Today I had an interesting morning. Out local university holds monthly lectures called "Modern Physics for everybody". It's for everybody [sic!], i.e. you do not need a physics degree to follow. Today's lecture was about H₂O, water. Seems like a rather boring topic, but it was the opposite. The lecturer was the head of the computational chemistry group which uses computer simulations to study structure and dynamics of liquid molecules. He showed some nice visualizations of their simulations. He could only scratch the surface of the topic, of course, but it was fascinating, nevertheless

After that there was a chance to visit DELTA, the Centre for Synchrotron Radiation and to get a look at their electron accelerator. "The plaything of the Physics department's Dean" as it had been jokingly called during the lecture  (The dean made the introduction to the lecture and was there when his "plaything" was mentioned). The accelerator is rather small in comparison to others like DESY in Hamburg, but it was still very interesting to see. It's located in a building of about 40x70m which looks like a common fabric hall from the outside. An electron gun generates electrons [sic!] which are accelerated and kept in the ring by big electric and permanent magnets. The electron circulate at near lightspeed in a vacuum in small stainless-steel tube which is about 4x8cm in diameter. The outer ring is 115m long. The whole thing is enclosed in a wall made of concrete blocks which is about 1m thick to shield radiation. The ring generates synchrotron radiation which is used for various experiments.

There was one sad thing I learned during the visit. The ring is used only 30 weeks each year, because they do not have the money to operate it year-round. How silly is that? North Rhine-Westphalia and the university probably spend millions to build that thing and now there's only enough money to operate it part year?