Nobel 2014 11: Just a Tourist
Day/Night 4: The Nobel Museum - Thursday December 11, 2014
We spent Thursday as tourists, while Sharon, Weo, and a small handful of guests were off to a taping of a BBC program called "Nobel Minds". This program was being hosted by a Sudanese-British TV commentator named Zeinab Badawi who is (apparently) quite well known in the UK. Coincidentally, we had met her on the elevator the night following the concert. It was immediately apparent that she was someone used to being in the public eye, as she wasted no time in introducing herself and learning our names. When I told her we were there in support of W.E. Moerner she shifted into reporter mode and asked me to confirm that he really preferred "W.E." rather than "William", and then checked the pronunciation of his last name.Being a tourist in Stockholm in December can be a bit challenging as the days are so short. From an astronomical point of view the day is about 8 hours long, but from the perspective of your own eyeballs the day doesn't really seem to start until around 930A or so and it is already getting dark by 2P (and feels like night by 3P). So there's a certain pressure to get stuff done between 10A-2P during "the day". On that note we head over to the Royal Armory - which I'll skip recounting other than to note that Swedish kings seem to have a long history of getting shot in the head during battle - and then ended our day at the Nobel Museum.
If we had been "normal" tourists, the museum would have held little attraction to us. It is reasonably small and a bit sterile in the way it presents materials. Of course, when you have a Laureate in the family and it is Nobel Week then the museum offers a few treats that are pretty special. The first of these is that there are several black, back-lighted display panels (obelisks may be a better description) immediately behind the front desk, one for each discipline. On one side are photos and summaries of the winners and their topic, and on the back side is a TV displaying media images related to the winners.
As you walk into the museum there is a small cafe on your left where you can grab a sandwich or soup (which we did), and the 10-12 small tables there offer up 40-50 black chairs of the bent wood variety. Turns out each chair is numbered, and if you turn it over you'll discover that previous winners have signed the bottom of the seat. The chair I was sitting on, for example, had 5 different winners (from 5 different years) on the bottom. This year's winners had already been to the museum (on the previous Sunday) and signed their own chairs, which were set aside near the front entrance and were sitting up-ended on a small table. Visitors could easily walk up and review the bottoms of each chair. The three Chemistry winners had all signed the same chair. Perhaps in future years other winners will add their signatures, but for now their chair is exclusively their own.
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| Yes, you can place your butt next to Nobel Prize winners in the cafe of the Nobel Museum. |
By the way, the equation on the bottom of the chair, just above their photos? That’s Abbe's Law, and for several hundred years it was the explanation for why seeing a single molecule was going to be an impossibility. Weo basically thumbed his nose at Abbe and did the impossible.
In the back of the museum was a small display containing items donated by this year's winners. Again, tradition is that the winners bring along something related to their achievement. In Weo's case he had brought along - among other things - a huge paper roll that looks something like an EKG or EEG but is, in fact, the physical evidence collected 25 years ago that first showed he had captured a single molecule. The most interesting part of the museum, in my opinion, is the permanent exhibit they have displaying about 30 of the more interesting donated items - will any of this year's donations find their way into the permanent display? Only time will tell. <dramatic organ chord>
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| Contributed artifacts from the Chemistry winners. The photograph shows something that Eric Betzig (co-winner) setup in his living room to do something that eventually led to a Nobel Prize. Our living room has a chair that our cat is slowly shredding with her claws. I'm not sure that's going to win us any awards. |
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| So, you see how this represents the Chemistry award, right? Yeah, neither did we. |
Finally, snaking across the ceiling of the central hall of the museum is a motorized track (similar in concept to what you see at the dry cleaners) from which hang hundreds of cloth panels, each one with a picture and short bio of a previous winner. Most of the panels remain bunched together in sort of a holding area before being launched on their closed loop journey where they spread out and can be read. I think the panels are randomly ordered - they certainly aren't in chronological order as I just happened to see Obama's panel next to someone from the early 1900's. Not sure if this year's winners were already making their journey above our heads or not.
We made a quick stop in the gift shop - we had a request to pick up a "Nobel Snowglobe" but - shocking! - such an item doesn't exist. A hand-printed sign did exhort us to buy a plastic compass (in the area with kid-focused stuff) as a tribute to the 2014 Medicine winners [who won for describing how your brain functions as a GPS]. We made a cursory search for something related to the Chemistry prize but found nothing. We could have purchased a flatware setting as used at the Banquet. Turns out that the flatware was commissioned from ["from" or "by"??? not sure what the right term is...] a Swedish designer in 1991 for the 90th Nobel anniversary. However, since we aren’t like to be serving our own red deer entrée any time soon there seemed no point in buying the flatware, so we refrained.
The Nobel Museum borders a small town square which was hosting a Christmas market while we were there. Several of the stalls featured ornaments. While some travelers collect keychains or refrigerator magnets, we like to commemorate our travels with an ornament so we were quite happy to spend a few minutes looking at the offerings of several stalls before we found The Ornament That We Must Have.
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| Stockholm is beautiful city. We think. We're not really sure given that it was pitch black for all but about 5 hours each day. |
Darkness was setting in, so we made our way back to the hotel so we could relax a bit before dinner. We were on our own this night. Sharon and Weo (and the other winners) were dining with the King and Queen at the Palace this night and – for some reason – we weren’t invited. How rude! Weeks of learning new ”knock knock” jokes to entertain fellow diners WASTED. So we ended up at a very average Italian restaurant a short walk from the hotel called Café Milano. How average? Well, as I wrote this summary in 2019 I looked it up on Google Maps and although it still shows up it is listed as “Permanently closed”.
A cultural observation: during our time in Stockholm we kept noticing many windows throughout the city displaying illuminated 7 branch electric candelabras. Since we were there in December (the Nobel Awards are always presented on December 10, which was Albert Nobel’s birthday) and Christmas was coming up we initially guessed that there was some kind of holiday tradition at work here. At the Nobel Banquet we learned from one of our table mates (who was acting as the attendant to one of the other Chemistry winners) that people placed these in their windows simply because Sweden was so DARK in December, and this was a way to try to light up the darkness a bit!
What happens next? Tune into the next episode by selecting another page from the "2014 Nobel" menu, above. These instructions cheerfully supplied as a public service for those who haven't won a Nobel Prize.
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