Bochum

I attended the European Nuclear Physics Conference in Bochum earlier this week. I left Karlsruhe on an ICE train at 6 o'clock on Monday morning and arrived at the conference site, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), about three and a half hours later.

Bochum is part of the industrial sprawl in Ruhrgebiet (Ruhr area), and was a major coal-mining center in Germany up to about three decades ago. Nowadays it sports the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum (DBM, German Mining Museum) as its main tourist attraction during the day and the daily Starlight Express musical at night.

RUB was the first new university in Germany after World War II. To my eyes, most of the buildings on campus have identical architecture. Here you see the "yellow block" of buildings; then there are the identical green, blue and red blocks....you get the idea. The plenary talks were held in the Audimax, and most of the other talks were held in Hörsaalzentrum Ost (HZO, Lecture Hall Center East, but there is no Lecture Hall Center West on campus!). You know you are in a mining town as the lecture hall number increases as one descends to the lower floors in HZO. The conference was a typical physics conference: plenary talks, topical sessions and a poster session. I learned quite a bit more about the future physics program in Europe at this conference.


Right across from the Audimax is the Kunstsammlungen der Ruhr-Universität Bochum, or the Art Collection of RUB. It has a good collection of Roman artifacts, and modern works by masters such as Gerhard Richter. Andreas Gursky's picture of the university is also on display. Gursky is an architecture and landscape photographer, and is one of my favorite (here is his picture of the neutrino detector SuperKamiokande in Japan).

Mines are not unfamiliar to me as I had to spend quite some time in a nickel mine, 6800-feet deep, in Sudbury, Canada during the early years of SNO. But I visited the DBM anyway. The museum's turquoise-colored headframe is clearly visible from downtown Bochum (less than a kilometer away).

After browsing a number of displays at the museum, I took the underground tour. Instead of a dark and wet "cage" (such as the one at the Creighton mine in Sudbury), DBM visitors descend into the mine in a well-lit elevator. Once (20m) underground, the visitors are welcomed by a network of drifts. The drifts here are much lower and narrower than those at Creighton, and my head almost bumped into the overhead pipes and cables on a few occasions. Since this is not a working mine, the air is not really mucky. The machineries that are used to extract coal is certainly different from those for ores. For example, there are a few giant wheel cutters that are used to "shave" coal from the wall.

The museum also has a collection of pewter steins on display, some of those are from the 15th century.



The gourmet area of the town is called Bermudadreieck (Bermuda Triangle). On my second night here, my German colleagues told me about a rather new American restaurant that is mentioned in the guidebook. Peter P. opened his guidebook and showed me a quarter-page culinary description of the Hooters (in Deutsch and English). Apparently my German colleagues had never heard of this restaurant chain, and I had to fill in the description on the service and the attire of the waitresses. At the end we went to a Mexican restaurant and enjoyed our time of pouring a frozen block of margarita from a narrow-neck carafe (the German idea of a pitcher of frozen margarita, I guess).

The conference would not finish until Friday, but I left Bochum on Thursday evening (just home in time to celebrate Jocelyn's 6th birthday).