Saint Hedwig

Of course, when I saw this church's name on the map, I had to visit. It actually has an interesting history, as it is the main cathedral for the Catholic diocese that includes Berlin (I guess the correct term is the seat of the archbishop of Berlin). It was also a good thing, because it turned out that there was a free organ concert that evening, my last evening in Berlin.

Side view of St Hedwig's, showing the domes.

Front entrance of St Hedwig's. There was much construction, as can be seen, in the platz surrounding the cathedral, as is true of much of Berlin.

Organ in St Hedwig's.

I was excited, because the poster for the concert said that some of Arvo Pärt's music would be played. I was introduced to Pärt when I went to a concert at Stetson University about a year ago. It was a duet with piano and tuba - being an old tuba player myself, I had to go. One of the pieces they played was Pärt's "Spiegel im Spiegel." Normally it is piano/violin, but these guys reworked it for piano/tuba. It was excellent. I've since heard it (in a recording) with the standard violin.

The organ player in St Hedwig played "Annum per Annum," by Pärt. I had not heard it before, but I recognized it immediately by the style. I recommend listening to both of these pieces, or anything by Arvo Pärt. It's well worth the time!

Axe of Ahneby

DESY, the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, is a national accelerator research center in Germany. I was reading a recent issue of their magazine, femto, since there were articles about supersymmetry and grand unified theories. However, those articles were really pretty boring (there's nothing much that you can say about theoretical research programs that have not accomplished anything), and my eye caught a short article near the back about the Axe of Ahneby.

Ahneby is a town in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein in the north, tucked between the Elbe river (and Hamburg) and Denmark. Several Bronze Age axes were found near this town in the 19th century, and recently, using the X-rays from one of their accelerators, DESY scientists showed that one of these axes was a fake! One of the real axes is the 4000-year-old Axe of Ahneby.

Axe of Ahneby

One of DESY's first papers, here, shows the different diffraction patterns resulting from the real axe and from a reproduction. And here is another short paper, explaining the differences.

Finally, here is a news story about the incident.

Recently on the arXiv

Some interesting papers were posted recently on the arXiv:

• Helge Kragh, a historian of physics, has a nice writeup on Robert Dicke's work on geophysics and the possibility that G might be a function of time. Dicke was a giant in the resurgence of general relativity in the 1950s and 1960s; he almost discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation; and he wrote one of my favorite textbooks: Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, by Dicke and Wittke. Even though this book was written in 1960 it has never gone to a new edition (!) because it's so perfect and concise. If you ever find a copy in a used book store, buy it.
• Kirillov and Levi describe the situation of a particle confined to a saddle - stable in one direction, unstable in the other - and show that by rotation the saddle point can be made stable.
• Several papers on Bell's theorem , quantum nonlocality, and Bell's view of nonlocality. This is always a confusing subject, and whenever I read about it I learn more, but also come up with more questions.
• Alister Graham reviews the history of black holes and how we came to believe that many galaxies (including the Milky Way) have supermassive black holes at their centers. One of the neat pieces of evidence - at least for our galaxy - is an analysis of the stars orbiting this central object. And one of the astronomers working on this problem is UCLA professor Andrea Ghez. Her website shows some cool movies.

Honorary Fellow

I am now, officially, an Honorary Fellow of the Munich University of Applied Sciences. And I'm a "Prof. Dr." Look out world!

This morning, the other visiting professor and I had a meeting with the Präsident of the University. He wanted our input on our visit, to see how the visiting fellow program could be improved in the future. It was a good meeting. Hopefully, there will be many more visiting professors, and some even visiting from Hochschule München to other places, like ERAU. I and my faculty mentor - and landlord - Karl, were there. Also, the other professor, Jack, and his mentor, Klemens, was there. Also there was the person from Int'l Programs, Nicole, who has helped us out with so many things - visas, housing, etc.

Then the group of us got our picture taken.

From left: mentor Karl Siebold, yours truly, President Michael Kortstock, Fellow "Jack" Lin, mentor Klemens Rother, International Programs representative Nicole Kewitz.

Berlin (3)

There are many churches with domes in Berlin. Along with the Reichstag Dome, which of course is not a church, there is the Berliner Dom, Deutscher Dom, and Französischer Dom, among others. Just like Alter Peter, I climbed the Französischer Dom, and got a great view of Berlin. This was the same day that I visited the Reichstag, but the pictures through that dome did not turn out as well as those that were unimpeded.

Looking east toward Alexanderplatz from the Französicher Dom. The gold-ball topped tower is the radio tower of the city and is in Alexanderplatz, the center of East Berlin. The large, low green dome in the foreground is Saint Hedwig (see next post). Note all the cranes. There was quite a bit of construction going on, which contributed to the industrial feeling.

While the sky was beautiful, the city is not as pretty as Munich. My airbnb apartment was on Alexanderstrasse, just a couple of blocks from Alexanderplatz. The area was mostly block apartment buildings, which gave the area a definite (presumably authentic) cold-war feeling. It is still worthwhile to visit, though, because of all the history that it's been through. It just doesn't feel like a small town, the way Munich does.

Bells inside Französischer Dom. Luckily, they did not ring while I was nearby. However, as I was descending the tower, they did ring. And it was quite loud. I'm glad I was not right next to them. Interestingly, there is an organ consolse visible inside the glass, and you can see the stairs to access the organ on the left. I assume that the organ player wears earplugs, especially if they also ring the bells!

Outside view of the Französischer Dom.

California Dreamin'

Caitlin and I took Kathy, Megan, and Sarah to the Flughafen early in the morning of 30.Dez to catch their 09.30 flight back to the US. It takes about 1 hour to get from Pullach to the airport by S-bahn, and because it was an international flight they had to be there early. In addition, it was cold and snowy, so the plane had to get in line for de-icing, which also takes time.

So we left Pullach at about 06.00, and Caitlin and I decided to have breakfast at the airport. We found a place that served bagels and coffee - one of the first that I had found in Munich (I have since found more), but the entire theme was California surfing. So much so that even one of the tables was inside an old VW van!

Volkswagen van at a restaurant in the Munich airport.

Table inside the Volkswagen van at a restaurant in the Munich airport. Unfortunately  we didn't notice that this was a table until after we finished eating, so we didn't get to sit there. But it was a cool idea.

After the airport, we decided to stay in town and do some museum hopping. Specifically, we went to the Munich Residenz, the city palace of the Bavarian royalty. More about that in a future post (although the number of "future posts" that I'm promising seems to be increasing more rapidly than I can write posts, so perhaps it will never happen.)

Jim Stewart (1941-2014)

The Integral House. Private residence of Jim Stewart, mathematician, textbook author.

My calculus book, handed down to me by my sister way back in 1980, was written by Earl Swokowski. I always liked that book - in fact, I still have it - and I go back and read sections of it from time to time when I need to brush up on a theorem or two. I have never been too critical about whether it was presenting proofs correctly or not. As a physicist, I usually want the answer; I'll leave the rigor to the mathematicians.

Jim Stewart also has written a calculus book, in recent years one of the best selling calculus books in the country. Now, if you write a calculus textbook, or a physics book, or chemistry, or biology, and many schools adopt that book and hundreds of thousands of undergraduates have to buy that book, well you're going to make a lot of money. Very few textbooks reach that level, however, although there are usually one or two in each field that become bestsellers. Sometimes that's because they are also classics (in the field of introductory physics, the "classics" are Sears & Zemansky, starting with their first edition right after WWII continuing to their 13th edition today, and which took  a hands-on, practical approach, and Halliday & Resnick, developed in the early 1960s, and which was decidedly more theoretical). But also it could just be that it keeps enough of everyone's favorite topic so that university textbook selection committees find it's the only one they can agree on. I don't know if this happened with Stewart's calculus book, but it has been the case (or so I suspect) with certain physics textbooks.

After making millions with his textbooks, Stewart decided to commission his home, called "Integral House," because of... who knows, his love for math? People have debated the excellence of his calculus books - see the reviews on the amazon.com page for Spivak's calculus book for a taste - but sometimes a book doesn't have to be excellent to be good.