PhD exams and Werner Heisenberg

Physicists can be divided into two big groups: experimentalists and theorists. The first lot (to which I belong) know what a vacuum pump is, the second lot write long equations.

Werner Heisenberg was a theoretician, and so good that he could even write short equations. He has a great (if true, I can't find any reliable source for it) epitaph, applying the inability to exactly locate a particle, as defined in his uncertainty principle, to his own body.

Er liegt irgendwo hier

meaning "He's buried somewhere/anywhere round here". I will try to check this out the next time I'm in Munich. It sounds somehow too good to be true.

Anyway, before he died, and before he developed his nobel-prize winning quantum mechanics, he wrote a thesis titled "On the Stability and Turbulence of Fluid Flow" that concerned the flow of the River Isar through Munich. In Google Maps the flow looks distinctly turbulent in parts, but maybe it's changed since 1925.


Größere Kartenansicht

Well, having done whatever he'd done in the Isar (I can't imagine that he spent much time wading in it) and writing his thesis, Heisenberg had to pass an oral exam. He had four examiners: A theoretician (Arnold Sommerfeld, his PhD adviser), a mathematician, an astronomer and an experimentalist (Wilhelm Wien). Being a theoretican, Heisenberg knew little about experimental matters, and was torn apart in that part of the exam. The bad news for experimentalists is that the theoreticians have been seeking their revenge ever since.

My exam was pretty much a mirror image of Heisenberg's, but without the mathematician. I had a theoretician, an experimentalist (also my PhD advisor) and an astronomer asking the questions, and almost drowned in the theory section. I passed, but only just. This happens to everyone I've ever heard of.

My only suggestion to future experimentalists is to make a formal apology to the theoretician at the start of the exam, explaining your regret for Heisenberg's treatment. Say how cruel it was to confront such a brilliant mind with trivialities of technical equipment, and profess that great thinkers don't need to know how vacuum pumps work. Suggest that you abandon the exam, pick a grade out of a hat and crack open the champagne, drinking to a reconciliation in the world of physics.

Links

I lifted most of this post from this site on Heisenberg's career.

Arnold Sommerfeld is the unluckiest physicist of all time.

That theoretician may be the train that Gajo-Simpatico is fearing.

Red Star Fussek 0 - Torpedo Entenhausen 2

You don't have to take my word for it; you can read that Torpedo Entenhausen won their first away match of the season as written by the opposition (in German).

Their pitch, as you can see in the picture which I nicked from their website, has an odd mixture of cinder fairway down the middle and deep rough grass on the flanks, as if their groundsman did his apprenticeship on a golf course. You can see it even better on google maps.


Größere Kartenansicht

Click here if the embedded map doesn't work

Our first goal was a wind-assisted 3-iron down the middle followed by a crisp 25-foot putt by striker Amin. The Red Stars then put us under quite a bit of pressure, but our defence held firm until the 55th minute, as we broke away down the right wing and then switched play to the left. I played Amin in behind the defence and he floated a cross to the back post which was headed in by Aziz for the second goal. Despite having no substitutes to replace some tiring legs (our spare striker is possibly still driving around Bochum looking for the ground), we just about kept going until the end to secure the points.

The occasion was lifted by the vocal support from the terraces (it's that thin grey strip at the side of the pitch outside the running track). Usually we are watched by the proverbial canine-assisted trio, but there were a couple of dozen supporters yesterday.

The Lancashire Derbyshire & East Coast Railway

If I walk out of the back door of the house where I grew up then within 20 minutes walk I can cross the Lancashire, Derbyshire and East Coast Railway, the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincoln Railway and the North Midland Railway. They all run parallel in the floodplain of the River Rother, and their owners presumably didn't get along with one another too well, cause they could have saved themselves a lot of hassle by just building the one. Now only one is left, the North Midland Railway, which is used by a few freight trains.

The first one I listed (that's the one in the title) must have been a bitch to build, as it was the last of the three and the flat and easy ground had gone. The railway dates from the 1890s and runs through impressively deep cuttings followed by huge embankments. Today I cycled, walked and slipped down the derelict remains of this railway. The lines were removed when I was small and the track has been mostly left to nature and to fly-tippers, which makes cycling quite a challenge. Here's a picture of the railway as it passes through a cutting.



click for google maps overhead shot of photo

Possibly the trickiest bit of cycling the Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast Railway to get past is the bridge over the Chesterfield Canal. In some weird parallel world the canal is filled with water and boats and the railway is home to the Killamarsh steam railway museum, and all visitors to the area would flock to see the point where the steam trains pass over the narrowboats going down the canal. In this world the canal is empty and filled with vegetation and the odd house, whilst the bridge has huge holes in it and is fenced off on one side. Here is a photo of the bridge. If you look carefully you can see the fence which used to block the way, but no longer does.



And here's the bridge from the other side. I didn't manage to get my bike across, but it's not too hard to walk round.



click for google maps overhead shot of photo

Anyone wishing for a serene pedal would be better advised to go down the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincoln Railway which is now a cycle path and part of the trans-pennine trail, but it isn't half as much fun.

If you read this far you might wish to see the three railway lines on google maps. They run fairly straight from north to south and are lined with trees. If you can't work it out, use streetmap for orientation. Note the lovely oxbow lake in both cases.

(I wrote this a few days ago, but only got the pictures up now).

King Franz I

One of the nice corners of Erlangen is the english section of the municipal library, which has most of the "what, you've never read ...." books on four shelves of classic literature, which I'm slowly working through. This week I read "Kidnapped" by Robert Louis Stevenson.

I had actually read this book when I was little, but I didn't really understand it at the time. I never quite worked out what a "Whig" was, and got a bit confused by the bits of dialogue in scots, and the scottish geography, with it's numerous lochs and glens.

Now, together with google maps, wikipedia, and a scots-english dictionary, I finally got this book.

The starting point of this book (and many british problems, including the troubles in Northern Ireland), is the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. Here King James II of England was thrown out by his protestant daughter, Mary, and the dutch prince William of Orange. The scots didn't like this, and many stayed true to James, and his descendants. "Kidnapped" is set a good 60 years after the revolution, and six years after the rising of James' grandson, Bonnie Prince Charlie, in 1745. At that time, many highland scots still supported the claim of the descendents of James II for the throne, and in fact some still do. And to be honest, they've got a point. The revolution of 1688 was a protestant joke: inviting some first-cousin-marrying Dutch caravanner to illegally take the British throne. All the attempted jacobite risings failed, though, and the heirs to James II and Bonnie Prince Charlie are now living in Bavaria. If Franz, Duke of Bavaria fancies claiming the British crown upon the death of the Queen, he has my wholehearted support.