Category Archives: Cities

Home sweet home

Australia, Copenhagen, Sydney

I finally managed to find the time to write a few lines after returning to Copenhagen, home sweet home.

Last week we finished our (very nice) Australia trip with yet another slightly annoying two-days-without-sleep trip from down under to up here. Actually it also had it’s nice moments: on our flight from Abu Dhabi we had comforting two four-seat rows and a baby bed for the three of us. There were only in total 60 passengers on a plane with 280 seats. Dunno how this works out for the economics of the airline, but I wanna fly this way all the time now. Unfortunately our six hours stay in Düsseldorf and the subsequent flight were already much less pleasing. Well, the flight was actually fine.
Arriving in Copenhagen we actually had worse weather than when leaving in Sydney (remember it’s winter down there these days). It’s good to be back ;)
Well actually it was not all good, since I was fighting a mixture of lack of sleep and jetlag for the past days … but I think I finally defeated it today.

Maybe to add a few more lines about Australia, Sydney in particular …
We had a couple of days in Sydney after the end of ICHEP. Which we basically spent with walking half of Sydney, the Manly peninsula and various beach/costal walks.
Same as Melbourne, it’s a really nice city. The weather was quite a bit better and we actually got slightly sunburned (once again, it’s winter down there).

I put up a few panoramas in my gallery’s Cities and Nature folders … maybe I’ll add a few more later.

Destination: Australia

Australia, Melbourne, Outreach, Physics

For those that didn’t know yet, I am currently in Melbourne, Australia. The main reason is probably the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) that currently takes place at the Melbourne Convention Centre. Another reason is the first public display of my ATLAS model in the Melbourne Planetarium during the same time (actually longer than that).

And since I am going to spend about three weeks in Australia, we decided to make it a family trip, so Heike and Erik joined in.

Flying Berlin – Düsseldorf – Abu Dhabi – Melbourne, we spend about two days in planes and on airports to get to our first destination in the centre of Melbourne. Still fighting with a bit of jet lag I went to see the folks of Melbourne University (cheers to Caroline and Dave) and Tanya from the planetarium on Friday. After getting a bit of an introduction to University and the Centre of excellence for particle physics in Australia, I went to see the exhibition and the ATLAS display at the Planetarium for the first time. Quite a nice casing and setting as well as some nice posters and videos in the installation (they also made a time-lapse video of their build in Melbourne about three weeks ago).

On the weekend we managed to get a bit out of town to see a wild life parks (with Kangaroos, Koalas and all that), some national parks (with actual ‘wild’ Koalas) and the Great Ocean Road. We actually rented a car and I had my first left-driving experience, which was quite nice due to the (at least for me) surprising fact that though everything is opposite in local cars, the pedals are the same way as in right-driving cars (accelerating right, breaking middle/left).

Today ICHEP finally started – which is the reason why I managed to write this blog as I didn’t have (affordable) internet before :( – and it started with a blast: they/we found the Higgs, well we found some boson that is compatible with the/a Standard Model Higgs, to be politically correct (or what you call it). Anyways … quite some excitement, both here and at CERN, where the results were actually presented (we just got a live feed here). But after that the reception seemed to be more exciting for most people (mainly because many people might have had an idea before the actual presentations).

One minor detail that was interesting (at least I thought so) … CERN’s press release on this issue was released already after CMS’ presentation and not after ATLAS’ results were shown as well. Also this time the release quoted only one spokesperson (CMS’) instead of both.
Hmm? But meh …

We’ll see what else this ICHEP has to offer, starting tomorrow morning …

Über den Wolken …

Erik, Geneva

Last weekend planes just passed Erik’s test as a suitable mean of transportation on his path to conquer the world.

We were invited to a beautiful wedding (congratz to Julie & Jacob again) in Geneva and for obvious reasons decided to go with the plane solution. It turned out to work really well … besides a few minor details maybe, mostly related to the check-in of the pram and such things. We had really nice weather and even got sunburned (not the little one, of course) walking the city of Geneva.

Due to the successful test, many more flights (and also more weddings) will follow this summer :)

Transit of Venus

Copenhagen, Physics

Thanks to my little one I actually managed to be awake for the last transit of Venus in this century … yeah! He also gave me enough time to set up my telescope and after some breakfast (at least for him) also to follow the happening for almost two hours until the little black dot disappeared at about 6:55 am.