Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Grass Art

No, I am not writing about Günter Grass, a Nobel Prize winner in literature and known as a skilled sculptor and fine graphic artist too.


I would like to present a grass work of art made by Ralf Witthaus, an artist from Cologne, on the Stühlinger Church Square, in mowing stripes into the lawn. My first reaction was that he had cut too deep, but his answer was that Nature is taking my work of art back. Art that does exist only for two or three weeks must communicate well. 

People living around the Stühlinger Church - situated just across the train station and often mistaken by passing travelers as Freiburg’s Minster Church - look at this piece of art differently in branding a panel: This is no art, this is a noise nuisance! Indeed, Ralf had used a rather noisy lawnmower.
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Saturday, May 14, 2011

Heisenberg Re-read

You should absolutely reread some books you got acquainted with during school days when being old and gray. The Bible and Goethe's Faust belong in this category, among many others. 

Up to now, I didn't count Werner Heisenberg's The Part and the Whole*, a book I read as a young physicist, but admittedly, I was mistaken.
*Titled relatively commonplace: Physics and Beyond in the English translation

This year my annual bicycle tour will take me to Franconia. Wulf, a former classmate and retired College teacher for German and biology, organizes these yearly trips. He does a marvelous job on these tours. While cycling during the day, we learn about birds and plants along the way. Wulf also prepares a reading for the evenings, always choosing an author and topic relevant to the region we are cycling.

Apparently, no famous regional authors were connected with Würzburg, but Werner Heisenberg, Nobel prize winner in physics, was born in this town in 1901. Since I had contributed to the evening entertainment on past bicycle tours too - although with mixed success - Wulf asked me whether I would be willing to read something Heisenberg wrote. 

To this end, I took his autobiography from the shelf and noticed it had been published in 1969, making it more than 40 years since I first read it.

What is comprehension in physics? Are we satisfied with understanding a phenomenon when it is possible to describe it by a mathematical formalism? Although such an understanding will allow us to do calculations and make predictions, the situation remains unsatisfactory. It turns out that terms and definitions of our daily experience will break down when we try to describe phenomena in the atomic world.

A cartoon by N. Harding shows Erwin Schrödinger clueless.
The equation named after him allows for calculating
discrete quantum states using wave mechanics.
One famous example is the physical description of light. While in the 17th Century, Christiaan Huygens' wave theory of light had beaten Isaac Newton's corpuscular theory, modern physics eventually englobed both ideas and speaks about a particle-wave duality. 

This is not a fight between scientists but an attempt to explain the physics of light with pictures taken from our everyday experiences. In subatomic physics, we need this complementary description. 

One of Heisenberg's leitmotifs is the problem of comprehension and that our language cannot describe the phenomena in atomic physics in an inherently consistent way. 

Following my 40-year experience in the subatomic world, it was fascinating to reread his book.
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Monday, May 9, 2011

Opalinus Clay

With Osama bin, the German news is again Laden with the nuclear issue. No more energy from fission in the future, that is decided, but what to do with all that highly radioactive waste already present and still being produced until the last power reactor has shut down in Germany?

So far, our government has put all its money on or better in an abandoned salt mine located in Gorleben in the State of Lower Saxony to serve as the permanent radioactive disposal site. 

Citing the Anglo-American Wikipedia: The name "Gorleben" has become infamous both nationally and internationally because of plans to build a national deep geological repository for radioactive waste there, along with interim storage units. The waste comes from Germany's nuclear power plants, was reprocessed in France at La Hague, and the unusable remains are then sent back to Germany in spent nuclear fuel shipping casks for final storage.
 
Abandoned salt mine Gorleben
A strong opponent to the Gorleben storage site is Anna Countess of Bernstorff, who was honored in Freiburg last week with the Kant-World-Citizen-Prize 2011. She is an admirer of our designated green Governor (Ministerpräsident), for he had agreed to start a search for a high-level radioactive waste disposal site in Baden-Württemberg. 

The past Black-Yellow government had consistently refused such action, arguing that one first has to show that Gorleben is no good. In fact, it had never been good for the Countess as part of the land on top of the Gorleben site belongs to her. No wonder she is vehemently opposed to any radioactivity in her - although deep-lying - basement. Slightly more objectively than this "not in my basement" attitude, Green Peace has declared a risk of water infiltration into the salt mine. Lately, the news of natural gas diffusing into the cavern has created an "explosive mixture" for any further discussions.

When our designated governor considered the possibility of radioactive storage in Germany's South-West, he certainly had the Opalinus clay in mind. This geological formation has been under investigation in Switzerland for many years because of a long-term safe haven for waste from their power reactors. Mighty layers of this particular clay are found in the North of Switzerland but somewhat delicately extend into Germany. Opalinus clay may, in fact, be better suited than salt as a geological storage medium since the stuff is waterproof and, due to its elasticity, will heal any developing geological faults, thus keeping the storage cavern tight for generations.

Generally hailed as a courageous step, the consent to search for the storage site in our "Ländle" is worth what it is: another brainwashing of the people. The investigation of the Opalinus clay formation will just cost taxpayers' money and - taking the Swiss example - continue for years well beyond the responsibility of any present government. 

Anyway, the answer to all the search and research is already clear from the start: storing radioactivity into Opalinus clay will bear a residual risk (Restrisiko) just significant enough to justify the statement of those living around: Not in my basement.

Let's face it: we simply don't know how to protect future generations against the radiological risk and consequences of all that artificial radioactivity we have produced and are still producing.
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