As you may know I have a four year old daughter, who is mostly very clever, but sometimes… well, lets call it unteachable.

Last weekend me and my wife were together in the living room, the door was closed and our daughter entered the room. We told her, “Please, close the door!” (so far so good)

She put her hand to the door (in the height of her shoulders at approx. 80cm!), gave the door a kick and the door closed quite noisy. We just said: “Please, use the doorhandle, next time!”

Ten times closing the door like this from her and “please use the…” from us, our daughter came to us again and before she closed the door me and my wife shouted in chorus: “USE THE DOORHANDLE!!!”

She put her hand on the doorhandle, gave the door a kick and …

Not exactly what we expected, but we are on the way!

In this sense,
Thomas

...to do this and that!

Have you ever thought about labels on technical devices? I mean, they might be helpful to understand how to handle it. The labels on gamma-ray detectors tell us, for example, which high voltage to put, labels on notebooks tell us, that they are designed for a certain operating system (and they are not even removable when we use other operating systems…) but sometimes these labels, tell us directly how to behave…

For instance: “Handle with care”, or “Do not shake” or the like. But there are labels, that try to reach our conscience, while they are telling us things, that are likely to be forgotten:

So, do what the labels tell you whenever you can!

Cheers,
Thomas

I should not test things using the “Publish” option and pressing “Submit” ;-)

Does somebody know, how to delete an entry!?

Cheers,
Thomas

Currently my wife is pregnant for the second time and my little daughter (almost 4 years old) is really really proud of her brother, who will be born “around x-mas”.

Each day she’s allmost terrorising us with questions about him. “Does he like chocolate, mum?” or “Do you think, that he also likes Spongebob?” or “Is he already able to…”

Last week we were speaking about babies again and that they have to drink milk from the breast at the beginning.

Our daughter asked one of her “questions”, like “Does he like to drink the milk from the breast?”. We explained, that we don’t know this yet, since he’s not born—her (almost shocked) answer was “Doesn’t this works from inside?!”... year, why not—everything could be so simple!

In this sense,
Thomas

Not long ago, I’ve been in Berlin to visit my relatives, who live close to this really, really huge city.

Frankly spoken, I don’t like Berlin very much but I found a nice thing that fits quite well to the overall picture, that one gets of Berlin, if one looks a bit closer… They got a lot of “Centers” there and they even call it “Center” (look for “Berlin” and “Center” at google – I got > 88*10^6 hits!)

They got the “Sony Center”, the “A10-Center” (that is more or less a shopping mall near the highway “A10”, that explains the name), the “Europa Center” and and and…

But the “Center” I like most is this one:

Enjoy Berlin, if you ever get there!!!

Cheers,
Thomas

I found an article about a company that tries to get a patent for all kinds of sunflowers (read here) and all “following” products that are made of it…

What comes next?

This week I care for two interns (from a Cologne school, 15+16 years old) in our Lab!

Part of their job here is to measure the traces of the reactor accident in Tchernobyl in 1986, that can still be seen in the gamma-ray spectra of some earth-samples (especially one sees Cs-137, that has a half-live of 30 years). To measure the spectra they use a superconductor counter (Ge)...

As I described some effects that may happen in such a detector due to the radiation, I told them about Positrons, that are Anti-Electrons. I told them, that after a Positron is produced it annihilates with the next best Electron and we measure gamma-rays (with the popular energy of 511 keV).

They never heard, that Antimatter is doing this annihilation, (neither they don’t know Star Trek!)—so one of their questions was “Why do Positrons and Electrons annihilate anyway?”...

Puh, ... Pretty good question! I never really thought about it! For me it was clear (big problem for a scientist, isn’t it?)

Anyway—I found this and that it is more a philosophical question… Like almost everything, that seems to be clear for us?!

Cheers,
Thomas

In our world there are some very important quantities (such as energy or momentum) that appear to be conserved in the time-evolution of a dynamical system. But there is another conserved quantity, which seems to me to be more fundamental: the Difficulty! The more we know about the world the more specialised is our knowledge – and unfortunately the number of people who understand us decreases with every new bit of specialised knowledge.

Even if we can express very complex relations by a few simple equations the Difficulty shows up when we are asked to express these relations in a way that everybody can understand! It is conserved in the time-evolution of our life!

But why do I tell you, what you probably know best from your own experience (do you still have friends that are no scientists or who are not at least interested in science?)?

Especially when we have a network like this, where scientists from many fields are connected, and where an exchange of ideas is much easier than elsewhere it is important to think about the Difficulty! Everyone of us is a kind of expert in his own field, but wouldn’t it be nice to really understand what’s going on in other science fields?

That is why I call this blog “The Simple Life(time)”, cause I’m nuclear physicist and I measure lifetimes of excited nuclear states. How this works I will explain in some of the next posts. Also I will collect some pictures, news, and other interesting stuff, that I find on the web (and try to explain it, of course!)

Enjoy it!