A birthday party with a "Star Wars" theme

One of Gabriel's best friends Milo had his birthday party today. The theme was Star Wars.

Here is a picture of the kids with two Clone Troopers.

What is Gabriel reading these days?

It was then (when he probably thought "Teach Yourself C++ in 10 Minutes" was synonymous with learning the alphabets):


and this was two days ago when he was reading the Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD) comic on CERN's Large Hadron Collider in a recent issue of Symmetry, a particle physics magazine published jointly by Fermilab and SLAC (two particle accelerator labs in the US):


Here is the link to the comic, which tries to explain the physics of the LHC. BTW he has started reading The Economist, and tried to explain the current economic crisis to his pals recently.

Sommerfest

The kids' school had two summer festivals in the past week. All the classes, except for the kindergarten, held theirs on Sunday; the kindergarten classes had theirs this afternoon. Both festivals featured performances by the kids (and games, food and drinks).

On Sunday, the kids had fun playing a human version of foosball. Gabriel also performed a couple German songs with his class.



Late in the afternoon today, Jocelyn's kindergarten class joined forces with the German and French kindergarten classes in a multilingual performance of the Rainbow Fish. The narration was in German, and the kids' dialogues were in their native tongue. Here is a typical exchange:

Blue Fish (English): Can I play with you?
Rainbow Fish (German): Nein, Sie sprechen nicht Deutsch. (No, you don't speak German)
Red Fish (French): Puis-je jouer avec vous?
Rainbow Fish (German): Nein, Sie sprechen nicht Deutsch.

Here is the link to the song and the dance by the English kindergarten class.

Zürich

On my return journey to Karlsruhe, I took a detour to Zürich, which is a 20-minute train journey from Brugg.

Since I had only a few hours to spare, I didn't get to see this city as much as I would like. After I left my belongings in a locker at the main train station, I followed the walking tour suggested in the map that I picked up at the tourist center. The route took me first to the sites on the right bank of Limmat, including the Großmünster (the view of the top of one of its twin towers is impressive), the building where Lenin once lived and Cabaret Voltaire (where Dadaism was born) at the nearby street, and the Opernhaus (opera house).


After a coffee and a small croissant at a local cafe ("wow" for the taste and "ouch" for the price - about US$7), I crossed the Limmat and enjoyed the tranquility by the pier at Zürichsee (Lake Zürich) before the arrival of a large tourist group. On the left bank, I particularly enjoyed Marc Chagall's stained glass windows at Fraumünster. They reminded me of the ones we saw at St. Stephan zu Mainz last year.

Before I headed back to the train station, I stopped by Paradeplatz, where pigs were once traded and is now the center of private banking in Switzerland. Not that I have any asset that is worth hiding from the US tax authority, but I wanted to get some good Swiss chocolate from Confiserie Sprüngli's flagship store. Here it is, the Truffes Grand Cru, which amounts to about US$2 a piece.

What I am impressed most by Zürich is how orderly everything is. No wonder it has been voted as the most livable city in the world this year (that is, if one can afford the high cost of living there).

A short trip to Switzerland

I left for Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) in northern Switzerland, this morning. PSI is about half-way between Basel and Zürich, and is a tad over 3 hours away from Karlsruhe. The train ride through idyllic towns between Basel and Brugg, the closest train station from PSI, was enjoyable. I got to the institute before lunch. The talk that I was invited to give went well.

PSI was a nuclear and particle physics laboratory, but has now diversified into energy and material research. This diversification has brought a lot of users to the facility. Its guesthouse was fully booked tonight and I was put up at a (very nice) hotel in the nearby town Böttstein.

The scenery in the surrounding area is gorgeous. Here are two pictures that were taken on the hotel grounds.

Burg Hohenzollern

After a tasty lunch in Haigerloch, we drove to the nearby Burg Hohenzollern. Parkings (for 2€) were available about half-way up the hill. But there were shuttle buses to take visitors to the main entrance (for a fee, of course) if they didn't want to hike. With two young kids, we took the shuttle bus.

We purchased the ticket package that included a guided tour (in English!). The tour lasted about 45 min. and we got to see the interior rooms (which were off-limit to visitors who don't get the guided-tour package. The view of the valley beneath is breathtaking (and must have been scary for the occupants to see enemies coming in from all directions during battles).



More pictures can be found here.

Haigerloch (where a beer cellar turned into a secret nuclear lab)

About a century ago, a beer cellar was excavated in the rock under the Schloßkirche (Castle Church) in Haigerloch, a small town 70 km away from Stuttgart. During the final days of the Second World War, German physicists, under the direction of Werner Heisenberg, were trying to create a sustained nuclear chain reaction with uranium in this cellar. The German physicists who participated in the research denied that they were trying to build an atomic weapon, although the Allied thought otherwise and sent the ALSOS mission to look for the nuclear research facilities and scientists.

This site selection was peculiar, but understandable. The cellar was hidden from Allied's aerial bombing, and was sufficiently far away from Soviet advancement (the German scientists thought it was essential that their work would not fall into the hands of the Soviet). The ALSOS mission dismantled the laboratory upon their arrival in early 1945. They almost blew up the whole cellar, but was later persuaded not to do so as it could also do irreparable damage to the Schloßkirche above and the civic morale.


At the end, the ALSOS mission removed most of the materials in the lab, and the aluminum containment vessel that lined an excavation in the ground in the cellar was destroyed. This vessel is now on display at one corner of the cellar, which was turned into the Atomkeller-Museum (Atomic Cellar Museum) in the 1980s. There is also a model of the proto-reactor with hanging uranium cubes. Here you see Gabriel standing in front of this model.

One of the physicists in the project, Karl Wirtz, led the construction of the first research reactor (Forschungsreaktor 2, FR2) in Germany, which did not come into operation until early 1960s. This FR2 reactor was built at Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe (Nuclear Research Center Karlsruhe), whose research program has now diversified beyond reactor research and is now known as Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (FZK, the host laboratory of my sabbatical). Coincidentally, there are replicas of Otto Hahn's laboratory bench at Haigerloch's Atomkeller-Museum and at the display area of FR2 at FZK. Since this work bench of the co-discoverer of nuclear fission is of historical significance, the original is kept at the Deutsche Museum in Munich.

Unlike the Manhattan Project, the German's nuclear research during the war never turned into a huge industrial complex. Hence, the operation at Haigerloch was miniscule compared to that at Los Alamos at the time. There is a commonality beyond fission research between the two sites, however. The sceneries in their respective surrounding areas are gorgeous (in a different way, of course). Here is the view of the Schloßkirche from a higher viewpoint across the town.



More pictures from Haigerloch can be found here.

A day-trip through the Black Forest instead

Gabriel was chirpy this morning. His rashes had subsided, and he didn't show any other symptoms that would indicate a scarlet fever infection.

So we took out a car from the car-sharing service and did a driving tour that I had been planning for the right moment.

The trip featured the visit to two historically interesting places, Haigerloch and Burg Hohenzollern, and a drive through the northern part of Schwarzwald along die Schwarzwald-Tälerstraße (the Black Forest Valley Road).

Bodensee trip...cancelled

We received an important email from the room parent of Gabriel's class earlier. There is a confirmed case of scarlet fever in the class.

Before Gabriel went to bed tonight, we noticed that he had rashes in his abdomen (which is consistent with allergies); but he did not have a sore throat or fever, which should precede any rashes in scarlet fever (so we learned on the US Centers for Disease Control and the Mayo Clinic websites).

But we promptly decided to cancel the train ride to Bodensee through the Black Forest. First, we want to be on the safe side and to make sure that it is not scarlet fever. It would not be fun if he feels sick all of a sudden on the Black Forest train. Second, the hotel room in Konstanz had a credit-card hold, and we would be responsible for 80% of the room charge if we didn't cancel prior to the arrival date.

Visiting Bodensee

The weather forecast for this coming weekend looks great.

We will take the Schwarzwaldbahn (Black Forest train) to visit Bodensee (Lake Constance), where we will stay for a night. The train route cuts through the scenic Black Forest.

The train fare is great at 28€ one way for our family of four, but the hotels in the town of Konstanz are nearly sold out and we could only reserve a rather expensive room (but it will be by the pier, I was told).

(Yet another) public holiday

The following is the list of public holidays in our state Baden-Württenburg in the last two months:

April 10: Good Friday.
April 13: Easter Monday
May 1 : Labor Day
May 21 : Ascension day
June 1 : Whit Monday
June 11 : Corpus Christi

Well, it is a public holiday tomorrow, and employees at the research center here are "forced" to take Friday (which is not a holiday) off as the cafeteria and the library (yes, the library) will be closed.

BTW, there are 14 public holidays and 20+ days of paid vacation time in a year for most workers in Germany.

Sommernachtskonzert Schönbrunn - Live!

The Wiener Philharmoniker (Vienna Philharmonic) just finished giving their annual open-air Sommernachtskonzert (summer night concert) at Schönbrunn, which we visited back in April. Nearly 100,000 attended this free concert in person.

Even though we are 800 km away from Vienna, we could watch this performance live on TV. Isn't it nice that public broadcast stations show cultural events live during prime time (instead of voting people off a deserted island)?

Karl-Marx RED wine

The bottle of red wine we bought at Karl-Marx-Haus....is sour and has a bitter aftertaste.