Longest Physics Lecture in History? 262
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."
Maybe if it were a single lecture... (Score:4, Interesting)
It can't be (Score:4, Interesting)
comments from a physicist (Score:4, Interesting)
All I remeber... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Oh YES THEY ARE... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Q: for native German speakers or physics geeks (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
too simple (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm sure most students don't realize that when they're still in university and many will never for the rest of their lives, but having lived and worked in differeny countries with the full range from completely free over subsidized to fully-paid education, I can assure you it's well worth it.
This discussion could fill pages, but e.g. young Americans are sent off into real life with a huge debt to society, which promotes a fight-against-each-other mentality and greed. It's like putting someone in a corner telling them that they are guilty and having to prove they are innocent. To make proud, responsible and social minded citizens with self-esteem, you have to do the contrary and provide some up-front trust and encouragement.
Student strikes in Australia (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Background (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, yes, but plans are to introduce fees for studying. IIRC, 1000 Euro per semester. There are higher fees in the US, for example, but the two systems are quite different so the fees are not comparable. Whether the fee is a good thing or a bad thing is debatable.
2.) There is a huge financial crunch in local communities and the states
Berlin has to save money. True. And again the debate is whether cutting down the financing of universities is smart. Consider that human capital (knowledge) is basically the only ressource Germany has. And universities are generally not well funded. The point "everyone has to save money, so it's fair that universitites have to, too" is certainly valid.
3.) Berlin has three full universities
Each has, AFAIK, a different emphasis. And colleges (Fachhochschulen) are inherently different from universities.
I agree that events like these raise the awareness of the problem. But given the current political climate, I doubt anything will change. BTW, it's not just Berlin. The cuts affect all universities in Germany.
Re:students on strike??? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Oh YES THEY ARE... (Score:3, Interesting)
Correlation not causation etc. etc., but the Universities must be doing something right.
PS: Australian higher education used to be free. Now it's at partially student funded, but the quality of education (as measured by student-teacher ratios, per-student funding, etc.) has decreased. Note also that it started as a 'small fee' (charging for student services), quickly became partial funding for the whole degree, and then a few years later became even more of a financial burden. If Germany does start charging fees, I can only hope they do not follow a similar road.
Re:awesome (Score:3, Interesting)
My first reaction was "Heh?"
My next reaction (after teaching the class for one evening) was "Yey!"
We got to have a 20 minute break every hour (hey, it's a LONG lecture), and got to go home an hour (or sometimes two) early. Overall, it was a pretty enjoyable semester.
A: Schachtelsatze (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [rhetorik-netz.de]:
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...
Re:Oh YES THEY ARE... (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. In fact, the US public education system was designed to keep people uneducated and docile [thememoryhole.org].