Flying to Copenhagen without a carpet

This semester I have a sabbatical and I am profiting from it by travelling more than I usually do. At the moment I am visiting the group of Carsten Wiuf and Elisenda Feliu at the University of Copenhagen for two weeks. The visit here also gives me the opportunity to discuss with people at the Niels Bohr Institute. Note that the authors of the paper I quoted in the post on NFB were at the NBI when they wrote it and in particular Mogens Jensen is still there now. I gave a talk on some of my work on the Calvin cycle at NBI today. Afterwards I talked to Mogens and one of his collaborators and found out that he is still very active in modelling this system.

I was thinking about my previous visits to Copenhagen and, in particular, that the first one was on a flying carpet. The background to this is that when I was seven years old I wrote a story in school with the title ‘The Magic Carpet’. I do not have the text any more but I know it appeared in the School Magazine that year. In my own version there was also a picture which I will say more about later. But first something about the story, of which I was the hero. I bought the carpet in Peshawar and used it to visit places in the world I was interested in. For some reason I no longer know I had a great wish at that time to visit Copenhagen. Perhaps it was due to coming into contact with stories of Hans Christian Andersen. In any case it is clear that having the chance this was one of the first places I visited using the magic carpet. The picture which I drew showed something closer to home. There I can be seen sitting on the carpet, wearing the blue jersey which was my favourite at that time, while the carpet bent upwards so as to just pass over the tip of the spire of St. Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall. In the story it was also related that one of the effects of my journey was a newspaper article reporting a case of ‘mass hallucination’. I think my teachers were impressed at my using this phrase at my age. They might have been less impressed if they had known my source for this, which was a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

During my next visit to Copenhagen in 2008 (here I am not counting changing planes there on the way to Stockholm, which I did a few times) I was at a conference at the Niels Bohr Institute in my old research field of mathematical relativity and I gave a talk in that area. Little did I think I would return there years later and talk about something completely different. I remember that there was a photo in the main lecture room where many of the founders of quantum mechanics are sitting in the first row. From my own point of view I am happy that another person who can be seen there is Max Delbrück, a shining example of a switch from physics to biology. My next visit to Copenhagen was for the conference which I wrote about in a previous post. It was at the University. Since that a lot has happened with chemical reaction network theory and with my understanding of it. The lecture course I gave means that some of the points I mentioned in my post at that time are things I have since come to understand in some depth. I look forward to working on projects in that area with people here in the coming days.

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