Now we all know scientists can sometimes waffle, but this brave half-dozen weren’t allowed that luxury. The format for the talks was a pecha kucha – born in Japan, you have 20 slides, each lasting for exactly 20 seconds, to get your point across. That’s 6 minutes, 40 seconds (and not a second more) to say who you are, what you do and pitch for a place in the science columns of Britain’s newspapers.

First up, Giovanna Tinetti asked what exoplanets are actually made of. For those out of the loop, exoplanets are those orbiting other stars, far beyond out own solar system. We weren’t sure such things even existed until the 1990s, but nowadays there are more than 700 confirmed cases, with hundreds more candidates awaiting confirmation. recently some astronomers have gone so far as to sayy that every star in our galaxy must have planets orbiting.The most productive way to search for these faraway worlds is by using the Kepler Space Telescope. Looking back along a populous spiral arm of the Milky Way, this other Hubble is a study in concentration, staring fixedly at a single window on the stars, watching for the most minute variation in their light. And by analying this light – the chemical clues hidden within the spectra, scientists like Giovanna can tell what planets hundreds of light years away are made from. She’s looking for those that are habitable. Soon, New Earth need not be a thing of science fiction stories, especially if Giovanna’s plans for ECHO, the Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory, are approved by ESA (the European Space Agency).

Ofer Lahav, Professor of Astronomy at UCL, chose to talk about dark energy, the mysterious entity that apparently makes up three quarters of out universe, but which we didn’t even know was there until 1998. For me the most incredible, unexpected discovery of the last fifty years has been that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing. No one expected this. Everyone wants to know why, but Ofer was impressively agnostic in his views. Either an entity we call dark energy permeates space itself, acting as Einsteins cosmological constant, or the best theories we have are very wrong. Once upon a time our best theory was Newton’s, but it couldn’t explain why Mercury orbited the Sun the way it did. Along came Einstein, General Relativity and a revolution in science. With the dark energy anomaly, are we on the cusp of another such paradigm shift?

Next, how would you rate a snowball’s chances in hell? According to Geraint Jones they turn out to be a lot worse than a comet grazing the edge of the Sun. In December (2011) Comet Lovejoy’s trajectory sent it plunging into the Sun’s corona. Now comets are pretty much snowballs and our star is one of the hottest things around. Because of that, few astrophysicists expected to see anything reappear on the other side, but that’s exactly what the plucky comet did.

Astrophysics moved to astrobiology and Peter Grindrod talked about the Mars Science Laboratory, otherwise known as Curiosity. Given that NASA’s superprobe is currently en route to Mars with my name and also Johnny and Clara Mackintosh’s recorded on its microchips, I rather thought I knew all I needed it about this mracle of interplanetary engineering. Not so. it turned out I was very light on where Curiosity is going and exactly why. The Gale Crater reveals strata twice the height of the Grand Canyon, a timescope through which to observe millions of years of Martian geology. We even got to look at the view using 3D glasses.

I’m sure Claire Cousins would like to go to Mars, but she’s looking for analogues of the Red Planet here on Earth. If we can find local places that are similar we can test our robotic Martian explorers and see close up how they perform. So, despite being based at Birkbeck and UCL she’s a frequent visitor to glaciers and volcanoes in Svalbard and Iceland. it’s a tough job, but someone has to be an astrobiologist. Claire’s working on the joint ESA/NASA ExoMars mission – I’m hoping that in a few years’ time might also carry Johnny Mackintosh to  our near neighbour, where it will proceed to drill into the red soil, searching for the elusive evidence of life on another world.

So is there life on Mars? It’s no small affair to most of us and Lewis Dartnell continued the theme, talking about extremeophiles, the super bacteria that survive on Earth in places almost every bit as hostile as the Martian dunes – places such as the dry valleys in Antartica. Become an astrobiologist and, even if you don’t get to the stars you’ll certainly see some very cool places on Earth. You don’t imagine drought on the Earth’s southernmost outpost, but these valleys have less rainfall than the Sahara Desert. For a long while we assumed nothing lived there, but now we know better. Step forward, Conan the Bacterium! If such lifeforms can survive freezing temperatures and minute quantites of water here, surely we will soon find similar examples on Mars.

My mind buzzing it got better as Geraint, Peter, Claire and Lewis joined me down the pub to continue our other-worldly discussions, freed from the limitations of 6 minutes, 40 seconds of PowerPoint presentations.

That was how I came to be at the Hoxton Underbelly last Friday. Sometimes people describe me as “lucky” so I suppose it was no surprise that, having discovered a great new band originating from my home town of Nottingham, I would swiftly find them playing just round the corner from my adopted Spitalfields. After the fates had conspired, it would have been rude not to attend.

Rude, but possible. There was a parallel invite from ITV to spend the night in the Jonathan Ross green room (the real one rather than what you see on stage) with Noel Gallagher (who did so much to revive British music at its most dead), Michael Sheen (who did a magnificent portrayal of the great Cloughie himself) and Miranda Hart (who did so little to win all those comedy awards) but I reasoned I can go to Wossy any week when he’s filming. But then there was an also a British Sea Power  gig at the Barfly in Camden and they are quite possibly Britain’s absolute best band, but I have seen them maybe a dozen times before. Nottingham’s finest won out.

This year I’ve been invited to see Muse in the private Wembley box of the head of Warner records, stood on the very front row for U2 at Glastonbury and even had to step in as John Taylor’s body double for Duran Duran (I told you I was a lucky so-and-so), but it’s this sort of gig, down in the basement of a small club with an energetic hungry young band that will always excite the most.

Spotlight Kid (the Spotters on Tour) had support: the long running order comprised four hungry bands, but I missed the first (apologies to La Bete). Next up came three-piece Alphastate, with singer Ani announcing it was her birthday. She sang well, but spoke quietly and moved little, but I liked her dreamy folky vocals. And that she asked if anyone had been lucky enough to get Stone Roses tickets earlier in the day. I’d booked my place at the reunion gig so raised my glass to her and cheered, and embarrassed myself as I was the only one in the whole of the Underbelly in that fortunate position.

After Alphastate came four-piece Faults (in the unusual position of having a female drummer). They had what I thought were excellent songs,  but the Hoxton-fin-crowned lead singer’s voice was just one you really didn’t want to listen to for any time at all and the (excellent) guitarist squeezed every note with the emotion and anguish of forcing a number two. Half the audience seemed to comprise family or friends of the band, so you clapped on pain of being beaten up. Bizarrely the other half was largely made up of minute women, presumably swelling the crown to make pint-size Spotters singer Katty Heath feel more at home.

Katty’s pronounced “Cat” rather than “Kate”. I know because I asked at the beginning of the evening, finding her all glittery eyed selling CDs and T-shirts in the middle of the bar. That’s another thing about proper working/touring bands – you can talk to them properly, except when you get all tongue-tied despite being a professional wordsmith like me. But she is very cute and all smiles. And just when you think she can’t get any more perfect, you notice the Johnny-Mackintosh-style Starmark tattoo on her right wrist. It would have been rude not to buy a CD and in fact I found myself asking for two.

In the twenty-three years before I left Nottingham permanently I don’t recall any decent music coming out of the city. One band (Krush) made it to number three in the days when the singles chart mattered, and I think they even DJ’d at The Garage, a presumably long-defunct Lacemarket club where I spent most of my weekends, but House Arrest really wasn’t my cup of tea. I moved to Oxford and fell into the “Happy (Thames) Valley” Shoegazing scene made all their own by the once-mighty Ride, with support from Chapterhouse and Swervedriver and Lush and Curve. Back in that muddy Somerset field I felt I’d hit upon the new Ride, but with more ethereal vocals. And unlike Alphastate, Spotlight Kid are all energy on stage, Katty pumping her air guitar for all it’s worth.

But Spotlight Kid are much more than their female singer. They’re a six-piece of sweltering guitars, building a wall of subtly crafted noise and with vocals and energy also coming from Rob McLeary, an effortlessly thin guitarist with spectacular hair and a penchant for taking his guitar into the audience and climbing onto the sound desk. He told me he was from Arnold and he looked it. Your eyes are drawn to these two but the band are very tight, with Chris Moore and Karl Skivington also on guitar, Matt Holt on bass and Chris Davis bashing away behind them. Space was limited. I thought I’d caught Katty on video accusing the others of touching her bum but the phone failed so instead you get a video of a track from their new album Disaster Tourist. This is “Forget yourself in me” (I might be wrong but I think it would make life easier for Katty in all that wind if she got a shorter veil):

The Spotters are endearingly proud of their visuals and I guess must have spent a lot of time putting them together. I thought this meant that the occasionally bitty nature to the night was because, between every song Katty had to get down on her knees and play with a laptop to call up the next vid. But she reliably informs me it was just to have a swig of water before belting out the next number!

The setlist is short and well crafted, as yet without an encore. Is that because Spotlight Kid haven’t yet found their breakthrough song that might see them sitting in the Jonathan Ross green room? Or are they just modelling their appearances on Jesus and Mary Chain/Strokes/Vaccines (take your pick)? I hope the former. Next time they’re gigging, treat yourself – I hope London doesn’t have to wait too long. What we heard was:

Plan comes apart

Forget yourself in me

Can’t let go

April

Creeps

Reason

All is real

Seefeel

Haunting

During the final number, grasping her tambourine tightly, Katty made her way back to the CD stand to sell merchandise with the promise of kisses for purchasers (sadly I could hardly buy more) while Rob vaulted onto the bass drum, only to fall backwards into the drum kit – I wasn’t sure Chris was terribly amused.

I’ve always disliked The West Wing, primarily because it peddles the myth of brave and decent politicians, always doing the right thing in difficult circumstances. In reality I suspect the public prefer not to think about the dirty deals and corrupt and seedy goings on behind closed doors, which makes The Thick of It more my cup of tea – maybe that’s the UK/US divide? Of course I’m not saying most politicians don’t enter the fray with the best of intentions, but they universally seem to disappoint and the longer they hang around, the more they disappoint. Power corrupts. Even the scent of power corrupts.

So full marks to Ides of March for telling the down and dirty, shabby story of how politics always seems to turn out. Last Wednesday I joined George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Evan Rachel Wood on the red carpet for the UK premier. To really appreciate a movie, I try to read as little as I can about it beforehand, so I can watch at face value. Because of that I can admit my ignorance by believing we were likely to have some kind of retelling of the Julius Caesar story (by coincidence the play I studied for my O level Shakespeare), so I entered the Odeon Leicester Square confident of making the necessary connections between the film and the Bard. Not a bit of it.

The bfi (the British Film Institute in official lower-case letters) is a great institution and a former employer of mine, but their organization often leaves a lot to be desired. I ended up being sent to various spots around central London to collect my tickets, meaning I only reached the red carpet about one minute before curtain up. I ran past George Clooney being interviewed without noticing, sat down in my seat and then saw the whole shebang being projected on the cinema screen.

As part of the bfi London Film Festival, my old colleague Sandra Hebron (it’s her last year as Artistic Director of the LFF) called Clooney up on stage where he proceeded to share a few jokes and introduce various cast and crew. Then the curtains parted and we were treated to 101 minutes of an intriguing thriller, even if the expected links to Shakespeare were missing.

This is the fourth film Clooney’s directed. In front of the camera he plays Democratic presidential candidate Mike Morris, Governor of Pennsylvania and leader in a two-horse race with a Senator from Arkansas. What I loved about the movie was that it’s not The West Wing – it shows just how sordid the realpolitik can be, and all credit to Clooney he’s right at the heart of it. The Ides of March of the title refers to the date of the key Ohio primary, which will fall on 15^th March and help decide the contest.

The US Primary system has always seemed flawed to me because (in my doubtless limited understanding) it seems anyone can get to vote to decide the preferred candidate. All well and good if it’s only people supporting the party concerned, as they have an honest interest, but I’ve always thought the other party (in this case the Republicans) should rally their voters to support the weakest opposing (in this case the Democrat) candidate. That’s what’s happening in Ideas of March, and it’s embraced by Paul Giamatti’s Tom Duffy who’s campaign manager for the underdog from Arkansas because he thinks it could win them the White House.

Morris’s campaign team is led by the always-brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman as Paul Zara, working alongside second-in-command Ryan Gosling’s Stephen Meyers. There’s also intern Evan Rachel Wood as Molly Stearns. Her dad is  leader of the Democrat National Council so she has all the right connections to land a temporary job in the campaign office.

In the main the movie follow Gosling’s Meyers in a magnificent performance. His (and our) knowledge of what’s going on around him is limited and he has to act as he sees best given the circumstances he finds himself in. The best of the screenplay is the flirting between Gosling and Wood, and Clooney’s West Wing-esque campaign interviews and speeches. I bet there are plenty of real-life Democrats wishing they had screenwriter Beau Willimon as a speech writer.

When you’ve grow up with the sickening bullying spin doctoring of real-life Alistair Campbell or his celluloid double Malcolm Tucker, you get the feeling Zara should have been far more on top of things and people than appears to be the case, which is one of the weaknesses of the movie, and much hinges on a meeting between Meyers and Duffy that seemed very innocuous to me. But if you can get over those two creaks in the story the rest of the film unfolds to give a real humdinger of a thriller and one of the must-see movies of the year.

I had to write about this because the news reporting has really annoyed me. Every announcement has said that Einstein might be wrong because he (special relativity) says nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum. Poppycock! (As I’m being polite.) What the theory says is that nothing that has what scientists call “rest mass” can travel at the speed of light – there isn’t any block on things travelling faster. It’s always slightly surprised me that in a discipline where mathematical physicists are used to things called discontinuous functions, I rarely hear of people willing to accept that something could go from “slower” to “faster” without having to “equal”, but it might be possible.

One argument against travelling faster than light is that, although there are solutions to Einstein’s equations, they contain the square root of minus one which we sometimes call an “imaginary” number (as opposed to other numbers that are called “real”). This is a brilliant example of mathematical spin and how it has actually damaged our understanding of mathematics and the universe. There is nothing less real about these imaginary numbers than what are called the real ones. It’s actually by combining both set that we achieve a far deeper understanding of the mathematical and physical universe. But way back when they were first introduced, French mathematician and philosopher Rene Decartes was very distrustful of them so coined the term imaginary as a pejorative description, hoping it would mean they didn’t catch on. He’s got a lot to answer for.

What is a neutrino? Like the similarly named neutron, a neutrino carries no net electric charge (compared with other familiar subatomic particles such as electrons (-1) or protons (+1). Unlike the neutron, the neutrino has almost (but not quite) no mass. Having no charge and almost no mass makes a neutrino extremely difficult to detect.

Back to relativity! Anything travelling faster than light in relativity yields solutions including the square root of minus one which people have interpreted as meaning travelling backwards in time. That’s the reason for the joke that’s currently doing the rounds on the twittersphere:

Barman: “I’m sorry, sir. We don’t serve neutrinos in here.”

A neutrino walks into a bar.

The idea of time travel in physics isn’t as unusual as nonscientists might think. In fact travelling into the future is completely straightforward and not disputed. Even if the time comes when relativity is superseded by a better theory, it will have to allow for the possibility of time travel into the distant future as we know full well how to do this (you just move very quickly) and have demonstrated it experimentally. However, as I mentioned in a recent article on the Johnny Mackintosh website, we can consider an antimatter particle to be the same as a particle of normal matter but travelling backwards in time – that’s how a notation called Feynman Diagrams actually work.

One of the reasons relativity came about was due to the unexpected results of the Michelson-Morley experiment back in 1887 which showed the speed of light didn’t vary, even if you changed the way you yourself were moving. Could it be that people will look back on these OPERA results in a similar fashion? Although we can’t yet rule it out, I doubt it. Nowadays we realize that there is an amount of uncertainty in every observation and experiment – statisticians possibly occupy the most pivotal role in the interpretation of results. And in an experiment such as this which is so incredibly complex, there are a lot of uncertainties that have to be quantified. It only takes the most fractional error somewhere for these results to be off by enough to bring the results back into line.

For instance, CERN can’t make the neutrinos in short enough bursts that there’s a gap between them leaving Switzerland and arriving in Italy (so they use statistical methods to infer which are which). Then the neutrinos don’t actually travel round the Earth – they go through it – so we can’t directly measure the distance they travel. We use light to measure distances accurately around Earth by bouncing it off satellites, but the speed of light is only constant in a vacuum – it is slowed down in different media and by different phenomena so it becomes hard to measure this distance as precisely as we want. And how can we know exactly how far away the satellite is. In fact I’ve just published a book on a technique called Nonlinear Filtering that tries to answer these sorts of questions and will be a technique the CERN scientists have used. And then, probably far more important, there are delays in electrical circuitry and clock speeds.

But it’s brilliant that CERN has released the conundrum – it shows a problem in action and is especially brave because everyone thinks the results are almost certainly wrong. I applaud them for asking the world to scrutinize this when they couldn’t find the error themselves and, whatever the final outcome, new things will be learnt as a result. And it’s always a great day when theoretical physics makes it into the news bulletins.

On the Quercus Books blog (Quercus is my publisher) you can read my post about Doomed Teddy Bear Love.

On the brilliant Book Zone for Boys website you can read another of my posts, this time on the coolest way (we’ve yet come up with) to land on another planet.

Then, over at www.JohnnyMackintosh.com, there’s a piece on Jo Rowling’s and Harry Potter’s influence on the Johnny Mackintosh books.

What are you doing still here? Go and get reading!

Join in the conversation about the new book on Twitter using hashtag #JMB4E.

After finally downloading some of my pictures, here’s a belated post about summer fun. If you’ve never been to the Glastonbury Festival you might be labouring under the misapprehension that it’s a music event. In fact, you could have a great time in the fields of Worthy Farm if you don’t do to see a band at all. A city of two hundred thousand people, three miles across, descends on the Somerset countryside and it is a city of wonders. I think the first time I went was 1992. I remember catching sight of the place and thinking I had stumbled upon Tina Turner’s Bartertown, from the Mad Max movies. There was just so much going on and here are a few pictures away from the music side:

Much of this year’s art was on a gigantic scale, set in some sort of post apocalyptic dystopian future. Here in an area of the site known simply as Block9 is “The London Underground”, a 50ft tower block complete with a crashed Tube train near the top.

Opposite “The London Underground” is another extract from an urban cityscape, the magnificent “NYC Downlow”. Dare you cross the road to enter what for the Glastonbury campers might still appear to be luxury accommodation. Yes the bathroom’s exposed to the elements but, hey, at least there’s a bath.

Shangri-La was a nearby area of the site that had “been contaminated”. It was a Blade Runner-style world with a mixture of hope and desperation. You entered underneath a neon banner proclaiming “We are all sky” which is something that’s always had a special resonance for me in my more poetic writing.

There was a rumour (that I started) that Bono’s plane had been shot down on leaving the festival, ending up as another club in one of the outlying fields. Or maybe this is an allusion to Lord of the Flies, that if the mud becomes too deep we’ll all revert to savages. Whichever, I think the styling’s extraordinary.

Here’s your chance to begin again in the off-world colonies. Now we’ve seen the final space shuttle flight it might be the only way to go there.

There are more conventional creations (but none the less disturbing) like this oversize sand baby. Basically everywhere you go that’s away from the very central area you’ll see something.

And, after his performance on the Friday night (I was on the front row, so confess I did see some music) where better to give thanks the Temple of the Blessed Bono?

If you go to the festival in 2013 (next year they’re having a break) then make sure you do more than sit in a field listening to faraway music.

Three months after the dreadful events of 22nd February when Christchurch, New Zealand, was struck by an earthquake, the Gherkin is unlocking its revolving doors to make way for the Step up 4 Christchurch Earthquake Appeal. You have the chance to walk or run (there’s even a race) all the way up the 1037 steps to the top or, if that sounds a tad too much effort on a Sunday morning (shame on you), there’s an alternative route to the top via the lifts. Sadly, these will be the conventional type rather than the antigravity ones normally used on the Spirit of London.

The event, taking place on Sunday 22nd May 2011, been organized by the Evans Randall Investment Bank so full marks to them. I was alerted to it by Meg Ellis who’ll be taking part as one of her 100 things for charity. There’s an entrance fee that goes to the earthquake appeal and, if you’re taking part, get yourself some extra sponsorship too.

One last thing, watch out for aliens when inside, including this one in the lobby …

Another year, another London Book Fair. You could be forgiven for thinking that very little was different – that everyone’s still talking digital, but no one really knows what the true impact of eBooks will be. Well, that seems to be changing with a vengeance – the news that, in February of this year, eBook revenues overtook trade paperbacks in the US is a tremendous wakeup call for publishers everywhere.

A stripey Cory Doctorow

The Digital Conference, the precursor to the main fair, took place on the Sunday. Although I wasn’t there, much of the Twitter comment suggested that it was the same arguments being rehashed, though Evan Schnittman (ex of Oxford University Press and now at Bloomsbury) created quite a stir by apparently announcing the enhanced eBook is dead. This was just as people were getting their previews of ePub3, next version of the digital format of choice for most eBook retailers apart from Amazon Kindle (which has its own proprietary format).

I arrived at Earl’s Court on the Monday, in plenty of time for “the great debate”, whether publishers themselves will soon be irrelevant. Representing the industry were Andrew Franklin of Profile and Richard Charkin (also ex of OUP and now at Bloomsbury, but with rather more than Evan sandwiched in-between).  The new media specialists on the other side of the camp were Cory Doctorow (founder of Boing Boing) and James Bridle, an editor and technologist.

We all know the industry has to change. Publishing is about connecting the creators of the content to those who need/want to use it – how it’s done can alter, but most of the audience seemed to think there will be a place for it. In my day job I’m a publisher at Oxford University Press, to which Charkin referred a fair bit, stressing the continued need for academic publishing. Franklin was more forthright that publishers are needed more than ever as arbiters of quality. Self-publishing is all very well, he claimed, except that no one would want to actually read the results – we sort the wheat from the chaff. The debate was a little like last year’s Prime Ministerial versions, with everyone queuing up to say “I agree with James” who spoke passionately and sensibly. Charkin did conclude by saying publishers need to bring books out far more quickly, and that they must be marketed continually, not just at the time of launch. Authors everywhere would doubtless cheer those sentiments.

Wayne Davies (left) & Mark Smith (right), co-counders of Quercus

Around the fair, of course I made my way over to Quercus and found its two founders, Mark Smith and Wayne Davies, momentarily free of appointments – it’s always good to chat about Johnny Mackintosh with the bosses. As ever, the stand was buzzing and impressive. I also snapped Australia’s Murdoch Books, who distribute my titles down under.

Last year the Book Fair was a bit of a write-off, disrupted by the ash cloud from Iceland. This year, to all intents and purposes, the British book scene showed itself off as vibrant as ever. An added plus, on the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic spaceflight, was a live linkup between the London Book Fair and the International Space Station. It was great to hear that the astronauts read while up there, and it’s now my mission to get copies of all the Johnny Mackintosh titles into their orbiting library. Though, I can’t help thinking that the ISS is one place where having a few hundred books on your eReader could provide a very considerable advantage over the printed word. Perhaps that’s the best demonstration of the need for eBooks.

Right now, the digital world is still problematic for publishers. Each reader has different requirements so needs different electronic versions (even different ISBNs). There’s also the question of rights – as Doctorow pointed out eloquently in the debate, readers have to be allowed to “own” eBooks rather than simply “rent” them. VAT (that’s sales tax to some of you) is charged at 20% on eBooks but doesn’t apply on print copies, making it hard to meet the market’s expectations. And the spectre of piracy looms large in the background. But unless the industry moves quickly, it’s very clear it will be cut out of the loop and left behind.