Last Friday, Theodor W. Haensch came to Heidelberg “Physikalisches Kolloquium”. The big lecture hall was filled up and quite a few people had to seat in the hall way. Some of the colleagues brought chairs from office. The speech was really great. Theodor showed how he had been curiously stuck to hydrogen spectrum. They developed a bunch of laser based techniques to do high-precision measurements of time/frequency, length and physical constants which finally led to the 2005 Nobel prize.
The audience may be attracted by Haensch’s basic rules, e.g. “Do not measure the atoms but Hydrogen”, “Do not measure the wavelength but the frequency”. Measuring the simplest system of most fundamental means with the state-of-the-art techniques, they have harvested unprecedented achievements. They are pushing continuously the frontier of fundamental quantum physics.
What will merit greatly the scientists doing fundamental research is the religion of curiosity-driven research as shown in Haensch’s drawing of chickens attached below, though it may be arguable.




Haensch spoke in Heidelberg
Last Friday, Theodor W. Haensch came to Heidelberg “Physikalisches Kolloquium”. The big lecture hall was filled up and quite a few people had to seat in the hall way. Some of the colleagues brought chairs from office. The speech was really great. Theodor showed how he had been curiously stuck to hydrogen spectrum. They developed a bunch of laser based techniques to do high-precision measurements of time/frequency, length and physical constants which finally led to the 2005 Nobel prize.
The audience may be attracted by Haensch’s basic rules, e.g. “Do not measure the atoms but Hydrogen”, “Do not measure the wavelength but the frequency”. Measuring the simplest system of most fundamental means with the state-of-the-art techniques, they have harvested unprecedented achievements. They are pushing continuously the frontier of fundamental quantum physics.
What will merit greatly the scientists doing fundamental research is the religion of curiosity-driven research as shown in Haensch’s drawing of chickens attached below, though it may be arguable.