In Germany the time of day is a matter of law. The Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, the federal institute of metrology in Braunschweig, is responsible for distributing the exact legal time. A long-wave transmitter at Mainflingen near Hanau broadcasts its signal, DCF77, about 2,000 kilometers. It sets radio clocks, station clocks and many clocks in industry. According to a 2007 report, the most accurate of the institute’s clocks deviates from an ideal clock by at most one millionth of a second in a year. After the clock change in October 2025, the institute said: Wir haben alles kontrolliert, es ging reibungslos. We checked everything, it went smoothly.
science
Six Weeks Before the First Report
On the evening of 8 November 1895, during an experiment in his laboratory in Würzburg, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen began the work that led to his discovery. After six weeks of work he made an image with the new rays on 22 December 1895. It showed the left hand of his wife, Bertha. On 28 December he submitted his first report. Its title was Ueber eine neue Art von Strahlen, on a new kind of rays, with the subtitle Vorläufige Mittheilung, preliminary communication. In January 1896 he reportedly opened his first public lecture with the words “Durch Zufall entdeckte ich diese Strahlen”, I discovered these rays by chance. In April 1896 the American magazine McClure’s printed his words about the moment of discovery: “I did not think; I investigated.” The sentence is known only in English.
Understanding Before Application
Dem Anwenden muss das Erkennen vorausgehen. Understanding must come before application. The Max Planck Society calls this sentence the motto of its namesake, Max Planck, and its own guiding principle. The society was founded on 26 February 1948 and works mainly in basic research in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. The society does not say where Planck first said or wrote the sentence.
The Curve Discussion
The Kurvendiskussion, the discussion of a curve, is a standard topic of school mathematics. It is the investigation of the graph of a function by working through a standard set of properties. They include the domain, symmetry, the points where the graph crosses the axes, high and low points, inflection points, asymptotes and the behavior at infinity. It is relatively popular with weaker pupils and students as an exam topic that can be prepared for with relative certainty. It is also criticized as a purely computational routine that conveys little understanding. In central Abitur exams, such schematic tasks are now set only rarely.
We Must Know, We Will Know
In the early 1920s, in talks in Hamburg in 1921 and in lectures at Göttingen, David Hilbert set out his Beweistheorie, proof theory. Its aim was to make the proofs of mathematics themselves the object of investigation, and to show that no contradiction could ever be derived within the system.
On 8 September 1930 Hilbert spoke at a congress of German scientists and physicians in Königsberg. In mathematics, he said, there is no Ignorabimus, no “we shall not know.” He ended with the words Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen. We must know. We will know. The words are on his gravestone in Göttingen. On the day before, at a conference in the same city, Kurt Gödel had announced the result that dealt Hilbert’s program a severe blow.
Weber on the Idea and the Dilettante
In 1917 Max Weber gave a lecture in Munich called Wissenschaft als Beruf, Science as a Vocation. An idea, he said, comes when it pleases, not when we please. But normally it prepares itself only auf dem Boden ganz harter Arbeit, on the ground of very hard work. A dilettante can also have ideas of great consequence. What the dilettante lacks is die feste Sicherheit der Arbeitsmethode, the firm certainty of a working method. For this reason he is usually unable to check the idea, to assess its consequences or to carry it out.
No Patent for the First Computer
On 12 May 1941 Konrad Zuse presented his Z3 in his workshop in Berlin. German Wikipedia says: Die Z3 gilt heute als erster funktionstüchtiger Computer der Welt. (The Z3 is today considered the world’s first working computer.) Its article on the machine opens more carefully and calls it one of the first working digital computers in the world. The Z3 was destroyed in an air raid on 21 December 1943. In 1941 Zuse had filed a patent application that described the machine. It was published in 1952, but other companies, among them IBM, objected. The dispute went through every court until the Federal Patent Court decided in 1967 that the inventor of the computer could not receive a patent mangels Erfindungshöhe, for lack of inventive step. Zuse himself called the English mathematician Charles Babbage den eigentlichen Vater des Computers, the real father of the computer.
The Code of Good Scientific Practice
In 1997 one of the largest cases of falsified research in German medicine came to light. In response, the German Research Foundation, the DFG, wrote a memorandum on good scientific practice in 1998 and appointed an ombudsman in 1999. In 2019 the memorandum was replaced by a code of 19 guidelines. Every university must turn the code into its own binding rules. The code states plainly: Einrichtungen, die die Leitlinien nicht umsetzen, erhalten keine Fördermittel. (Institutions that do not implement the guidelines receive no funding.) The University of Potsdam, for example, announced that it had to adapt its statute on Selbstkontrolle in der Wissenschaft, self-control in science.
A Guideline for Writing Guidelines
In German medicine, accepted good practice is written down in Leitlinien, clinical guidelines. Since 1995 the umbrella body of the medical scientific societies, the AWMF, has coordinated their development. Each guideline is graded by how it was made. An S1 guideline comes from an expert group in informal consensus. An S3 guideline has gone through every step of systematic development. Guidelines are not law, but in a given case they can define the care a doctor owes a patient. Even the method of writing a guideline is itself written down. The AWMF calls its rule book die Leitlinie zur Erstellung und Publikation of guidelines, the guideline for writing and publishing them.
Parliament’s Office for Consequences
Since 1990 the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag, the TAB, has advised parliament on scientific and technical change. The German word for its work is Technikfolgenabschätzung, the assessment of the consequences of technology. A committee of the Bundestag decides what the office studies. One of its reports examined what would happen in a large, long-lasting power blackout. It was presented to the Bundestag on 27 April 2011. The report found that all critical infrastructure would be affected and that a collapse of society as a whole could hardly be prevented. The consequences, it said, would equal a national catastrophe.