I. Jahresfeier am 30. Mai 2015

delberg was very conducive. On Friday evenings there was a physics Colloquium,
fbllowed by wine and pretzels fbr all. The first Speaker I heard in the Colloquium
was Isidor Rabi. Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy for me, because after briefly starting
in German, he switched to English at some point. Nonetheless, seeing and hearing
one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th Century was an important and high-
ly motivating experience.
I don’t know if I stood out as a Student. In any case, I was always dissatisfied
when I had the Impression that the lecturer failed to get to the heart of the matter.
I could never accept arguments such as, “if you do the maths, you’ll know why this
is so”. I firmly believed that everything could be boiled down to simple principles.
And if that wasn,t possible, one simply didn‘t understand matter. Be that as it may
a consequence of this attitude was that during my studies I spent hours and hours
thinking about how I could distil down phenomena and concepts to their essence.
During the vacations, I managed to shroud in my room for months - much to the
concern of my friends — ‘picking apart’ textbooks from morning till late in the night
and writing my own version of the subject in Stacks of notebooks. Some days I only
progressed by one to two pages, and it was frustrating when I still hadn’t grasped
the core of the matter. But it was fantastic to eventually ‘discover’ what the core
was. I was also of the opinion — and it’s probably true - that I am terribly bad at
memorizing things, and if I didn’t understand something exactly, I would forget it
and fail my oral exams. Fortunately, that did not happen.
Like many physics students, I had planned to specialise in particle or nuclear
physics, and Heidelberg was the place to do it. On the other hand, I heard that it
was disillusioning to work on large projects and that job prospects were not good.
The latter consideration proved decisive, because my father’s job was becoming
increasingly uncertain, and my mother was diagnosed with a serious illness from
which she later died. As the time to work on my diploma thesis approachcd (a final
master thesis lasting up to 2 years), I opted - against my inclination - for a topic
which I believed at the time would provide good prospects of finding a job. It was
about microlithography, the production of fme structures in photoresist material
for Computer chips. Professor Hunklinger from the Institute of Applied Physics, a
low-temperature solid-state physicist who had just moved to Heidelberg from the
Stuttgart-based MaxPlanck Institute for Solid State Research, wanted to produce
piezoelectric surface-wave transducers lithographically and had teamed up with
his colleague Professor Josef Bille to construct a laser Scanner that could be used to
write microstructures.
I must have done my diploma thesis work reasonably well, because I was one
of the few students Professor Hunklinger wanted to keep for doing a PhD. But, for
my doctoral thesis, I wanted to focus on something less applied - which wasn’t so
particular, because most of the others students were concerned with low temper-
ature solid-state physics. Actually, Professor Hunklinger had kind of planned that

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