A flying dog, technicolor pigeons and a pig's head

Sometimes, you come across a Wikipedia entry that's so perfect it makes for the ultimate in lazyblogging. So, without further ado, or any input from me, here are some of the things Wikipedians have to say about the life and times of the aristocratic composer, novelist, painter, aesthete and eccentric, Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners*:

Berners was born in Apley Hall, Shropshire, in 1883, son of The Honorable Hugh Tyrwhitt (1856-1907) and his wife Julia (1861-1931), daughter of William Orme Foster, Apley's owner. His father, a Royal Navy officer, was rarely home. He was brought up by a grandmother who was extremely religious and self-righteous, and a mother who had little intellect and many prejudices. His mother, a wealthy ironmaster’s daughter with a strong interest in fox hunting, ignored his musical interests and instead focused on developing his masculinity, a trait Berners found to be inherently unnatural. Berners later wrote, "My father was worldly, cynical, intolerant of any kind of inferiority, reserved and self-possessed. My mother was unworldly, naïve, impulsive and undecided, and in my father's presence she was always at her worst".

The eccentricities Berners displayed started early in life. Once, upon hearing that you could teach a dog to swim by throwing him into water, the young Gerald promptly decided that by throwing his mother's dog out the window, he could teach it to fly. The dog was unharmed, though the act earned Berners a beating.

After devising several inappropriate booby traps, Berners was sent off to the boarding school Cheam School at the age of nine. It was here that he would first explore his homosexuality; for a short time, he was romantically involved with an older pupil. The relationship was abruptly ended after Berners vomited on the other boy. ...

...In 1918, Berners became the 14th Baron Berners after inheriting the title, property, and money, from an uncle. His inheritance included Faringdon House, which he initially gave to his mother and her second husband; on their deaths in 1931 he moved into the house himself. In 1932, Berners fell in love with Robert Heber-Percy, 28 years his junior, who became his companion and moved into Faringdon House. Unexpectedly, Heber-Percy married a 21-year-old woman, Jennifer Fry, who had a baby nine months later. For a short time, she and the baby lived at Faringdon House with Heber-Percy and Berners...

Berners was notorious for his eccentricity, dyeing pigeons at his house in Faringdon in vibrant colours and at one point entertaining Penelope Betjeman's horse Moti to tea...

...His Rolls-Royce automobile contained a small clavichord keyboard which could be stored beneath the front seat. Near his house he had a 100-foot viewing tower, Faringdon Folly, constructed as a birthday present in 1935 for Heber-Percy, a notice at the entrance reading: "Members of the Public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk". Berners also drove around his estate wearing a pig's-head mask to frighten the locals.

Full Wikipedia article here

There's also a fun Berners-related anecdote over at The Dabbler:

...Berners' mother seemed blissfully unaware of her son’s homosexuality and was horrified to hear that he’d been spotted ‘stepping out’ with one of the most notorious society lesbians in London. Concerned that Berners was risking both a broken heart and his reputation, his mother pleaded with him to publicly disassociate himself from this woman.

Berners agreed and place the following announcement in the Times:

Lord Berners wishes to announce that he has left Lesbos for the Isle of Man.

* I was inspired to look him up after hearing Radio 3's introduction to a piece of music from his ballet The Triumph of Neptune (based on a story by Sacheverell Sitwell) this morning.

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Close, but no cigar...

The initial mission will therefore last for two years, and cover almost the entire sky, looking at 200,000 stars in total for exoplanets.

Given what we’ve learned about exoplanets from previous searches (like with Kepler), TESS [the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite] is expected to find anywhere from 4,500 to upwards of 20,000 such worlds. Mind you, the first exoplanet was discovered in 1992, and we’ve found roughly 4,000 more in the 26 years since then. TESS will likely double that number in just two years.

Phil Plait of Bad Astonomy fame. 

It sounds exciting, and it is. The first exoplanet wasn't discovered until 1992. Since then, astronomers have found thousands and it seems from their initial results that planets are incredibly common. This wasn't always what astronomers believed. I've got a very old guide to astronomy, The Stars In Their Courses by Sir James Jeans, first published in 1931.  

As I've blogged before, I like this book, particularly for the way it conveys something of the incomprehensible vastness of our solar system and the distances to the stars using simple language and scale comparisons with everyday objects and distances on earth.

But it is also a book of its time and it includes a number of theories which have now been superseded. Notably, Jeans supposes that the solar system came into being as the result of a close encounter between the sun and another star which passed close by in the distant past. The gravitational pull of the passing star, he thought, ripped a "long filament of hot filmy gas" shaped "rather like a cigar" from the surface of the sun. It was from this cigar of matter that he supposed the planets condensed, with tiny Mercury and Pluto (Pluto was still an official planet back then), forming at the thin ends of the cigar and Jupiter and Saturn condensing in the fat middle where there was more stuff:

 

If the solar system really had been the result of such a chance encounter, we might expect planets to be rare and for most stars to shine their lonely lights on planetless neighbourhoods. Our world - in fact, our whole solar system - would be a rare aberration.

But now astronomers believe that planets formed from clouds of gas and dust left over from star formation. These protoplanetary discs are thought to be a normal part of star formation, meaning that we should expect most stars to be accompanied by the planets which condense out of these discs.

Less than a century ago, many astronomers thought that most other stars were barren, companionless points of light. Less than three decades ago, they hadn't detected a single planet around another star. Now they've found thousands and expect to find as many more in the next couple of years. And that's just scratching the surface of the billions that are probably out there in our galaxy.

Contemporary readers of James Jeans' book would have been staggered, as I was, by the sheer inhuman immensity of the universe. What they didn't know about was the sheer number of worlds, scattered like dust across that vast emptiness.