How brilliant is this? Nobel Prize winners get to invite 16 of their dearest family, friends, and colleagues to Stockholm for the party–then find themselves with such a heavy schedule that you see all these people mostly at huge receptions or during random encounters in hotel lobbies.
Laureate: Uncle Walter! Aunt Billie! Hi! How are you? Er, sorry, the car is waiting….
That’s one more reason I’m grateful to Nobel-guest-blogger Sverker Fredriksson for some more email I know readers will enjoy.
Late Thursday night:
Hi Betsy and Frank,
I guess you are asleep now before the first serious duty in Sweden, to deliver the Nobel talk tomorrow. I saw you two on TV tonight, and observed that your appearance on TV fits very well the picture I already have, that you enjoy life and are easy-going and charming.
This means that Frank has a good chance to break an old tradition of somewhat boring Nobel talks. Most speakers seem to forget the audience of mainly non- experts, eager to get some knowledge about the Nobel Laureate and the discovery, and instead try to deliver their talks straight into the History Book. Just like with Academy Award Winners, the main content of the talks are long acknowledgments.
I guess Thursday is for rehearsing, before “Good Friday”.
Tonight I heard David Gross tell that he looks forward to meet our King. The King is a very nice chap, who could joke and laugh when out of serious duty, but also be formal and a bit shy while doing traditional things, like inaugurating something.
The King is tremendously popular in Sweden. Being a “Republican” here does not give any votes in an election (unlike in your country – unfortunately). Our ruling party has some footnote somewhere that Sweden should become a republic, but the government has avoided the issue successfully for about a century.
Anyway, when you get your five minutes with the Royal family on Friday night, don’t forget to tell that you are going to the Arctic and will stay overnight in the IceHotel and visit space organisations and the mine. I guarantee that the King’s attention will be on top.
You Frank will also probably be called to deliver a two-minute talk at the banquet. These are normally light-hearted and well fitted to an audience in a good mood, including us in front of TV. Last year’s literature winner devoted his talk to “all mothers”, without whose support no one would ever qualify for a Nobel prize.
This morning our main newspaper told that most American winners are concerned about those strange “tails” that you have to carry on Friday. In Sweden they symbolize the uniform of the academic world, and demonstrate that in science one is judged from ideas and arguments, and not from how fancy one looks. In folklore the entrees into the various ceremonies are called penguin parades.
Finally some news:
Ingrid Sandahl [physicist and expert on auroras] is a great person, who knows almost everyone in Kiruna. She has arranged a dog sled for you on Thursday evening, after our visit to the Space High-School. She has a friend, Lena, who owns so many dogs that she plans to start up commercial tours for tourists. It would be a great thing for her upcoming business to mention you as her first “passengers”. Of course, the tour is free of charge. It will not be as long as the existing commercial ones, because they can take up to a few yours, and stop for coffee somewhere (and cost a fortune).Since you are dog-lovers, you will be able to chat with the dogs and tell them about your own beloved one at home. If you have seen sled-tours on TV, you know that the problem is not to make the dogs run – it is to make them stop. They love to run, and one normally has to throw out an anchor around a tree to get them to halt. Therefore, I cannot promise that you will get a chance to pilot them yourselves – it is too tricky. Let’s hope for both Northern Lights and some moon next Thursday!
Even later Thursday night, responding to my response which told him I’ve been seated next to the Prince at the Nobel banquet:
Congratulations Betsy to a nice and handsome partner at the banquet. Traditionally, the oldest physics winner’s wife will sit next to the King. That was a bit of a problem when Salam got the prize, because he brought both wives. The oldest lady got the honour while the younger one had to sit with the students. This situation was not quite foreseen by Mr Nobel, whose will is still used for how to place people at the tables.
All three Royal kids are nice and cute. And above all, our Royal family is 100% scandal-free, unlike the British one, which is 100% scandal-burdened. Even the Danish and Norwegian royalties are too often in the tabloids, with divorces and the like.
Now I will go to bed too. I have spent the night with preparing a powerpoint lecture later today – about alien abduction and earth radiation, as case studies within a new course in “good and bad science”, where I provide examples from physics and space.
I will probably oversleep the lecture now, and all work will be wasted. Qrispin fell asleep many hours ago.
Good luck for the rest of the week, or break a leg, as the saying goes here among superstitious colleagues.
Best wishes from a half-sleeping Sverker
P.S. Also the King and the Prince are dog-lovers. The King once had a labrador named Ali. But the Swedish Muslim community objected, so he renamed it Charlie. The Prince recently walked his dog unleashed in central Stockholm, and the tabloid press immediately pointed out that this is illegal. That’s the nearest a royal scandal we have been since the early 1950s! Maybe some of them have also walked against red light once or twice?
The Nobel lectures are over and should soon be online at http://nobelprize.org. I hope the online version includes the great story Frank told (heard from Sam Treiman) about “Ohm’s Three Laws.”