Marburg, Germany

Today is the 7th of July, Tuesday, and we're in Tuebingen after spending four days in Marburg at Evelyn and Olaf Korn's place there. Evelyn spent a week in Kentucky last March (and went back with a pair of Justin boots, no less), and we retaliated. It was a lot of fun. They have a precocious eight year old named Johannes, who is prone to logical argument. He was of course annoyed that neither of us could speak German, and his English stops about at "My name is John". By the time we left, though, I had decided to learn German, and I would say something in German, and he would answer in English (you must understand, these were VERY primitive conversations, if you can call them that...)

The photo above is the three of them in front of St. Elisabeth's Church, Marburg's local saint, and a former pilgrimage destination. As you can see, I am as usual having trouble with formatting the text around the photo.

So on Friday, while Phil and Evelyn did science at Marburg University, and Johannes went to school, Olaf, who had no lectures at his job (he's a finance professor at Gottingen) took me to Gottingen and showed me around. It was really cool. Anybody who's studied any mathematics knows that Gottingen is sort of like Mecca for mathematicians. Soooooo,

the guy below was the first ever experimental physicist. Can't remember his name, of course. I wanted to post Gauss's house and the "Hilbert Space" from the mathematics institute, but perhaps I'd better post this, and then add another entry to the blog.