First of all, thank you too all the participants of the studytrip. Everybody has shown perfect behaviour, following Kevin and Paul around the city in what we lovingly refer to as ‘Sheep mode’. Also, we’ve never missed a train or a participant. You all have been a great audience to all our speakers and perhaps most important of all, you were a fun group!

Next, I’d like to thank Onno van Gaans and Peter Denteneer for accomponying us on our study trip. They spent a lot of time with the students and actively participated with the program. They were a great addition to the group and helped us out when even the most hardened students of us didn’t understand what was going on anymore. So from all of us, thank you!

Finally, I’d like to thank my fellow members of the committee that made all of this possible. We’ve had a great lot of fun together, and there are still many more fun times to come. As, even though the main event is over, there is still more work to be done.

All in all, I really wanted to come up with a silly joke about our chairman, I had already called it the Paul exclusion principle, after a famous Quantum Mechanical principle. But I’m to tired to come up with anything good. I guess, you can either have a great trip, or a great joke, but you can’t have both at the same time. (Get it, Pa dum Tssja)

I hope everybody enjoyed themselves, and I hope you enjoyed reading the blogs as they came by.

Cheers,

Alex

After a short trip by train we arrived in Uppsala. It is quite the pretty little town, with a lot of student live, except for today as ascension Day is a public holiday in Sweden

Uppsala university is the oldest university of scandinavia as it was founded in 1477.

The first lecture of the day was given by a Former member of the Leidsche Flesch, Ilke Engelhardt.
She talked about the Cassini & Rosetta missions, and used the most adorable ways possible to present her subject, including a plastic ducky to represent the comet 67P/Tsjoerjoemov-Gerasimenko. And apparently this comparison isn’t unique to Ilka, as her entire research devision lovinly refer to the Northern and Southerm Hemiduck when talking about different regions of the comet. We concluded the lecture with a sweet fairytale story about Rosetta and Philea, you can view it here online

Next, as appears to be scandinavian tradition, the fire alarm went off in the building. And, once again, as is fitting to true scientists, we casually ignored all safety protocols. But don’t worry, nobody got hurt, except perhaps our lunchtime break.

After the lunchbreak, which we spent sitting in the grass enjoying the lovely sun, we had a special moment. The Mathematicians and Computer scientists joined our group for 2 joint lectures.

Professor Andreas Korn was particularly sad that all his colleagues weren’t able to find any time to give a lecture when they found out today was a public holiday. It was a nice talk for the entire audience. He talked about our galaxy and the universe. In particular he talked about the GAIA mission and how it will change our entire understanding of the galaxy and possible the universe.

Then we concluded the day with a very cool lecture that had gotten the great alternative title: ‘Space keeps trying to kill us’. Some paleontologists have discovered a periodicity in large extinction events on earth, on a timescale of 26 million years. periodicities on such a timescale are typically only possible for astronomical phenomena, and our lecturer gave us some possible explanations for what could be going on. He was a very funny guy, and since he didn’t like powerpoints he had made illustrations for every slide which he showed on the screen.

After this we had a BBQ with the local students of Uppsala, enjoying hamburgers and drinks in the sun. Mathijs and Kevin wrote a more extensive discreption of this in their Blog

Quotes of the day:

On the subject of the mass extinction events: “They already got the dinosaurs, and I’m really pissed about that!”

“Don’t forget to bring your rice-jersey tomorrow for the group picture.” (Instead of Reis)

Cheers,
Alex

I don’t know if any of you have ever seen the metro of Stockholm, but it feels like a dwarven kingdom, especially when you walk through Stockholm at night and there is nobody to be seen, but as soon as you descend into the depths of those cavernous tunnels, you find a great many people walking around

Today we travelled to AlbaNova, a “research and education initiative run jointly by the Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University”. We started the day with a lecture about type 1.5 Superconductivity by Egor Babaev. In short, there are two types of conductivity. Type 1 & Type 2, and this man found another type. The interesting thing about superconductivity is that it was one of the best understood physical problems in the field of Statistical Physics. However, this was in the case of extremely low temperature super conductivity. Then, one day, found a superconductor at ‘high’ temperatures. Although it’s super cool, I would not recommend touching this magnet Haha.
Anyways, this was 30 years ago and now we still don’t have a clue how these high temperature superconducters can exist. And to make a long story short, this professor and his coleagus found a third type somewhere inbetween type one and two, which is and was a huge discovery.

After a short break things got real dense, as in condensed matter physics. Our lecturer Mats Willin managed to squize an entire Masters Degree of subjects into an two hour talk, and because of the enthousiastic way he lectured it was an amazing talk. We talked about phase transitions and statistical properties of matter. That is, we know the properties of a single atom, but when you add many together, as in 10^23 many, you get emergent properties in your system that simply don’t exist as single atom properties. These two quotes sum it up quite nicely:

“The whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts.”

“Technically all the gas-atoms in this room have the same probability to be in any part of the room. So technically, it could be possible that all of the air in the room would move to your half of the lecture room, and I would die quite a horrible death. Luckily for me, statistics tells us that such a deviation from the most probable distribution (An even distribution) is so unlikely that it is just unphysical”

After the lunch break we continued onwards with lectures by a team of Quantum physicists. They gave lectures about Quantum entanglement, single photon sources, and extremely sensitive photon detection systems. I wish I could give you all an easy explanation of these subjects, but I must admit that the after lunch dip combined with a dark lecture hall wasn’t exactly the optimal configuration for my concentration. The essence of the first talk boils down to the fact that you can create photons in pairs, and when you measure properties of one of these photons it influences the properties of the other photon. And depending on how you interpret these results you can either say there is some form of communication faster than light between this pair, instantaneous as far as we know. Einstein referred to this phenomena “Spooky action at a distance”, so if even Einstein gave it a name like this, you might understand when even we get confused by what they are talking about.

The single photon detector was quite an amazing piece of engineering, as it was smaller than a euro coin:

The final lecture of the day was a talk by Oscar Larson, which was really refreshing and funny at the end of the day. It wasn’t as purely scientific, although we learned a lot about astronomic particles and how they trie to detect these.

This evening everybody had some time to explore the city for themselves, and Stockholm is a beautiful city with many, many, many palaces and such on seemingly every corner of the street

We finish with the best joke of the day:

Do you know why all of these bottles are red?
It’s because of the dopper effect (All our drink bottles are red bottles from dopper).

We started of the day with a lecture by Dutch theoretical physicist Niels Ober, which he fittingly gave in the Niels Bohr Institute. He talked about gravity, the classical model of Newtonian gravity up to gravity according to Einstein. The first half of the lecture led to the conclusion:

matter tells space how to curve, space tells matter how to move
~John Weeler

Next he talked about quantum mechanics and how gravity is the only one of the four universal forces that has not yet been unified with Quantum Mechanics (The other ones being the Strong and Weak nuclear forces, and the Electromagnetic force). He could have continued on for a lot longer, but we had to be on our way already to the Natural History Museum.

Here we were greated by Elishevah van Kooten. An Astrochemist from the startech devision who studied in Amsterdam. She told us about meteorites, and how the abundunces and ratios of elements could tell us where they were formed in the beginning of the solarsystem and also how we could use them to learn about the formation of the solarsystem.

After a short break David Rapetti, an observational and theoretical physicist, talked about cosmological moddeling and fitting cosmological models to our observations. It was most noticable that we were dealing with an astronomer when the fire alarm went off. He pretended he didn’t notice untill after about 5 minutes, the signal to noise ratio had become so high that it was certain we were indeed hearing a fire alarm, instead of random noise.

Quickly moving on we took the bus to the Department of Mathematics, were Jesper Nygard introduced us to the center for Quantum devices and quantum electronics. He talked about things we of quantum mechanical technologies that will change the world, and gave us the following insight:

20 years is always the best bet for difficult science. 50 years is to long as it count be covered by ones scientific career and is therefore not interesting. However, 5 years is to short, it puts to much pressure on a scientist to impress. Therefore, 20 years is a always the safest bet. So we can expect Quantum Computers in perhaps 20 years. When I started studying it was also 20 years.

~Jesper Nygard

Next a masters student at the institute told us about his research into majorana particles and ‘braiding’ these particles to encode information, which is another stepping stone towards Quantum computing.

Last but not least we were given a lecture about nano spectroscopy and several of it’s aplications, such as creating images sharper than the diffraction limit, which is really exciting for us familiar with the term, but probably not very telling to anybody else.

At the end of the day we had a very nice Pizza-dinner, which you can read more about in the W&I post. I hope you’ve enjoyed the Blog’s so far. Tomorrow we will be traveling to Stockholm, which will hopefully be as easy as reaching Copenhagen.

Cheers,

Alex van Vorstenbosch

The hostel ‘Sleep in Heaven’ is quite the cozy place, with bunkbeds 3 stories high!
We’ll have a breakfast prepared here for us in the morning, and there is a very big and sociable lounge were I am sitting as I write this very first official blogpost of the Studytrip.

Everybody was free to explore the city for a nice dinner-place, and we have another comforting idea for the parents at home: An øl (Beer) costs almost 7 euros here, so it is sure to be a very productive weekend.

Tomorrow we will start the day by visiting the Tycho Brahe Planetarium with the whole group,
after this all the participants will be free to enjoy the culture of Copenhagen.

Quote of the day:

“We’ve arrived in Hipster paradise!”

Signed by Alex van Vorstenbosch