Gottingen is known as 'The University Town'. Students everywhere, high-tech facilities and anything else you could think of as a necessity of the blossoming physicist, you can find it here. Then, the idea that Gottingen boasts 44 nobel prize winners poses no surprise. After an opening address by the Dean of the faculty of physics, we were given a guided tour around the city. We were brought through its development from the medieval era to present day. As is the case with many medieval European structures, this city most certainly manifests its fair share of splendid buildings of intricate craftsmanship. After the opening speech, we were given a talk on Ion-Beam Mixing- Namely an in-depth analysis of the processes which take place when one attempts to mix two or more elements together. Not a simple process when one has to utilize ideas such as Rutherford Back Scattering and Mossbauer Spectroscopy to account for certain phenomena such as electrostatic interactions and transitions. The day ended with us visiting the main shopping street of Gottingen- where we had dinner.
The hotel that we presently reside at has a Keglig alley. Similar to bowling, but uniquely different- many of us are addicted to this awesome German game. Even Prof. Thomas showed us his skills.
Friday was a full-fledged lecture day. We admittedly did learn a lot. The first lecture was on high energy physics with reference to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN- The idea that proton-proton collision at a certain energy threshold will advent the presence of new phenomena, provide some insights to the evolution of material right after the postulated 'big bang' as well as lead to the discovery of the Higgs Boson reigns hopeful. The second lecture on the mass of the neutrino was equally interesting. I had always thought that the neutrino is a massless particle which is, in fact, is not the case at all. However, presently, we are not able to determine the absolute mass of the neutrino on a scale that starts from zero. Nonetheless, we are able to construct a range between which we expect the mass of the neutrino to be. The lecture thereafter was on robotics. It was quite cool, as we got to see a robot in action. The thing to note here is that people want to build robots that don't merely act upon human instructions, but robots that are able to think for themselves and act upon their own judgment- Robots that are able to learn. For the last part of the day we visited Gottingen University's resident nuclear tandem accelerator. The evening was spent in Gottingen town again, where after having dinner and some beer, some of us walked around the town that was having some cultural event. Soon enough myself, Zhang Jiang, Chang Jian, Chang, Guo Chuan and Gwen were all in the singing and music mood. We sang and played music all the way to the train station.
Today (Saturday), we were given a tour of the nearby castles and ruins by the two Professors escorting us on our trip. In the evening, Chang, Zhang Jiang, Chang Jian, Myself, Gwen, Yoke Ling, Yarong and Pei Shan played win, lose or draw in the hotel's seminar room. The guys won the 'boys versus girls' match... :)
That's all for now... :)
...aNgeLs BrOuGhT mE HeRe...
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