From Westmister to Greenwich

While strolling through London before taking the boat at Westminster pier to Greenwich, Elisabeth and I had an encounter with yesteryear:

A small town in Oregon late fall of 1959.
Photo in Caffé Concerto on Regent Street.

The square in front of Buckingham Palace was full of tourists
all looking forward to the Queen's Jubilee.

The gates were closed, but behind, a lonely guard paraded forth and back.

We walked down to Westminster pier to catch a boat to Greenwich.

We left Westminster precisely at noon,

passed St. Paul's and looked at some b&w photos on the other side.

When approaching the Tower Bridge ...

... the London Tower, beautifully restored, was on our left.

We arrived at Greenwich just in time to watch the red ball dropping at precisely one o'clock. What they used to call Greenwich Mean Time on the BBC was, in the meantime, watered down to Universal Time.

When we left the boat in Greenwich, I felt an English sunburn. 

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Excellence Lost

No, it's not the paradise lost, but following a re-evaluation of Germany's universities, Freiburg's alma mater lost its status of excellence it gained five years ago. The lost grade is not only a blow to Freiburg's self-esteem but also means a loss of special funding. The total money involved in the program for Germany's now eleven elite universities will amount to 2.5 billion euros over the next five years.

People who assembled in Freiburg's university's rectorate yesterday night for a party to celebrate the university's confirmation in the rank of excellence were devastated when Rector Schiewer announced the bad news. Today Freiburg's media spread a general morning-after feeling (Katerstimmung). The Badische Zeitung published a photo with the university flag at half-mast.

Photo Badische Zeitung

The following map shows Germany's new distribution of elite universities, the lighthouses of science. Yellow stars stand for the newcomers, whereas blue stars mark the losers.

Map dpa

I am sad to see Göttingen, where I passed 1957 my Vordiplom (some sort of bachelor) in physics, marked with a blue star, but I am happy to see Berlin's venerable Humboldt University among the winners. Berlin's oldest university was in the east, following the city's division into four allied forces sectors. 

With the help of American funding, the Free University was founded in Berlin's western sectors such that today there are three universities in our nation's capital, with two labeled excellent. 

The choice of Tübingen, where I started my studies in 1955, fills me with joy. 

In Dresden, following the fall of the Wall, I participated in a somewhat unofficial evaluation of one of the physics institutes in the spring of 1990.

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My Cornish Diary 2

England's farthest point out west is Land's End.

Getting a sunburn in a Mediterranean climate.

Yes, I was there, although the refreshment we took at St. Yves.

Cornwall Cream Tea, traditionally delivered with a Cornish split, a slightly sweet white bread roll, was served in St. Yves with a scone. The warm scone is spread with strawberry jam and then topped with a spoonful of clotted cream. Simply delicious!

St. Yves harbor at low tide in the mist. The only place without sun on the whole trip we visited.

Another typical Cornish food is pasties. A Cornish Pasty is made by placing the uncooked filling on a flat pastry circle and folding it to wrap the filling, crimping the edge at the side or top to form a seal. Traditionally, a pasty is filled with beef, sliced or diced potato, turnip, and onion, seasoned with salt and pepper, and baked.

British humor: This driver invited Prince Philipp as his front-seat passenger for the Queen's jubilee.

Dartmoor is known for its sheep, prison, and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Here, the hound is following Sherlock Holmes, who is possibly late for his date with the escaped prisoner from Dartmoor, serving him as a red herring while Sir Conan Doyle is watching from the top of the staircase.

We just drove by on our way to London. However, we made a long stop in Bath ...

... and were soon ad fontes. The water is not only warm but also of a greenish color.

In the nineteenth century, the main pool was decorated with statues of famous Romans, including Julius Caesar, who looks quite grouchily.

Minerva's gold-plated head was dug out of the Roman debris.

In 973,  Edgar I was crowned at Bath Abbey and anointed with his wife Ælfthryth in a ceremony that formed the basis of the present-day British coronation practice. The coronation was an important step in England's unification, as other kings of Britain came and gave their allegiance to Edgar shortly afterward at Chester and pledged their faith that they would be the king's liege men on sea and land.

A mirror to admire the fine structure of the Abbey's vault is placed in the center of the nave.

No, this is not Calvin but one of those many deans of Bath Abbey.

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The Swerve

Once in a while, I come across a beautifully written book. In The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt tells us in his elegant style the story of Poggio Bracciolini, an Italian book hunter living during the first half of the 15th century. Book hunting in those days consisted of finding handwritten texts from the times of the Romans, who wrote works of their own and copied and translated some of the Greek heritage. Poggio, gifted with the knowledge of excellent Latin and known for his beautiful handwriting, was to Pope John XXIII what Georg Gänswein from Freiburg is for Pope Benedict XVI, the private secretary. He followed his master attending the Church Council of Constance in 1414, where King Sigismund wanted to end the Papal Schism. Eventually, John was formally deposed on May 29, 1515, and later even imprisoned for high treason. 

The Apostolic Secretary Poggio lost his job. In the following, we find Greenblatt well-informed about modern politics when he writes: the papal throne was vacant, and the council - which, like the current European Community, was riven with the tension between the English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish delegations squabbled over the conditions that would have to be met before proceeding to elect a new pope.

Poggio Braccioli at the age of 68. The
picture was taken from The Swerve.

Poggio finding himself unemployed goes out book hunting in German monasteries. He heads for Fulda, the Imperial Abbey founded in the eighth century by the apostle of the Germans, St. Boniface. The abbey is located between the Vogelsberg and the Rhône mountains? Dr. Greenblatt, the Rhône is a river in southern France, but the German mountains are called Rhön. From their highest peak, the Wasserkuppe, traditionally gliders, start.

Apparently, in the library of the Fulda monastery, Poggio finds a copy of a poem called De rerum natura (On the nature of things) by Titus Lucretius Carus written in beautiful Latin around 60 B.C. It seems that Lucretius' primary purpose when formulating his ideas expressed in the poem was to free his friend's (Gaius Memmius's) mind of the supernatural and the fear of death — and to induct him into a state of ἀταραξία (ataraxia) that Epicureans consider synonymous with the only true happiness possible for a person.

A printed copy of
Titus Lucretius Carus' De Rerum Natura
 (Wikipedia)

According to Greenblatt, the content of The Nature of Things, when it became widely known, caused the medieval world to swerve into the Renaissance. On page 185, the author gives a gist of Lucretius' ideas and continues his description on page 220. The quotes are in italics, and the humble comments are mine.

On the Structure of Matter
Everything is made of invisible particles. The elementary particles of matter - the seeds of the things - are eternal. The elementary particles are infinite in shape and size. All particles are in motion in an endless void.

Taking up Democritus' ideas, Lucretius addresses some basic principles of modern particle physics. In particular, since the times of Lord Rutherford, we know that matter in atoms is concentrated in a tiny nucleus, leaving lots of empty space. New exotic particles like the Higgs boson - also called the God particle - are understood for their vacuum energy coupling with geometry in a curved space. 

For Lucretius, body and soul are only fantastically complex structures of atoms linked for a time and destined one day to come apart. 

For centuries, the Church had been fighting this atomistic approach, so Galileo was regarded as a heretic for his Copernican views and atomism.

Creation and Free Will
The universe has no creator or designer. Though nature is beautiful and intricate, there is no evidence of an underlying intelligent design. Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve. The swerve is the source of free will.

As determinism appears to conflict with the concept of free will, Lucretius explains it with the random swerve of the seed of things in his atomistic approach. It is interesting to compare his idea with the discussions in the 1920ies between the advocates of quantum mechanics preaching the breakdown of determinism in the atomic world and Albert Einstein claiming that God does not throw dice. Is our free will a consequence of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?

On Evolution
Nature ceaselessly experiments. Humans are not unique. Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty but in the primitive battle for survival. 
Darwin, did he read On the Nature of Things before writing On the Origin of Species?

On Religion
The soul dies with the body. There is no afterlife. Death is nothing to us and no concern of ours. There is no judgment after death. The universe was not created for us by divine power, and the whole notion of the afterlife is a superstitious fantasy. All organized religions are superstitious delusions and are invariably cruel. There are no angels, demons, or ghosts. The preachers who tell us to live in fear and trembling are lying. God has no interest in our actions.

Mind you, these ideas were brought forward well before Christ was born. Already Epicurus, Lucretius's spiritual father, said: Against other things, it is possible to obtain security, but we humans all live in an unwalled city when it comes to death. Lucretius's further ideas on religion were taken up in the nineteenth century. 

According to Feuerbach, religion is a projection: God is nothing but the outward projection of a human's inward nature, a projection of unfulfilled human wishes and positive attributes. Marx's religion is used as opium to suppress the people. 

For Nietzsche, religion is empty because God is dead, an idea that developed into Sartre's and Camus' existential nihilism: We should face the absurdity of our existence, that we will eventually die, and that religion simply is the result of the fear of death.

On the Pursuit of Happiness
The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. What should matter to us is the pursuit of pleasure, for pleasure is the highest goal of existence. The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is a delusion.

I found out that Thomas Jefferson owned at least five Latin editions of De Rerum nature, along with translations of the poem into English, Italian, and French. Jefferson wrote to a correspondent who wanted to know his life philosophy, "I am an Epicurean."

About Love
Lucretius' poem starts out with a hymn to Venus, the Goddess of Love:

Delight of humankind and gods above,
Parent of Rome, propitious Queen of Love,
Whose vital power, air, earth, and sea supplies,
And breeds whate'er is born beneath the rolling skies;
For every kind, by thy prolific might,
Springs and beholds the regions of the light:
Thee, Goddess, thee, the clouds and tempests fear,
And at thy pleasing presence disappear;
For thee, the land in fragrant flowers is dressed,
For thee, the ocean smiles and smooths her wavy breast,
And heaven itself, with more serene and purer light, is blessed.
For when the rising spring adorns the mead,
And a new scene of nature stands displayed,
When teeming buds and cheerful greens appear,
And western gales unlock the lazy year,
The joyous birds thy welcome first express
Whose native songs thy genial fire confess.
Then savage beasts bound o'er their slighted food,
Struck with thy darts and tempt the raging flood.
All nature is thy gift: earth, air, and sea;
Of all that breathes, the various progeny,
Stung with delight, is goaded on by thee.
O'er barren mountains, o'er the flowery plain,
The leafy forest and the liquid main
Extends thy uncontrolled and boundless reign.
Through all the living regions dost thou move
And scatterest, where thou goest, the kindly seeds of love.

For Lucretius, love means life, beauty, and proliferation. About 100 years later, Paul of Tarsus wrote another quite different Hohelied der Liebe (Song of Love). We read in chapter 13 of his first letter to the Corinthians:

If I speak in the tongues of men and angels but have no love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains but have no love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames but have no love, I gain nothing. Love is patient; love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, and it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts always hopes, and always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. We know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now, these three remain faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

In his praise, St. Paul, the man who laid the foundation of Christianity, stripped love of all its sexuality! Christian history might have taken a different course if he had only referred in his letter to the Song of Songs of Solomon, a book of the Old Testament. Could it be that Paul's Hohelied der Liebe is a direct answer, an alternative model to Lucretius' vision of life? We do not know whether the apostle, an educated Roman citizen, had read Des Rerum Natura. Still, there is one trace of Paul's dispute with Epicureans documented in the Act of the Apostles 17:

While Paul waited for them (Silas and Timothy) in Athens, his spirit was provoked as he saw the city full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons and in the marketplace every day with those who met him. Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him. Some said, "What does this babbler want to say?" Others said, "He seems to be advocating foreign deities" because he preached Jesus and the resurrection. They took hold of him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, "May we know what this new teaching is, which is spoken by you? For you bring certain strange things to our ears. We want to know, therefore, what these things mean." Now all the Athenians and the strangers living there spent their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.

Smartly craving their attention in flattering them and referring to the altar of the unknown God, Paul had noticed; he stood in the middle of the Areopagus and said, "You men of Athens, I perceive that you are very religious in all things. As I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription: 'TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.' What, therefore, you worship in ignorance, I announce to you. The God who made the world and all things in it, he, being Lord of heaven and earth, doesn't dwell in temples made with hands, neither is he served by men's hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he gives to all life and breath and all things. He made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the surface of the earth, having determined appointed seasons, and the boundaries of their dwellings, that they should seek the Lord if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 'For in him we live, move, and have our being.' Some of your poets have said, 'For we are also his offspring.' Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold, silver, or stone, engraved by the art and design of man. The times of ignorance, therefore, God overlooked. But now he commands that all people everywhere should repent because he has appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man he has ordained; of which he has given assurance to all men, in that he has raised Him from the dead."

When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some [surely the Epicureans] mocked, but others said, "We want to hear you again concerning this."

Unfortunately, the commentator stops there.

Coming back to the Hohelied der Liebe, Paul admits that in our life on earth, we see a poor reflection of God like in a mirror but out of Paul's belief grows his hope that he will see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now, these three remain faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

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My Cornish Diary 1

Two weeks ago, Red Baron spent a week in Devonshire and Cornwall in the south of England. One of my objectives was to have a conversation with a person from that region, remembering well Professor Higgins' complaint when he met Eliza selling flowers at the Covent Garden Opera:

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
This verbal class distinction, by now, should be antique ...
And he continued:
Hear a Yorkshireman, or worse,
Hear a Cornishman converse ...

The bus tour to England's southwest started from a hotel in Heathrow and took our group to historical Plymouth via Stonehenge.

We stopped at Winchester, where its famous cathedral was made known to the younger generation through a 1966 song by the New Vaudeville Band: "Winchester Cathedral, you're bringing me down." You stood, and you watched as my baby left town. 

While humming the tune, a stained glass window on one side of the transept caught my attention. The man on the lower left-hand side, I had seen before. It is King George VI with his wife, Elizabeth, who is opposite him, better known as Queen Mum. A guide confirmed my guess and added that King Henry IV, with his second wife, Joan of Navarre, is depicted in the two fields above. On February 7, 1403, Henry married Joanna de Navarre, the daughter of Charles d'Évreux, King of Navarre, at Winchester.

Plymouth, the city of Francis Drake, the Mayflower, 

and Christian Victor, Prince of Schleswig-Holstein

The famous Hoe above Plymouth harbor, with lots of people enjoying the sun

Text on the bronze plate: Francis Drake sailed from Plymouth on December 13, 1577, to begin the "famous voyage" during which he traversed the Strait of Magellan and discovered the Drake Passage south of Cape Horn. Drake then sailed the Golden Hinde north and in June 1579 landed in California. He took possession of that region for Queen Elizabeth, naming it Nova Albion. He returned to Plymouth on September 26, 1580, having circumnavigated the globe. Drake was knighted aboard the Golden Hinde at Deptford in the presence of Queen Elizabeth on April 4, 1581. Do Californians know that they belong to the Commonwealth of Nations?

Quitting the Hoe where Sir Francis finished his game of bowls before descending to the Plymouth harbor and attacking the Spanish Armada, our group passed a monument with a memorial plate:

This obelisk is erected by Alfred Mosely to the memory of Christian Victor, Prince of Schleswig-Holstein, and to the officers, non-commissioned officers & men of the Gloucestershire, Somersetshire & Devonshire regiments who fell during the Boer War, 1899-1902. A German prince in Her Majesty's service against the Boers? 

Well, yes, or somewhat no. The father of Christian Victor, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, fell in love with Princess Helena, daughter of Queen Victoria. She permitted marriage with the proviso that the couple live in Great Britain. So their oldest son, Christian Victor, was educated in England and became known to a broader crowd as the Royal cricketer. His Highness, Prince Christian Victor of Schleswig-Holstein, served in the British Army in Africa. He did not fall in action but died of enteric fever in Pretoria, where he was buried on British soil.

A replica of the Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor. A commemorative plate reads: On September 6 1620, in the Mayoralty of Thomas Fownes after being "kindly entertained and courteously used by divers friends there dwelling" the Pilgrim Fathers sailed from Plymouth in the Mayflower, in the Providence of God to settle in NEW PLYMOUTH, and to lay the foundation of the NEW ENGLAND STATES. The ancient Cawsey, where they embarked, was destroyed not many Years afterwards, but the Site of their Embarkation is marked by the Stone bearing the name of the MAYFLOWER in the pavement of the adjacent Pier. This Tablet was erected in the Mayoralty of I. T. Bond in 1891, to commemorate their Departure and the visit to Plymouth in July of that Year of several of their Descendants and Representatives.

One of the trip's highlights was visiting Lanhydrock, the most complete Victorian country house in Cornwall, with its beautiful park and gardens.

The National Trust made the house's interior most attractive for visitors by decorating it with artifacts from the good old days. Sitting around a decorated table ...

... and sipping French water:

Having already discussed the virtues of high beds, I was captivated by this really high one with a hot water bottle and those mysterious fir cones on the steps. I recalled a German myth that fir cones should help father the heirs.

However, this will not work when his Lordship prefers to spend his time in the presence of his trophies from India:

The country house has the most impressive kitchen facilities ... 

... with fromage et dessert prepared on the same table:

Absolute plumbing on a WC with down-piping made from lead:

The decline of English plumbing. The nation that once invented the WC and gave it to the world, such that for sanitary equipment on the continent, the imperial 7/8th of an inch has still not been replaced by a metric thread, now imports faucets from Schiltach in the Black Forest.

It seems that the English adopted the binary system for fines. It is £250 for smoking in the hotel bed at Plymouth:

Increasing by a factor of two for boozing on the sands of St. Michael's Mount:

The fine doubles again for dog poop left behind in the streets of Polperro:

I asked His Lordship about his opinion, but he did not deign to look at me.

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New Drumming Authorized

Do you remember my blog about the Freiburg Gipfel in December 2010 with the story of some drummers who saw their 13 instruments confiscated by the police? The group called Sambastas was accused of disturbing with their noise the meeting between former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and our chancellor Angela Merkel.

The Sambastas in full action (©Badische Zeitrung)

There had been a follow-up in June 2011 with the drummers asking for their instruments to be returned without paying the ransom. When the municipal authorities refused their request, the Sambastas forced a court decision. One year after their complaint, a Freiburg judge decided after four hours of deliberation that confiscating the drums had been illegal. Even the argument that noise measurements had resulted in peaks of 104.9 decibels, with 100 decibels being the value where noise can be harmful to your health (the Sambastas actually kept their ears plugged) did not influence the judge. Since the initial argument of the authorities to confiscate the drums had been the disturbance of the summit meeting and not the noise - the latter had only been mentioned in retrospect - the judge did not consider this argument. His verdict was a slap in the face of Freiburg's administration. Wise not to make further fools of themselves, the city officials abstained from an appeal. However, what followed was sickening brainwashing of the public when the winning advocates sold their triumph as a victory for the freedom of assembly that the police had stamped down. Disgusting!

Although I keep to the principle of Leben und leben lassen (Live and let live), I am intolerant as far as music is concerned. Here I agree with Wilhelm Busch, a German humorist. Many country fellows consider him (although not correctly) the inventor of the comic strip. The following two pictures are copied from his strip cartoon The Mole:

Schnarräng! - Da tönt ihm in das Ohr, ein Bettelmusikantenchor
(Shing, bang bang, there rings in his ears a beggar musician band)

Musik wird oft nicht schön gefunden, weil sie stets mit Geräusch verbunden
(Music is often found not nice, since it's always linked with noise)

This latter rhyme, somewhat modified, has become a common saying in German. Do I really have to accept the noise of Ukrainian accordion players, South American choirs, and North American folk singers while quietly drinking my glass of wine at Freiburg's Münsterplatz? Good old Sten Fredberg was right when, in the Banana Boat Song parody, he complained, "It's too shrill, man. It's too piercing!" I continue to protest with him, "I don't dig dilettantish amateurs, man!"

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