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Longest Physics Lecture in History?
gfrege writes "Perhaps you remember some long physics lectures from your days at school. But as part of a general strike of students at the Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin concerning cuts in funding for the city's universities, some physicists are in the middle of what could be the longest physics lecture in history. It started at noon on Monday, and is planned to run to noon on Thursday. Check out the topics, and if you're in Berlin, come on down. The Babelfish translations of the lecture titles make for some fun reading, too, if you can't make it there yourself."
...by a single professor, rather than a series of lectures on different topics by different people. Or am I missing something?
as long as this musical piece by John Cage, also being performed in Germany.
Back in the days when I went to school (up hill both ways) we had lectures that lasted all winter. We got to school on day, it snowed 30 feet, spring came, snow melted then we got to go home. And we LIKED it. back in the day.
Ride recklessly only when safe to do so.
Again sorry, but you know it's funny.
why? forty-two.
Students at Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin will simultaneously break the world record for sleeping in class.
I remember many 3 day physics lectures -- unfortunately most were only one hour in length!!!
This sheds new light on the old "look left, look right, look left again" rule when crossing the street: In quantum, by looking at the cars, you can affect their positions!
Doesn't apply to me (I tried, nearly got run over). Maybe it works if you're blond...?
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
I guess this also makes for the largest act of masochism as well. Does it really make sense to do something so heartless to get their point across? And I thought that the mass deforestation done to protest the WTO in Seattle was bad.
Anyways, what will this accomplish? It seems to me like this will detract from their point, almost as if it's a lighthearted, happy little protest.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
Maybe I am way off in thinking from the status quo, but I believe universities have a responsibility to inspire students, not just "sell a product". I believe this because what happens to people during their college time effects all of society, not just the student. The imagination and creativity of these graduates will determine how much we advance with space exploration, computers, and all sorts of technologies. These new graduates just have to dream it. Just look at the past 40 years, and what graduates have accomplished. Good for the physics faculty to have this lecture marithon. I bet they will be helping themselves recruit more students.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Also, since a student strike does not hurt as much as a worker strike, the students have to revert to more spectacular means. The one described in this article is one of them. Another media effective action was the demonstration at IKEA last week where many students occupied the beds there and "applied" for educational asylum in Sweden.
You could say it is a kind of demonstration, but a very specific one.
BTW: I am not a student, but work as assistant at a German university, so I am familiar with the current situation and the student protests.
Sebastian
1.) Here in Germany, higher education comes mostly for free, including attending University. This is paid for by state taxes, mostly.
2.) There is a huge financial crunch in local communities and the states (Laender), of which Berlin is one, due to prolonged blissful ignorance of reality (tax revenue down) in crazy public spending. Berlin is one of the worst candidates with huge debt, kind of like CA in the US, even suing federal gvt. to bail them out and unfortunately winning.
3.) Berlin has three full universities plus N colleges and such, sucking up money.
4.) what's an avg. politician to do? Slash university funding big style, amongst other things, potentially closing one of them down for good
5.) what's a university student to do? go on strike (IMO not very creative either, but I digress....) and generally raise awareness that higher education is worth its money.
6.) what's a prof to do? help students out (after all they're in the same boat), by e.g. holding a 3 day continuous physics lecture in the middle of Berlin, for everybody to attend.
That's why they're doing it. If you or I agree with it, is another question...
Everyone's looking at this like it's some crazy publicity stunt to do physics for every waking hour for 3 days. Maybe so, but for those of us who are in physics, this isn't any big deal. I've gone for months at a time thinking about physics every minute I was awake (and losing sleep to it too). Would this have been reported as big news if it were 3 days of biology lectures, I wonder? What about art history?
Plus, there is a reason society should pay for students to go to school. Over the long run, the country will get back more money in taxes than they paid for the tuition. Think about it, if government paid $8000 a year for tuition and another $5000 for room and board, heck make it a cool $15,000 a year for the student, then that would be $60,000 for the 4 years. Now a college graduate will probably make at least $20,000 a year more than a non-college graduate on avarage, and probably much more later in life as they advance in their careers. If government taxed 20% of this extra $20,000 a year, then government would get $140,000 back over the next 35 years. And those are lowball estimates. Consider the extra money would probably push the person into a higher tax bracket (more than 20% taxes, probably closer to 40%), and they will probably be making $50,000/year more than non-graduates after 10 or 15 years of work.
I do not understand why country's do not offer free college education for all.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
are the apparent showing of pornography the 12 hours before the lecture begins and the 12 hours after it ends. If you look at the schedule, you'll note in those time slots, it does say XXX. :)
Hey, this seems like the perfect place to try to verify an old bit of physics lore that I only vaguely recall. Maybe a native German speaker (or physics lore collectors) can verify it, or shoot it full of holes.
The story as I recall it, describes a brilliant but eccentric German physics lecturer. It described an antiquated German grammar structure, now obsolete, but still used by this lecturer due to his advanced age. It was described as "pushing and popping the stack," each sentence was left incomplete, quickly shifting to a new sentence fragment, but omitting all the verbs. Each time you came to the place where the verb belonged, you just "pushed" it onto your mental stack, and moved on to the next sentence. Then when you got to the conclusion, you'd "pop" all those verbs off the stack and speak the sentence endings in order. So hypothetically it might go something like this:
Mary little lamb, fleece white as snow, everywhere Mary, the lamb; had, was, went, sure to go.
Now I never heard anything so preposterous in my life. That was, UNTIL I read the rest of the anecdote about this lecturer. Apparently he was prone to using run-on sentences that would last nearly half an hour, which he only realized as the allotted time for the lecture was coming to a close. As the story told it, students would listen to the first half-hour of the run-on sentence, baffled by most of what he was saying, and not taking many notes because none of the sentences were complete or even sensible. Then near the end of the lecture, he'd suddenly have to wrap things up so he'd just spit out 15 minutes worth of verbs, popping them off his stack in the correct order, and all the students would frantically try to copy them all down in their notes, moving backwards from the bottom to the top of the pages, to fill in all the gaps in the notes.
I don't speak German so I don't have any evidence pro or con about this grammar structure. And I'm skeptical because it would take a genius to remember the last 30 minutes of your extemporaneous lecturing, let alone all those verbs you used in the correct order. But it wouldn't be completely implausible since the German physicists of that era were some of the greatest minds of all time. The story seemed to be told out of respect for his prodigious feat of eccentric speechmaking, as much as it was told as poking fun at the absentminded idiot-savant professor.
So does this story sound like complete B.S.? Or is it vaguely plausible, if someone straightens out the errors I probably made due to it being about 25 years since I heard this? And if anyone else has heard this anecdote, would you happen to know just WHO it was?
There is also something wrong with the idea that if someone comes out the right vagiana then they everything for free, while others have to struggle for the same oppertunity. Isn't education something everyone has a right to? It is the only thing I can think of which by itself can take a person and improve their quality of life, their job, the amount of money they make, and their happiness.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
In Australia, university students are required to join the student union on enrolment in any course at a tertiary institution. The union can thus choose to take action on behalf of the students in exactly the same way as any other workers union.
So even though students are not paid to attend university, their union has legally the same weight as all other trade unions.
In my city the local representatives have been active organising various protests against proposed government regulation changes (effectively govt. wants to reduce spending on education and force universities to obtain funding through research avenues AND raise student fees - in Australia we have a deferred payment scheme called HECS that partially offsets tuition fees).
Some of the recent protests have been a day strike, culminating in a lunchtime rally, storming the state Parliament house. How effective? Who knows but the proposed reform bill has been stymied.
Yes, it's about "modernization" of universities here in germany, especially Berlin, which means to drastically cut expenses, close faculties, adopt a tuition fee model (studying is free until now in germany). And also funds for profs are dropped. So it's in there interest, too.
You might get some more information on indymedia germany (http://de.indymedia.org), but until now the whole movement is not too much related to social movements in general, more about academics getting a bad future like everyone else does.
What union are they part of? At my school, the TA's and graders are part of the United Auto Worker's Union and were threatening to go on strike. Yup, United Auto Workers. So maybe the students are part of the Electrician's Union or something. =)
I do not understand why country's do not offer free college education for all.
Simple. Because educated people are harder to control. Those in positions of power want those who are not to be easier to control, easier to turn into mindless consumer zombies, easier to get to vote for whoever puts out the best commercials rather than has the best platform, etc.
Universal education challenges the new aristocracy, who believe that you shouldn't get anything unless you can pay through the nose for it. Of course, they can afford to, but no one else can.
And the society goes to hell for it, with them leading the way. Gotta love it.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
It's mentioned on page 130 of Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid..
"The proverbial German phenomenon of the "verb-at-the-end", about which droll tales of absent-minded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherance, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping. The confusion among the audience that out-of-order popping from from the stack onto which the professor's verbs had been pushed, is amusing to imagine, could engender."
What the fuck are you talking about?
...).
Not everybody can get a higher education - you have to earn it first by, you guessed it, getting good grades. This is called the "Hochschulreife". Without it, you are not eligible to even apply to a University. There's ALSO this thing called "Numerus Clausus", which basically says "only people with these grades or better get even LOOKED at" for degrees with a limited capacity. And furthermore, if you don't spend effort to study, you'll get kicked out - if you don't manage to pass the exams in the given time-limit (if there is one) or flunk twice, you'll lose your right to ever take another exam in that discipline again. Forever. For every University in Germany. This means, that if I manage to flunk twice in Mathematics, I'm not allowed to study anything where Mathematics is a part of the degree (Engineering, Computer Science,
There's also no studying forever: you get one and a half times the specified time of study for that particular degree (in BW at least). After that you'll have to pay tuition fees. But this is different from state to state.
Who told you that bullshit anyway? Take it from someone who actually studies in Germany...
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
American students get tuition raise after tuition raise, and they do nothing. Same thing for American workers--we just bend over and take it. But Europeans know how to organize and act together. That is why they have taken their countries to a place beyond what America is or may ever be. They have free or low cost universities. American students have to go into debt $20K even for a public school education.
American workers now work more hours per year than any other country, and our pay just keeps going down.
Brainwashed and politically isolated by the media, we are each like baby wildebeest stranded midstream in an African river, while the investors, business owners and corporations feast on our carcasses.....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I believe what you're referring to must be Schachtelsatze, or "nested sentences", which indeed is a (quite obsolete) rhetorical style in german.
It's not used much, and if it is, it's generally in literature. Probably 95% of its useage is simply to show off, I'd assume.
It works basically more or less like this: you start a sentence, and at some word, where you'd like to add additional information about it, you start a subclause. In that one, you can do the same again. Effectively, you're embedding sentences within sentences. Since in German, the verb often comes at the end, once you're through, you must clean up by adding all the verbs at the end. So it's a bit like pushing and popping indeed.
An artificial, exaggerated example was taken from here:
german:
Schon immer mal wollte ich einen Satz, der zwar grammatikalisch richtig gebildet, jedoch durch die Anfugung von Nebensatzen, die durch ein Komma, welches das Verb bzw. das Hilfsverb, das dieserart jeweils erst nach dem Schachtelsatz, der eigentlich den Zusammenhang, der ebenfalls im Nebensatz, der kurz vor dem Verb, welches das Satzende, das das Verb bzw. das Hilfsverb, das durch das bereits genannte Komma, das ja die Nebensatze, die eingeschachtelt worden sind, abschachtelt, ineinander verschachtelt wurde, endlich bringt, wieder entschachtelt, verschachtelt worden ist, erklart wird, erklaren sollte, genannt wird, somit einschachtelt, getrennt werden, verschachtelt wird, ist, formulieren.
english, (almost) german word order:
I always wanted a sentence, which however gramatically corrently formed, but through the addition of subclauses, that are with a comma, which the verb or the auxiliary verb, which in this way each time only after the nested clause, that actually the context, that also in the subclause, that shortly before the verb, which the end of sentence, which the verb or the auxiliary verb, which through the previously mentioned comma, which now the the subclauses, which have been nested, nests in, has been nested in each other, finally mentions, de-nests again, has been nested in, is explained, should explain, is mentioned, therefore nests in, are separated, is nested in, is, to formulate.
english, understandable (sort-of):
I always wanted to formulate a sentence, that is formed gramatically correct, but that is nested in through the addition of subclauses. These subclauses are separated by a comma, which nests in the verb or auxiliary verb, which then gets only mentioned after the nested clause. The nested clause should explain the context, which also is explained in the subclause that has been nested in shortly before the verb, which de-nests (the sentence) again before the end of the sentence. The subclause thus relates to the verb or auxiliary verb.
The verb nests sentences through the use of a comma, which marks the nesting of the subclauses that were nested in.
Hope that helps or at least doesn't confuse more than before...
Indeed. In fact, the US public education system was designed to keep people uneducated and docile.
Not quite, if I were to study mathematics and were to flunk a course, I could still study economics or business even though these include courses in algebra, finance mathematics and statistics. So, while it may apply to engineering or computer science, it wouldn't apply to other courses containing math lectures. And yes, flunking one single part of a degree program twice (sometimes thrice) means that you can't study this program in Germany anymore.
Furthermore, the "Hochschulreife" you mention, usually acquired through the Abitur (or High School Diploma in US, Baccaleaureat in France, but don't hit me for spelling), is not the only way to get higher education in Germany. There are three ways I can think of to get it:
1. Abitur, which means that you could study at every public and private University, Fachhochschule (University for Applied Sciences, Polytechs) and Berufsakademie (professional academy) provided that you meet the entry requirements (NC, special tests, portfolio evidence for arts and architecture).
2. Without Abitur, you can still qualify through apprenticeships and further education in a specific field that would let you study at some Fachhochschulen and Berufsakademien.
3. Obtain a first degree at a foreign university and continue in Germany.
Your degree will state where you got it:
Dipl. Ing. - University
Dipl. Ing. (FH) - Fachhochschule
Dipl. Ing. (BA) - Berufsakademie
In my own experience, Fachhochschulen and Berufsakademien are usually not any worse than normal university education and are sometimes better regarded by some. E.g. the reputation of the TFH Berlin is much better than the other Berlin universities in architecture.
Nevertheless, the point SerpentMage was making was flawed on a number of issues:
Higher education in Germany is not free, we pay for it through the tax system. Berufsakademien and private universities charge you.
Nowhere does it say that you MUST study. Though this might be a socially induced phenomenon.
I feel so sig.