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The region was an excellent choice for me to get my education. It was easy to get a research assistant position throughout my studies at the various academic institutions and then advance to my career from there. Cost of living is still quite cheap compared to other metropolitan areas. Only thing that is missing is more bold risk-taking on new startups. Also the horrendous bureaucracy makes things slow-moving.

Otherwise they have everything they would need for a great hub. Smart and well educated students. A great university and cultural scene.

They are still doing plenty shots for the national ignition campaign and figuring out the target manufacturing process. The official purpose of NIF has just been shifted to support security research.

I really love the strong connection between statistical mechanics and information theory. Before attending a statistical mechanics lecture I was not able to comprehend why entropy was a relevant quantity, beyond the definition of the second law of thermodynamics. My statistical physics professor motivated entropy, by saying: "We need something to measure how much information we can extract from a system. Let's call it entropy, and it should reach its maximum value in a closed system when we are only able to extract the minimum amount of information from the system". And this opened my eyes on how intertwined information theory and statistical mechanics is. In my opinion one of the most beautiful connections in physics!

Are there any papers already out which focus on the technical aspect of reconstructing the image? I heard that they analyzed 3.5 Petabytes of data for this.

Thank you for sharing that story! It must be really amazing to hear storys from a Nobel laureate about working for other laureates like Fermi.

Thank you. Awesome! What did he say at dinner?

Thank you for the interessting material! I have heard a lecture on the geometric and topological applications to solid-state physics. This is one of the things that excites me a lot that whole areas of physics can be "geometrized".

I once took an advanced seminar course on the mathematical foundations of electrodynamics in parallel to my theoretical electrodynamics course during my third bachelor semester. I did not have any clue about differential geometry and did not understand the advanced formalism the lecturer introduced in the seminar. But I was quite shocked how easily Maxwells equations can be derived and how compact the formula was. The article suggests that Gauge theory and fiber bundels are subjects, where math and theoretical physics seem to help each other, which is absolutely facinating!

The problem is getting worse as new jobs are mainly created in cities. They also offer a more attractive infrastructure such as fast internet speeds and shorter commutes, than rural areas. There are of course many other advantages, but I think these are some of the most significant ones. This creates an unhealthy growth, which we see now manifests in the completely out-of-control rents worldwide. The only way this problem can be tackled is to invest massively in the rural infrastructure and stop this disturbing trend towards growing megacities and sparsely inhabited rural areas. Rising rents contribute to an large extent on social inequality. As a renter will only get living space for each month but nothing else of value in return, as opposed to buying a house/flat. The calculation for renting has been fine in the past decades as renting was often cheaper than buying a house, but this changed as we see now.

The text said that they begin in the age of 15 or 16, so the "duale Ausbildung" system is meant by that, because "Dualstudenten" are usually 17 or 18 when they start. The "Dualstudium" combines the practical "Ausbildung" with an applied science bachelors degree like CS, EE, mechanical engineering and so on, so it double the stress, but you'll also get a lot of work experience, a bachelors degree and an apprenticeship diploma. Also you will get paid.

I would not consider the language barrier as the largest obstacle. But the European scientific infrastructure can't even compete with Californias institutions and it gets much worse if you count in the whole US scientific infrastructure. Most of the world leading scientific institutions like Standford, Berkley, CalTech etc. are located in an area where scientific knowledge can get appropriate funding for a product. You simply cannot innovate or create something new without extensive research from universities or research labs. This is one of the problems.

The other problem is, in Germany at least, that the general population is not that well educated in computer science, since the educational curriculum is organized in a strict federal way. The German constitution even prohibits the state from cooperating with the federal education departments. CS should now be a major subject on the same level with math and physics, yet this kind of system makes it very hard to implement a curriculum for all of our pupils. This causes, that even a lot of young people are not that interested in CS and lack of basic CS knowledge.