Ursula Bassler

To all German Expats in Paris

See where I went this morning: the one and only German food-store in Paris: Der Tante Emma Laden! It’s a long story how I ended up there. First my friend Louis talked about it; he lives just close by and invited us once for a brunch with some German sausage from this store. Then Franck, who is directing "The Private Life of the Mater Race” from Brech, asked me about typical German recepies. The reason is, they are participating in a festival for young theater troupes at the Cartoucherie, and the idea is to serve a dish associated with the play. Brecht, the thirties, I immediately thought about something like “Eintopf” - stews, lentil-soup, pea-soup, potato-soup. And even if in the thirties working class families did not necessarily have the budget, those dishes are much better with a good sausage in there.

I think I even found them in the Tante-Emma-Laden. And maybe even more than just the sausages: I came in, and a French girlfriend was searching for some food-items to cook a birthday dinner to her German boyfriend. I eavesdropped the discussion between her and the French owner, affirming the French viewpoint on German cuisine. Not very flattering. However, I learnt the owner’s wife is from Bavaria, another client got involved, she’s a Swabian, and I admitted to come from Baden. We exchanged e-mail, and I had the impression to have finally found the meeting point of the German’s in Paris.

No wonder: they carry items like Fish in Horse-radish sauce, Chocolate with yogurt filling and gingerbread pretzels, Ahoi-Brause  - Germans, any childhood junk food memory, you can find it there! And not even to mention zillions of beers. See you there!  

Meeting Art II

Some time ago, I got a mail from a guy, Joerg Tiedemann referring to my blog entry “Meeting Art”. Joerg proposed a web-site to collect pieces of Meeting Art. I just tried out to reach it again, but it’s gone!

I thought actually, that I should start contributing to this web site, maybe because I didn’t feel that involved in the meeting I assisted today: a very informal discussion at IN2P3 on perspectives in dark energy measurements. The subject is pretty interesting, but as I am not an expert and I get more out of such discussions, if they are more structured – however, the outcome of this meeting was the plan for a daylong colloquia in January, with much more detailed and prepared presentations – exactly what would suit me.

I went to this meeting to replace Pascal, our director – who had to go to another appointment at CNRS. It is amazing, how different the style in directing the lab is comparing Pascal and Jean-Eudes. Definitely my involvement increased a lot, even though we haven’t completely figured out yet, what my responsibilities and competences are – I think it is a good thing to let things float a little bit during these first months, it allows me to look around and to get to know what I would like to take care of. This morning I presented the status of our travel money budget to evaluate if there are areas with problems to finish the year, and I still have a lot of work to do to have all the necessary numbers correct. This is not a lot of fun, but becoming just a meeting-artist is not really what I aim for either. Well, at least I would need Joerg's web-site to publish my oeuvre!

PS: Joerg replied to a mail, the Meeting-Art-Web-Site still exists actually, even though it's success has been limited. Go and post your pictures!

CNRS: Fri-Fri about Frou-Frous

“Women! You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them” – who said that? Well, could have been our French Minister for Research, do you remember him? Monsieur François Goulard? Now we got our “scandal” about women in Science as well!

Currently everything concerning research is moving a lot in France - except that the scientists would probably just like to continue to work on their subjects and if possible with enough money to do it properly. The biggest change is the reform of CNRS, the “Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques”, employer of 26000 people in scientific research, more than 10000 of them scientists in all kind of fields. This reform (as any reform) is heavily criticized – however some of the criticism is to my opinion very well founded. Within this climate of changes with uncertain outcome, the "Conseil d’Administration",  the board of directors of CNRS has been renewed: out of 21 members, 1/3 had been women so far, now there is only 1 woman left.

That is already scandalous, especially considering the declared mission and gender politics of CNRS. But then, it got even better: Dr. Elisabeth Dubois-Violette, former president of CNRS’ scientific council, “Director of Research of Exceptional Class” (which is the highest level of promotion in CNRS), widely recognized for her contributions in theoretical condensed matter, member of the steering committee for the place of women in CRNS, dared to complain!!! And our minister replied:

“The problem is due to the fact, that this dame – Elisabeth Dubois-Violette – would have liked to have a position as director herself. The question is to know if she is the best suited for this. (…) Now, if you like, I can nominate my secretary…”

Just to let you know, they nominated in the board of directors Prof. Michel Maffesoli to represent the department “Humanity and Society”. This professor had been the thesis supervisor of Mme. Elisabeth Tessier, President Mitterand's astrologist  - her thesis in sociology is not know as a milestone of scientific achievement ("La science officielle va-t-elle finir par rendre hommage à la vérité expérimentale, reconnaître les faits ? En tout cas, la victoire paraît éclatante pour l’Astrologie, car les faits sont les faits ; ils ont l’insolence de l’évidence" - page XL appendix) - but that is not my field, no?

If you would like to read the articles in "Liberation" and “Le Monde” or sign the petition.

The French Physics Society made a Press Release:

« La Société Française de Physique s'étonne des propos tenus par le Ministre de la Recherche et de l'Enseignement Supérieur, François GOULARD, rapportés par Patrick Roger dans le journal Le Monde du 22/10/2005, à l'encontre de notre collègue physicienne Elisabeth Dubois-Violette. Interrogé à propos de l'absence totale de femmes parmi les nouvelles nominations au Conseil d'Administration du CNRS, absence soulignée par Elisabeth Dubois-Violette, présidente sortante du Conseil Scientifique du CNRS et membre du comité de pilotage de la Mission pour la place de la femme au CNRS, le Ministre a exprimé une opinion particulièrement désobligeante à son égard :

"Le problème vient de ce que cette dame -Elisabeth Dubois-Violette- se serait bien vue à un poste de direction. La question est de savoir si elle était la plus désignée pour celui-ci. (...) Maintenant, si ça peut vous faire plaisir, je peux nommer mon assistante... "

La stature scientifique de notre collègue, qui n'a briguée aucun poste de direction, a pourtant été largement reconnue par la communauté internationale et toutes les instances d'évaluation du CNRS. Elle est directrice de recherche à la classe exceptionnelle au CNRS et a produit des contributions majeures à la théorie physique de la matière condensée. Ce n'est pas par des déclarations sexistes de ce type que le Ministre apportera des solutions au problème de la sous-représentation des femmes dans les instances de direction des organismes de la recherche française.

La Société Française de Physique apporte son soutien le plus complet à notre collègue Elisabeth Dubois-Violette et à l'action qu'elle a engagée. »

Time to finish my film-project about women in science and go see ARTE!

Buerkle GmbH visits CERN

The true reason why I studied physics is the bad influence of my brother Gerd – he told me that in physics, contrary to chemistry, nothing has to be learnt by heart and he had many of this books about the Universe and Particle Physics, that may seduce the innocent soul of a young person and induce him to study physics. My brother didn’t go through the hassle of University, and he earns today twice as much money as I do!

He does so in a medium size company (staff of about 35) producing plastic, sorry “Kunststoff”, equipment for chemical and pharmaceutical laboratories. Yet, it is a company a little different. Its owner, Veit Buerkle, is not what I would call a hardboild entrepreneur, no, rather someone interested to realize more than high profits and open to experiments on how to work together - and yet his company is doing very well! I heard about proposing Tai-Chi lessons during lunch break, fruit baskets disposed all over the company, a cooking-club and Xmas-parties with small theater companies etc. Some of them last, some of the vanish, but they keep the company lively. So for the Einstein-year, Veit had the idea to visit CERN with his company, and my brother  (next to me in the picture - thanks Tanja!) thought to invite me to “talk-to-a-physicist in Allemanisch”, our incomprehensible home-dialekt.

I never worked at CERN, and the last time I visited Microcosm, CERN's general public exhibit, was nearly 15 years ago with our University. Yet after getting up at 4:00 am to take the earliest flight to Geneva, I just arrived in time to “guide” the group with an improvisation of comments to the exhibit. It was fun! Questions came up, like “Why are you doing all this?”, “What happened before the big bag?”, “Can you say something about the sense of the Universe?”, “All this money, couldn’t it be used to feed Africa?” and “Hey, I would like to hear something more about black holes!”. Someone having taken care of a household, mentioned that event filtering is not very different from sieving flour and I felt a true interest in wanting to know, what we are doing with all these events that are measured in a detector.

In the afternoon, the 20 hardcore “Physicists” of the group got a professional conference about CERN and LHC physics by Klaus Batzner (the other part of the group went visiting a Chocolate Manufacturer!) – during such conferences I am often worried, on one side “Will the public really understand something?” and on the other side “Well this they must have heart so often already!”, but their reaction was pure delight: “Have you seen how enthusiastic this professor was? His eyes were shining!”, “Oh, one could really feel how much he loves this subject with all his heart”, “I really had the impression I understood what he was saying – you must also have learnd something, no?” Well this later comment, lead me to some doubts about the impression I gave them. Then we visited the CMS-experiment with two guides, Ulrich Fuchs and Manfred Muecke, and they did a wonderful job, giving a very good insight of the technical, political and every-day-life aspects of particle physics. I was amazed seeing CMS, it is one of the moments, where I am marveled by the size and the complexity of our detectors and I feel proud of everyone in the field, that we managed to work together to built these astonishing apparatus. And then I think it wasn't that bad to got a little influenced by my brother!

On the way back home, even a quiz had been organized to answer Einstein related questions - and it was someone visiting the Chocolate Manufacturer who got the first price (together with one of the Physicists) I checked my brothers answers, but it was only the second place - shame on me! He won a "dinner for two" - a pack of Miraculix spaghetti - Silvie, my sister-in-law doing the bookkeeping of the company was certainly most delighted as well.  All I have to say is: thanks again for the invitation, I had a great time and was very happy to meet you guys! See you next time!

Bienvenu!

“The French year starts on the first Monday in September, when all the Parisians are coming back in town…” – well that is not completely true: the contracts for PhD students, as well as permanent positions at CNRS etc. start actually on the 1^st of October. But to leave a little more time, a day of welcome for the PhD students was organized by Irena (thanks for the picture!) and the “thesis committee” today.

This spring, we were pretty worried in the lab, that there would be no new PhD student starting this year. Sophie already wrote a little about this, but we set up a small committee to do some thinking about the reason for this, and what we could do about. Jean-Michel and Sophie did a survey among the PhD students in the lab, to find out, if there was any particular problem, where we could improve the situation for them or if they have ideas, which we could implement in the lab.

The outcome of this procedure was the creation of a permanent thesis committee with four young researchers, Irena, Julien, Melissa and Sophie. They are taking care of now, to organize a “godparent” for each student in the lab, in case there is any conflict with his thesis director, a contact list of former students who went off working for industry, a day to visit the lab and meet the different groups for students during their last year of classes, and the welcome day for new students starting their PhD. Meanwhile, without having those propositions already implemented, we got six new students in the lab – but that is not a reason to give up our new ideas!

Today the welcome day for the new students took place: the students and the committee met in the morning together with our lab director, then they came to the general weekly Friday meeting, the “reunion du Vendredi”, and presented themselves to the lab. As this presentation was done for the first time this year, also the students from the previous year came to the front. Next year, it would be certainly a good idea, to expand this presentation to all new members of the lab and not only the students. In the afternoon, visits of the different parts of the lab were proposed, which led them to corners, even many permanent staff members have not necessarily been to.

So welcome to Alejandro, Florant, Jeremie, Jerome, Mohamed et Pietro!

 

Einstein missed in Hamburg

Hey „Einstein the big Idea“ was shown on ARTE yesterday! and I missed it: Hannes a friend from old days at DESY gave a party on Saturday – after promising it two years ago for getting a permanent position. We now celebrated the 90^th birthday of Hannes and his friend Antje. I admire Hannes: besides being very human, Hannes continued over years with temporary appointments, when most people I know whould already have given up becoming a physicst. More over, Hannes instited working on subjects he was interessted in and pursuing his own ideas with a lot of courage - and see, it worked out for him! Even though he was already well advanced in his forties, and career consulting would probably have adviced him to give up a long time ago. Is there some truth, that Einstein today wouldn't make it through his PhD? That's what I heart about a second film shown by ARTE that night - yet it is important to remember that all the statistics never tell something about the individual paths in life!

I was delighted to see dear collaborators I haven’t seen for a long time. Like Hilde, the H1-secretary for many years, and truly the heart of the collaboration. I love listening to people from her generation about their paths in life, family stories during the war, being a refugee and building a life from it. Sometimes I have the impression that this generation had to accept to have a personal way through life, instead following predefined ideas. 

Before traveling back to Paris today, I went to say hello at DESY – from Quickborn, the place I stayed with my friend Sonja 20km from Hamburg, it was a longer trip by public transportation than to fly from Hamburg to Paris. At DESY, there are guardians at the entrance gate, who still recognize me, and in the lovely October sun I had a little nostalgia for the time I spent in Hamburg. DESY is a wonderful place and the lab so close to downtown Hamburg!

The H1-collaborators I’ve met seem to do very well, even though in June 2007 the HERA accelerator operation and the related experiments will end operation, which is sad. HERA is a unique electron-proton collider, which allows first of all to measure the proton structre function, this means the content of the proton in quarks and gluons. This may sound like a "one-time measurement" but infact these are probablity functions which depent on the energy of the quarks and gluons and on the resolution with which we observe them. In this field there are also many other things worthwhile to explore: to measure the longitudinal structure function with require lower beam-energies, to explore the differences between proton and neutrons using deuterium beams, to investigate polarization. Yet choices have been made and DESY will become a Synchrotron radiation lab as SLAC and certainly be one of the driving forces of the ILC. A lot of discussion is currently going on, about which LHC experiment DESY will join: ATLAS or CMS? Everyone has a different opinion, and so far the money seems too limited to join both. Yet there are many physicists employed by DESY, and I cannot imagine them not wanting to participate in the LHC – especially as ILC seems still in some unknown future.

Fete de la Science

What happens when you take a six 10 year olds and show them science ? I can tell you it’s a mess - Especially when their teacher is with another group! It’s the “Fete de la Science” and I volunteered to guide through a set of “Counterintuitive Experiments”.

Every year in October is the "Fete de la Science” where research laboratories all over France open their doors for tours in the lab, meet a scientist, conferences, workshops and hands-on experiences. Our lab is participating very actively in this since years, thanks to Jacques Dumarchez and Isabelle Cossin, who put everything together and come up with new ideas every year.

  The “Counterintuitive Experiments” is a little exhibit put on food by Pierre Colinart for high school students: small table size experiments, showing phenomena of Archimed’s principles, airflow, heat-exchange, chemical reactions. One experiment asks the question: “In how many pieces does a spaghetti break?” Do it at home! Take a spaghetti the long way between your forefingers, and push. What would your answer be? Do it several times, you will get a nice gaussian distribution and go find the explanation googeling on the web. Now, ask this question to a group age 8 ½ to 11. They brake the spaghetti with a lot of delight, start to play with the glass balls intended to illustrate the gaussian distribution and finally ended up eating the spaghettis uncooked -  me trying to prevent them and them having more and more fun to put up with challenge. At that point I gave up to try to interest them in science, it was our last experiment anyhow and you finaly get the reason why I didn’t became a school teacher. What amazed me most, was their creativity to transform anything they find immediately into a toy and do something with it. And at this age, that’s probably more important than understanding a gaussian distribution. Except for the sweetest, tiniest 8 1/2 year old girl who followed very concentrated and who told me "When I will be grown up, I want to become a scientist!"

With groups of older students, the experiments were a much bigger success and I think many of them enjoyed making a hypothesis, observing the experimental facts and finding an explanation. At least I enjoyed it, and probably all the other from the lab who accompanied the different groups. With more than 400 visitors a day and 30 lab members mobilized, the “Fete de la Science” is a remarkable success. Especially schools are using the opportunity to get an idea what scientists are really doing, but also general public is just coming. Scool classes exhalte sometimes the feeling, that they were obliged to come and their preoccupation of the students is often far away from science. The question about science communication and the understanding or even interest in science by the general public is a serious one, and I sometimes feel discouraged by the indifference. During the "Fete de la Science" it is marvelous to talk about our experiments and the phenomena in the Univers we study, and feeling that it makes some people dream. Nothing wrong with making the scientists happy, no?

Tooth & Nose

My nose is dripping, I got a wisdom tooth extracted and all the other teeth are hurting. Don't ask me to do anything useful today! (and don't tell anyone that I've been obsessed debugging scripts for a little web site for the soon to happen 20-or-so-years-high-school reunion - we are searching for our class-mates!)

When I go to the dentist I always end up with the question: how to you choose a doctor? There are no comparitive reviews and yet, trusting them on my health makes me sometimes feel nervous. I go to this dentist, because Sophie recommended him to me "My husband said it is the best dentist he ever went to and he is afraid of dentists!" Enough of a criteria? Yes, he is a very nice guy, not listening to classic music, but to FIP, a generic radio station, very calm and surrounded by an aura of competence. I hope my teeth will agree with that.

Veronique's book

Not Prospero’s Book - after the debate with Peter Greenaway yesterday, I had a quick look at the library of the Centre Pompidou, and there it was: my friend Veronique’s first book! It came out on Friday, and we had a little party in her flat on Saturday - yet, how astonishing to see it for real in a library! And even more in the library of the Centre Pompidou. It is a beautiful book, explaining contemporary art to children (~10 onwards) in a very original way: rather than giving a historical overview of contemporary art, Veronique explains what contemporary artists are doing: transforming the human body, listening to nature, installing environments etc. This book is opening the meaning of art from reproduction to something wider and more open. It tells about the questions artists are asking and trying to answer today and may inspire you to try out for yourself – which is interesting even for adults: during the party on Saturday, the children who were present focused rather on their game boys – no illusions about this one. I admit I am a little jealous - it looks so fun to do such a book, and probably I will never be able to do something similar about physics.

Uranium 92

I will break my friendship with all those who refuse to get a cell phone! Standing in the foyer of the Centre Pompidou, I’ve waited for my friend Carmelinda to show up: the plan was to meet at 3:30 to get tickets for the latest Peter Greenaway movie showing at 4:00 and go to the following conference. 3:50 she is still not here, not even in the line in front of Beaubourg, meanwhile a lengthy line formed already before the entrance of the cinema, and I am standing around with two tickets in my hands, not even able to tell her to meet me in front of the cinema rather than in the foyer.

Was it a bad thing? No, finally we met three Italian friends of hers towards the end of the line, we were seated pretty much in the front of the theater and even though we didn’t made it in time to meet Peter Greenaway in a smaller conference room than the cinema, we saw a part of his conference transmitted by video in a neighboring room. And left for dinner before the end, once we had enough.

“A Life in Suitcases” is actually the short movie version of the “The Tulser Luper Suitcases”, a multimedia project on “a personal history of Uranium”. The movie traces in some very personal way the history of the Uranium between 1930 and 1990 (not much to do with physics) with the Tulse Luper, the hero, living 92 adventures, meeting 92 characters and symbolizing them in 92 suitcases all with a different content. Claudio, one of Carmelinda’s friends contributed actually the sequence of suitcase #85 “Ink & Blood” – as part of a contest – but he didn’t even get an invitation for the projection!

The interesting point during the conference was Peter Greenaway’s statement, that the important point about a movie is less the plot, which we forget anyway pretty quickly, but rather the ambiance and the emotions through which a movie takes us. This is certainly true for “A Life in Suitcases”: the story is so complex, surprising, jumping, that I could hardly tell you what it was about, yet impressions of it do remain. It was certainly very virtuoso, using a wide variety of cinematographic languages in a very imaginative way, and fun to follow (sometimes I thought of first BBC series of the Hitchhiker’s Guide). Greenaway stated that cinema should not be the appendix of a bookstore, yet his movie was full of text. Luckily. I like being told stories. We left the conference before the end, because I started to make a fixation on Greenaway saying "I suppose" in every sentance, and because I didn't like him being so negative about cinema. Mr. Greenaway, you are doing movies, and I like your movies, so why can you not accept that you are a filmmaker? There's nothing wrong with the fact that you did not become a painter! Look, I even start to accept that I became a physicist...