The explanation for the blog's name: wirmuessenwissen.
For a physicist, if there is one place of pilgrimage (without the religious connotation), it is the German university-town of Göttingen. Giants among men have lived and worked, and are buried, here: among them Carl Friedrich Gauss, Friedrich Wöhler, Wilhelm Weber, Max Planck, Walter Nernst, David Hilbert, Karl Schwarzchild, Max von Laue, Otto Hahn, and Max Born. Others who are not buried in Göttingen but have been associated with the university (either through studies or through teaching) include Bernhard Riemann, Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, Felix Klein, Victor Goldschmidt, James Franck, Eugene Wigner, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, Emmy Noether, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Walther Bothe, Peter Debye, Richard Dedekind, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Ernst Ising, Irving Langmuir, Hermann Minkowski, Wolfgang Pauli, Otto Stern, Hermann Weyl, Wilhelm Wien, Ernst Zermelo, and Richard Courant. The only two contemporary notable names I could think of that are missing from the above list are those of Schrödinger and Einstein.
Those who do visit Hilbert's tomb will see the following inscription:
Wir müssen wissen
Wir werden wissen.
(Translated as: We must know, we will know).
These famous words are from his 1930 retirement address at Königsberg to the Society of German Scientists. The context is as follows: "We must not believe those, who, today, with philosophical bearing and deliberative tone prophesy the fall of culture and accept the ignorabimus. For us there is no ignorabimus, and in my opinion none whatever in natural science. In opposition to the foolish ignorabimus I offer our slogan:
We must know,
We will know."
I quite agree with the sentiment. I thought myself lucky to obtain the name. I wonder why it was still available.
For a physicist, if there is one place of pilgrimage (without the religious connotation), it is the German university-town of Göttingen. Giants among men have lived and worked, and are buried, here: among them Carl Friedrich Gauss, Friedrich Wöhler, Wilhelm Weber, Max Planck, Walter Nernst, David Hilbert, Karl Schwarzchild, Max von Laue, Otto Hahn, and Max Born. Others who are not buried in Göttingen but have been associated with the university (either through studies or through teaching) include Bernhard Riemann, Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, Felix Klein, Victor Goldschmidt, James Franck, Eugene Wigner, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, Emmy Noether, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Walther Bothe, Peter Debye, Richard Dedekind, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Ernst Ising, Irving Langmuir, Hermann Minkowski, Wolfgang Pauli, Otto Stern, Hermann Weyl, Wilhelm Wien, Ernst Zermelo, and Richard Courant. The only two contemporary notable names I could think of that are missing from the above list are those of Schrödinger and Einstein.
Those who do visit Hilbert's tomb will see the following inscription:
Wir müssen wissen
Wir werden wissen.
(Translated as: We must know, we will know).
These famous words are from his 1930 retirement address at Königsberg to the Society of German Scientists. The context is as follows: "We must not believe those, who, today, with philosophical bearing and deliberative tone prophesy the fall of culture and accept the ignorabimus. For us there is no ignorabimus, and in my opinion none whatever in natural science. In opposition to the foolish ignorabimus I offer our slogan:
We must know,
We will know."
I quite agree with the sentiment. I thought myself lucky to obtain the name. I wonder why it was still available.
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