Rascal Voltaire

Following le plat de résistance at CERN, the participants of the Museumsgesellschaft's summer tour 2025 savored an excellent dessert by visiting the Château de Voltaire at Ferney the following day.

When entering the château, you find the entrance door framed by statues of the Vieux Patriarch and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Voltaire looks mockingly at the reading Rousseau.

Although both men were enlightened and shared some common ideals, such as critiques of the Church and traditional authorities, they had very different philosophies, temperaments, and views on society, which led to sharp personal and intellectual clashes.

Voltaire took on Rousseau after the publication of Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique: "One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours."

Rousseau, in turn, regarded Voltaire as insincere, elitist, corrupted by luxury and salon society, and accused him of orchestrating a conspiracy to ridicule him.

Despite their mutual dislike, both giants of the Enlightenment profoundly influenced the French Revolution and modern democratic thinking. Voltaire, being the liberal, reformist strand, and Rousseau, the radical, populist one.

Their disputes reflect the broad debates of the epoch between reason and emotion, civilization and nature, elite reform and popular revolution.

Here are some photos from the exhibition at the Château:

Voltaire et ses amis. The Patriarch enjoyed good company.

I recognized le Père Adam, l'Abbé Mauré, d'Alembert, and Diderot (For details, read here in German).

Henri IV accueillant Voltaire aux Champs-Elysées

The assassinated Henri IV receives Voltaire on the banks of the River Lethe. The Huguenot king stands here as a symbol of Voltaire's fight against l'Église.

Le Triomphe de Voltaire 1775

Also called The Apotheosis of Voltaire, led by Truth and crowned by Glory. In the center, Melpomene, muse of tragedy, leads Voltaire towards Apollo. On the right stands the Temple of Memory with its central niche vacant, flanked by Sophocles and Euripides on one side, with Corneille and Racine on the other.

Catherine the Great. The inscription reads: paint à dinant par
Pierre-Lyon-peintre-de Sa Majesté Limpératrice Reine J:R:A
 donné à M. de Voltaire, le 15 juillet 1770

Madame Denis' bedroom, Voltaire's mistress

In stepping out of the castle, Ferney's old village church catches the eye. Since it obstructed the view of his castle, Voltaire wanted to have it torn down. However, the local authorities would not allow him to do so.

The Patriarch had the building restored and erected a monumental façade bearing the inscription, "Deo erexit Voltaire MDCCLXI (Erected by Voltaire to God in 1761)." What a scandal, Voltaire's name was written with larger letters than God's.

A fake inscription: This is not Voltaire's tomb.

On the right side wall of the church, Voltaire had a half-pyramid installed, which is said to symbolize his troubled relation with the Church: "Half of me is in, half of me is out.

Voltaire was a hypochondriac all his life. As he grew older, his fear of dying and being buried in a mass grave grew. So he decreed that when he was dying, he should be taken to Geneva. After his death, he was to be transported back to Ferney. Thus, rascal Voltaire wanted to die a Calvinist but be buried a Catholic. 

However, things turned out differently. Following Voltaire's triumphal return to Paris at the beginning of February 1778, he died there on May 30. The Parisian clergy, as expected, opposed a church funeral. Only through deception was Voltaire's family able to bury his body in the Abbey of Scellières (Champagne).

During the French Revolution, Voltaire's remains were transferred to the Pantheon. His tomb lies opposite that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 

Finally pacified in death?

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Cooling at CERN

No, I am not referring to my cooling off following a full day of service at the CERN Open Days in September 2019.

This blog refers to beam cooling, or better, stochastic cooling of particle beams in storage rings. "Cooling" will narrow the transverse momentum distribution within a bunch of charged particles by detecting fluctuations in the momentum and applying a correction.

View of the AA ring. Slide from Simon van der Meer's Nobel Prize lecture:
Stochastic Cooling and the Accumulation of Antiprotons

In 2025, the Museumsgesellschaft chose CERN as the plat de résistance for its traditional summer tour. During our visit to the site, we saw a special cooling facility. The building we entered is familiar to Red Baron. Here, he helped to build the AA (Antiproton Accumulator) in the late 1970s.

Simon van der Meer invented and developed the technique of stochastic cooling at CERN in the Initial Cooling Experiment (ICE).

The principle of Stochastic Cooling.
Slide from Simon van der Meer's Nobel Prize lecture

Stochastic cooling uses the electrical signals produced by particles in a "bunch "to drive an electric kicker. This will kick the bunch of particles to reduce their transverse momentum.

The circulating particles (nearly) and the electrical signal travel at the speed of light. So the correction sent along the chord reaches the kicker well in time to apply the necessary kick to the bunch of particles.
When individual kicks are applied continuously and over an extended time, the average tendency of the particles to have wayward momenta is reduced.

 

Note the shrinking of the beam profile with time.

Cooling times range from a second to several minutes, depending on the required depth of the cooling.

Many accelerators had to work together.
Slide from Simon van der Meer's Nobel Prize lecture

The technique was used to collect and cool antiprotons* in the Antiproton Accumulator (AA). They were then injected into a modification of the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), i.e., the Proton-Antiproton Collider (PAC), to collide with counter-rotating protons.

*Noted as p in the graphic

While Carlo Rubbia proposed and pushed for the PAC, Simon van der Meer's stochastic cooling provided the necessary tool for success. In 1984, Carlo and Simon were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the W and Z bosons that carry the weak nuclear force.

 
The ICE ring was also instrumental in evaluating electron cooling, a technique introduced by Gersh Budker.

Electron Beam Cooling is a technique used primarily in particle accelerators and storage rings to reduce the emittance (the measure of the spread of particle positions and momenta) of a beam of charged particles, typically protons or heavy ions. Dense parallel beams of quasi monoenergetic electrons travel with the heavier particles over a distance, the cooling section. The protons or ions undergo Coulomb scattering in the electron "gas" and exchange momentum with it, thus reducing the space coordinates and the angles of the heavier particles.

Click graphics to enlarge.

CERN operates electron coolers in its Antimatter Decelerator (AD) and in the smaller Extra Low Energy Antiproton (ELENA) ring.

Looking down on ELENA

This is where it gets exciting, because ELENA produces antiprotons of nearly zero energy that capture a positron, forming antihydrogen atoms. This opens research on antimatter.

Does a hydrogen atom fall in a gravitational field just as quickly as an antihydrogen atom? Are there differences in the emitted spectral lines of the two species? With the current measurement accuracies, no differences have been detected so far.

The CERN computer center was the other interesting part of our visit. Here, we were impressed by the amount of data from the experiments that were to be processed.

On the way out, Red Baron was abruptly confronted with his past.

On Display was the first paper by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, which marks the beginning of the World Wide Web, the precursor to the Internet. Even today, the sequence of letters HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) for calling up websites is a reminder of the HyperText Project proposed by the two CERN computer freaks, who had no idea at the time that their proposal would change the world.

Click to enlarge

I had many a cup of coffee with Robert, a wide-awake colleague who was always up for a joke. CERN's superiors looked positively at this drinking of coffee while leaning at bar tables, as new ideas were discussed with colleagues from outside their own field.

It was a thoroughly nostalgic visit to CERN.

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Sabine

Prof. Sabine Wienker-Piepho died on the morning of May 21, 2025, after a serious illness.

On the afternoon of the previous day, another member of the Museumgesellschaft, of which she was Vice President, and I visited Sabine at the university hospital.

She was lying on her back in bed, not asleep but pumped full of medication. The sight was cruel and unbearable. She didn't notice us or the bouquet of flowers.

Click photo to enlarge

I knew Sabine as a person who was turned towards life and bubbling over with intelligence. As the fairy tale professor, she would also dream, as in the photo I took on last year's Museumsreise to the Reichenau Island. This is how I will remember Sabine.

Sabine is contemplating the interior of St. Mark's Minster.
The late Pope Francis elevated the church to a basilica minor.

For lack of other literature during the war, Red Baron grew up with fairy tales.

You may read here how I discovered a copy of my lost fairy tale book.

Sabine read the blog, and she wrote a comment:

Sabine Wienker-Piepho June 18, 2024 at 1:36 PM

Dear Manfred, very suitable for my magazine. In German, with your pictures and slightly expanded. I'll print it! Your Sabine

Since 2018, she has been editor-in-chief of the periodical Märchenspiegel (The Mirror of Fairy Tales).

 I started working on a draft but didn't finish it on time.

Sabine's recent academic activities centered around the University of Jena. Her research focused on folkloric narratology, i.e., fairy tales, legends, songs, jokes, proverbs, and wit. She was a sought-after visiting professor.

For me, Sabine's activities at the Museumsgesellschaft remain unforgotten.

There was the trip she organized to the exhibition Brothers and Sisters at Tübingen.

Sabinen listens attentively to the explanations given by the museum director,
who showed us around.

She was also active as a vivid lecturer on a disturbing topic.

Her contributions to the Museumsgesellschaft's Advent celebrations and dinners will remain unforgotten. Her introductions of the speakers to the lecture evenings were legendary.

She has been Vice President of the Gesellschaft since 2021. As the first woman in this position, she has left big shoes to fill.

Sabine, we miss you, and I miss you especially.

RIP

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Leo XIV

Red Baron took part in a long-planned pilgrimage* to Rome from May 7 to May 10. 

*Two blogs to come    

It happened so that our group was on the plane from Frankfurt to Rome when the cardinals under the age of 80 entered the Sistine Chapel to elect a new pontiff following the death of Pope Francis.

We then expected a long wait. 

And indeed, the evening of May 7 saw black smoke.

The Vatican seagulls on the roof of the Sistine Chapel were a worthwhile photo opportunity. Wait a minute. Isn't that smoke white?

 

On 8 May at 18:08:

Habemus papam!

But then, there was an uncommonly long wait for the new pope. The television stations passed the time by taking pictures of the balcony of St. Peter's Church pointing their cameras at the fabric through which He was to pass.

 

Leo announced in flawless Italian:  La pace sia con tutti voi

It was not until 19:17 that Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost from Chicago stepped through the curtain as Leo XIV onto the balcony of St. Peter's Square.

With only five ballots, this conclave was short in church history. The New York Times immediately found the reason for this. The cardinals were hurrying to leave the Sistine Chapel because the food was not so good.

Above are two comments from the cardinals about their meals.

The following morning, our group toured St. Peter's Basilica. Before entering, the Vatican spoiled us with a copy of the May 9 edition of L'Osservatore Romano.

 

On our later tour of the city, we passed a coffee shop on our way to Castel Sant'Angelo. The resourceful manager advertised "his" Americano in a way that coffee lovers would understand.

Finally, the following day at the Vatican Museum, Pope Leo and Red Baron celebrated His election with a High Five.

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Finis Germaniae

wrote the exiled German author Theodor Plievier when he returned to Berlin shortly after the Second World War.

 

Fleeing mothers with their children in Berlin in spring 1945

Germany's unconditional surrender was signed on May 7, 1945, in Reims and on May 8 in Berlin-Karlshorst, but this was preceded by the capitulation of the Reichshauptstadt 80 years ago today. The Red Army had already reached the government district on April 30, where they found the remains of Adolf Hitler and his newlywed Eva Braun in the courtyard of the Reich Chancellery.

 
The capture of Berlin is considered a key moment for the end of the war in Europe and the liberation from National Socialism.

You can find fake videos on the Internet in which scenes from the movie The Downfall are dubbed with new funny texts. Red Baron is not amused.

Here are some historical photos of the fall of Berlin from my longstanding collection.

The Red Army had encircled Berlin on April 25, 1945.
Now it had to be "Victory at All Costs."

The Reich called the old and the young to the Volkssturm (people's storm).
The men had no uniforms but were identified as fighting men by their armbands.

The Führer inspects das letzte Aufgebot (the last contingent)
in the courtyard of the Reich Chancellery

What is right for the Führer must be right for the Reich Minister of Propaganda.
Goebbels in AGFA color congratulates a child on being awarded the Iron Cross.

The proud young man is decorated.

Others are not so proud ...

... and others are too young to understand.

This is the most iconic photo of the Battle of Berlin.
On May 2, 1945, Soviet private Mikhail Minin raised the Red Flag on the Reichstag above the destroyed Berlin.

On closer inspection, photographer Yevgeny Khaldei noticed that the supporting soldier's arms were heavy with wristwatches. In fact, the familiar battle cry of the pillaging Russian soldiers was uri, uri.
Looting was officially considered a war crime and could not be shown in the picture,
so Khaldei had to retouch the wristwatches.

Clean arms in the colored photo

Khaldei's photo did not please Stalin. He wanted a compatriot to be the honored man.
So, Russian propaganda reenacted the scene two days later with Militon Kantarija from Georgia.

Russian soldiers storm the Reichstag. Fake!
They and the planes providing air support were later mounted in the photo.

Smiling Russian poet Yevgeny Dolmatovsky with a special war trophy,
photographed in Berlin on May 2, 1945.

Sightseeing Russian soldiers.

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