Once Nobel Week is over, Frank and I will head north for a week of auroras and anti-midnight non-sun. Swedish physicist Sverker Fredriksson
has been sending us fascinating email about what to expect–today I got
permission to post some. So here he is, my first-ever guestblogger.
I
am mailing you from the Gothenburg airport while waiting for the bus to
Boras. I missed the previous one because we arrived one hour late due
partly to the snow yesterday, partly to the ice today. There is only
one shuttling aircraft between Lulea and Gothenburg, and it collects
delays during the day. And this time even overnight. The last one
yesterday was so late that they had to let the crew sleep this
morning, and took off one hour late. Then they had to de-ice the wings,
which normally takes just a few minutes. However, 7am is rush-hour from
Lulea, with four airlines, so we had to stand in line for another 30
minutes, waiting to be sprayed.
The good thing is that this
brought me one hour at the airport internet café. The bad thing is that
this gives me one hour less with my wife.
Anyway, we “dog people” seem to have the same view of our darlings. My wife always jokes that Qrispin
is reading the newspaper’s gossip column when he checks out which dog
has done what since he read it last time. Qrispin is not the least
interested in a shoot-out on TV, or someone making a noise in our
apartment house. But he can stand still for minutes to sort out all
details around one spot on the lawn. And that is even if he can clearly
see the other dog 50 meters ahead.
As you know dogs have some 250,000 times better “noses” than we
have. It is even claimed that they can detect one single molecule. I
try to train Qrispin to tell one single free quark, but he probably
knows that they are only asymptotically free, and not worth the effort.
I am amazed that your dog is 16 years old, and still so cute! My
wife and I are a little depressed over Qrispin’s 12.5 years, because in
the books most races are predicted to live only until the age of 14. We
hope that these predictions are as wrong as the one we heard when we
bought a little rabbit 20 years ago (Stumper). We counted on “5-7
years” but he became 12 until he died of high age. We think this had to
do with his habbit of eating bacon chips, After Eight mints, art books
and electric cables.
I have seen balloon launches* only on TV,
but sometimes we see them in the northern sky from Lulea, when they
have reached their operating altitudes of some 35 km. There they look
like very bright stars. Every time they are sent up, people phone the
authorities and report UFOs. I do not know yet who owns the balloon of
mid-December, but there is a fair chance that it is NASA. They have
decided to use Kiruna for scientific balloons that will fly to Alaska.
Normally
the wind here blows to the east, so that balloons are taken down just
before the Ural mountains. I guess that NASA balloons have to wait for
specific weather types.
About weather: We had a one-week period of unusually cold weather in both
Lulea and Kiruna
– down to -22C where I live, and even -27C in Kiruna. Now it is up to a
more normal -3 to -5. Here on the west coast it is +8 just now, which
is comparable to a cold summer night in northern Sweden. The year my
wife and I moved to Lulea, August had a mean temperature of +8C, which
was the coldest summer for decades. On the other hand, two years ago we
hade a week of more than +30C, with a record +35C one day. Remember
that this is as far north as northern Alaska or northern Greenland. An
advantage is that the air here is always dry, which is a comfort both
with cold and warm weather. In other words we do not have New York
weather.
That’s all for this internet café!
Best regards,
Sverker
* We are hoping to see a stratospheric balloon launched from Esrange during our visit.