 1957 when he was fired from his federal government job (as a civilian astronomer for the U.S. Army) for no reason other than that he was gay.  In the 1960s, he and other early movement leaders organized the first pickets of the White House and the Pentagon by gay and lesbian activists.  

LGBTQNation identifies the asteroid as "minor planet 40463." An Associated Press report published in the Washington Post places the asteroid as between Mars and Jupiter. Its name is "Frankkameny" (one word, no spaces).

Jean Ann Esselink explains at The New Civil Rights Movement:

It was Canadian astronomer Gary Billings who initiated the request to name an asteroid after Dr. Kameny. When Billings read Dr. Kameny’s obituary, he sought out other astronomers to join him in a petition to name an asteroid Billings had discovered after the gay rights legend. The asteroid was officially dedicated July 3...

The Minor Planet Center's technical publication Minor Planet Circulars reported the asteroid's new nomenclature in its July 3 edition:

(40463) Frankkameny = 1999 RE44
Discovered 1999 Sept. 15 by G. W. Billings at Calgary.
Frank L. Kameny (1925–2011) trained as a variable star astronomer in the 1950s, but joined the Civil Rights struggle. His contributions included removing homosexuality from being termed a mental disorder in 1973 and shepherding passage of the District of Columbia marriage equality law in 2009.

Other recently discovered minor planets reported in the same edition were named for Wilhelm Brűggentihies, a biographer of astronomers; Molleigh Elena Struble, who passed away at age 16 after helping to design the Yerkes Astrophysics Academy for Young Scientists; Robert Grosseteste, a 13th-century English theologian; radio astronomer Osamu Kameya; 19th-century Czech philanthropist Vojta Náprstek; Slovak ice-hockey player Pavol Demitra; and a 15th-century Grand Duke of Lithuania, Vytautas Didysis the Great, among others.

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