Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

The BBC produces an annual (?) TV show called “Nobel Minds”–this morning they filmed it in Sweden’s royal library.

On December 13, Swedish families celebrate a festival of light, where young boys and girls in white robes “surprise” adult sleepers with songs and saffron cookies. The traditional headdress for girls was a crown with lit candles, but that can create surprises that nobody wants.

Needless to say, the Grand Hotel also offers Lucia wake-ups on December 13, although I’m told their Lucias are beautiful Swedish twenty-somethings.

I am eternally grateful to one of my dinner partners last night for this piece of useful information: that traditional costume for adults being surprised is “your most dignified pajamas.”

Our most dignified pajamas. Hmmmm. Unfortunately I don’t seem to have packed these. But I’m glad to have 4 days notice that they’ll be needed.

How many families end up with a name that means “wolfcub”? More than you’d think, and we’ve had email from many!

Frank’s Wilczek roots are Polish–his father’s dad and mom came from Warsaw and Galicia respectively, arriving sometime between the two world wars. (Frank’s mom is Italian, but that’s another story.)

This morning, 5 copies of ‘Przeglad Weekly Magazine were delivered to our hotel from Warsaw, Poland–you can see a shorter version of Frank’s interview at their website–they called it “Lowca kwarkow, ” which means “Quarks hunter”, I’m told.

Here, at the request of their editor, is a photo of Frank, in a rare moment of Nobel downtime, reading “Przeglad.”

Thanks to Waldemar Piasecki for making it happen!

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.”

Reading the Swedish newspapers online this morning–I like the picture of Frank in Dagens Nyheter.

I can’t tell you, however, whether Frank or the reporter made this statement: “Teorin var den sista pusselbiten som behövdes för att förklara hur naturens krafter verkar.”

Tomorrow (December 8) come the Nobel lectures. To keep laureates from worrying too much, the Nobel Committee creates a giant smorgasbord of activities all day long December 7.

Then there was the moment when Frank thought the lecture notes inside his computer had vanished–but they hadn’t. Whew.

Tonight, the Swedish Royal Academy of Science treated us all to dinner in yet another lovely light-filled 18th-century space. I had the great pleasure of sitting between Sune Svanberg and Lennart Stenflo.

After dinner, some young Stockholm singers absolutely charmed us with a cappella singing, sometimes funny and othertimes movingly beautiful. Riltons Vanner (Friends of Rilton) are professional singers with a real website and two CDs for sale online. If you get a chance to hear them–well, lucky you!

We were so spellbound we all forgot to worry about anything, even Nobel Prize lectures to be given tomorrow.

In Stockholm, I seem to have stepped through the looking glass into a sensible world where journalists have better things to write about than “Is blogging journalism?” For example, a bunch of new Nobel laureates with good things to say about more interesting questions.

I’ll say this for real journalists–how many bloggers would jump out of bed early enough to interview my husband at 7:15 a.m.? Well, some nice young man from Swedish radio did.

Later, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences fed the science laureates breakfast in their tower, interrupted by a rare astronomical event–an occultation of Jupiter. (Alas, the sky was too bright for us to see it, though we could all see the slender crescent moon.)

Another press conference and a rehearsal later, the President of Stockholm University treated us to a delicious lunch in “Spökslottet”, a 17th century mansion said to be haunted–hence its name “Ghost castle.” 

Lars Bergstrom, the Stockholm University physicist who gave such a good explanation of the strong interaction,  told me that Ingmar Bergmann got the chess-playing-Death motif in Seventh Seal from a mural in the church in his small home town. Even scarier, he told me that the final decision about physics Nobel Prizes, can be reached as late as the morning of the announcement! 

David Gross, on my other side, gave me some Nobel-worthy wisdom about the festivities. (I had asked him if one of the laureates ought to propose a thank-you toast to our host.) David said, “This whole event is so well-planned that if we were supposed to do it, someone would have told us. And if nobody told us to do it, we probably shouldn’t.”

Frank and David are now on their third or maybe fourth interview. But I think bloggers blogging about journalists is even more boring than journalists journalizing about bloggers, don’t you?

In Stockholm, I seem to have stepped through the looking glass into a sensible world where journalists have better things to write about than “Is blogging journalism?” For example, a bunch of new Nobel laureates with good things to say about more interesting questions.

I’ll say this for real journalists–how many bloggers would jump out of bed early enough to interview my husband at 7:15 a.m.? Well, some nice young man from Swedish radio did.

Later, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences fed the science laureates breakfast in their tower, interrupted by a rare astronomical event–an occultation of Jupiter. (Alas, the sky was too bright for us to see it, though we could all see the slender crescent moon.)

Another press conference and a rehearsal later, the President of Stockholm University treated us to a delicious lunch in “Spökslottet”, a 17th century mansion said to be haunted–hence its name “Ghost castle.” 

Lars Bergstrom, the Stockholm University physicist who gave such a good explanation of the strong interaction,  told me that Ingmar Bergmann got the chess-playing-Death motif in Seventh Seal from a mural in the church in his small home town. Even scarier, he told me that the final decision about physics Nobel Prizes, can be reached as late as the morning of the announcement! 

David Gross, on my other side, gave me some Nobel-worthy wisdom about the festivities. (I had asked him if one of the laureates ought to propose a thank-you toast to our host.) David said, “This whole event is so well-planned that if we were supposed to do it, someone would have told us. And if nobody told us to do it, we probably shouldn’t.”

Frank and David are now on their third or maybe fourth interview. But I think bloggers blogging about journalists is even more boring than journalists journalizing about bloggers, don’t you?

Spin a “tippe top” on its hemisperical base–it wobbles until it flips over to spin on its stem. (Animation with better explanation )

Physicist Anders Barany (Nobel Museum) is one of the world’s top experts…on tippe tops! Frank and I first met him in 2003, and within minutes Anders and Frank were on the floor taking a bunch of tippe tops out for a spin. It was with great pleasure we saw him again today at a Nobel Museum reception for the newest prizewinnners.

The reception was part of a long, topsy-turvy day, that began at 8 a.m. with the arrival of Frank’s aunt and uncle. Their hotel room wasn’t ready, but the Grand Hotel kindly furnished them with a “resting room” until it was. We strolled off into some glorious Nordic sunshine and found a small ice-skating rink already open for business. Sanity and jet lag soon led us home again to the hotel.

A few more fragments:

• Frank looks handsome in a tailcoat, and the people who rent them can tell just by looking at you what coat will fit you.
• Stockholm looks lovely from the top of a television tower, but cellphone reception is surprisingly bad there.
• The Nobel Museum store sells beautifully detailed “Nobel medals” made of gold foil with chocolate inside.
• Lots of people here ask Nobel laureates for autographs.

Our day ended with great pleasure and some more sanity at the hotel’s Franska Matsalen, where we managed to have a wonderful family dinner that included Frank’s “Nobel attendant” Cecilia Ekholm ( in her real life, a foreign service officer) and Roland Zuiderveld of SVT 2. (Remember Roland, the Swedish-cultural-television interviewer whose arrival at our house I live-blogged?)

Frank needs the computer and I need some sleep. (I’m luckier than Frank here.)

And tomorrow’s schedule is even more of a whirl.