When a colleague on my 3000 person experiment at CERN whom I didn’t know, Torsten Akesson, emailed suggesting I visit the Lund University physics department for a year, I smiled. 40 years ago I had been impressed by a charming Swedish physicist, Guy von Dardel, who was a professor in the particle physics group at Lund, and also spent years looking for his half-brother Raoul Wallenberg. Without more thought I said yes. I am so glad I did.
When I finally started to plan my trip, I wasn’t sure which airport to fly into. Now I know well the 34 minutes it takes from Kastrup to Lund C. That's how long it takes to drive from my home in Cambridge, Massachusetts near Harvard where I work, to downtown Boston. I have come to love the bridge crossing the Oresund even better then the bridge crossing the Charles River which is measured in Smoots rather than kilometers. (Graduate student Oliver Smoots)
Guy had died a few years earlier and I didn’t know a soul in Lund, but was welcomed at the university. Well, at least at the fourth floor of building A in the Fysicum. This is my temporary home. The friendly sitcom they call the division of particle physics. Here I am using “sit-com” but should really use “sit-sci” since it is not a comedy but a place to do science. Something like Friends, or Seinfeld; two American TV shows in which there are a handful of people, and only two sets; someone’s apartment, and a café/diner. In the sit-sci that is particle physics at Lund, there is the fourth floor corridor offices of building A and the coffee room. A brand new whiteboard I needed to teach my informal pre-fika seminar with, and I, are presently making a guest appearance in the coffee room.
In our sit-com we are engaged in the study of elementary particles, some of us trying to recreate the quark –gluon plasma of the early universe, others trying to discover the particle form of dark matter, still others trying to look for physics beyond what we know. We band together in this pursuit, and also in the pursuit of lunch. Since the Fysicum has no cafeteria, we happily rove around as a group randomly sampling the infinitely many wonderful places to eat lunch in Lund. As a result we have added the angelic man who serves us food at Govinda as a special guest in our sit-com.
There are many surprising differences between Harvard University and Lund University. They are both old universities. Harvard was established in 1636, and Lund in 1666. (The story goes that Harvard offered Galileo a teaching position which he turned down.) Both are universities whose campuses are intermingled with city buildings.
There are some differences I have noticed. Harvard is a private university and Lund is public and yet the building and grounds are equally beautiful. In Lund, the cafeterias have candles burning at lunchtime; absolutely wonderful and completely against the fire laws at Harvard.
The elegant main library at Lund closes at 7 pm on weekdays and has even shorter hours on the weekends. At Harvard, the main student library is open 24/7 and you can find students there late into the night and even into early dawn. I wonder where the Lund students have their “third” spaces, to think, write and read, their classroom and bedroom being the first two spaces.
In Harvard Yard it is frowned upon to ride your bicycle. Pedestrians have priority. In Lund, it is the pedestrian who is often in the wrong place, absent minded researchers roused out of their academic fog by a bicycle bell.
At Harvard there is no age by which you must retire. In Lund I listen to faculty come to terms with their finite university lifetimes, and wonder what to do next. So at least there are fewer truly absent minded professors ambling about to be surprised by bicycles.
In the winter, after dark, at say 7pm, I walked home in Lund through the dimly sodium lit campus, past the darkened library into town, with not a soul about. Coming from Boston, I was nervous to walk through dark passages alone. Now I feel the tenseness of defensive living easing, shoulders relaxing. The students are eating, the professors and researchers have made their way home in large part, I guess. Every once in a while a bicycle whizzes by in the dark and knocks me out of my revery.
MELISSA FRANKLIN
