> This was the golden age of physics LanX and all played out in your backyard!

Yes the Nobel prize was mostly a German party till the 50s. Mainly because much of modern universities and education were invented by the Humboldts. Plus the polycentric structure of central Europe where each little sovereign needed at least one academy, (my region alone has maybe a dozen "capitals"). This created a very fertile ground for science and technology in the 19th century.

Britain in contrast centralized most in "Oxbridge", with classical colleges concentrating on law and theology.

> As a physics nut, I'm extremely envious because I'd love to visit Germany one day to tour all these historic sites ...

I'm afraid there is not that much to see.

I was once in Göttingen visiting a friend studying there. It's a very nice students town, but couldn't spot any boxes filled with semi-dead cats tho.

Unfortunately I needed a train to get there, the wormholes were out of service.

> including Heligoland where Heisenberg formulated Quantum Mechanics -- have you ever been there?

No, and unlikely I ever will.

It's Germany's only "real" island in the very north 40km off shore and tiny. One can go there by ship to buy tax free and enjoy local folklore fostered for tourism, but I never was much of a shanty singer.

Tho the Brits had a famous big bang experiment there, I might go to watch a rerun ...

> I find it interesting that the two biggest QM breakthroughs, by Heisenberg and Schrodinger, were both made while on holiday.

Theoretical Physics like Mathematics mainly happen inside tormented heads trying hard to find solutions and fighting against blockades.

Stories from revelations while relaxing in the nature are plenty, I somehow remember a cartoon showing Poincare (?) making a discovery while cutting trees.°

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

update

Hey... you can meet and "get physical" with Olivia Newton-John in your "backyard"! Just realized her mother was born Born ... ;-)

Update

°) Turns out that Poincaré published about such kind of subconscious creativity to solve problems in your sleep.

In reply to Re^7: Organizational Culture (Part VII): Science by LanX
in thread Organizational Culture (Part VII): Science by eyepopslikeamosquito

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.