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Being honoured with the Nobel Prize for Physics made Munich experimental physicist Theodor Wolfgang Haensch into one of Germany's best-known scientists. «Since then I have received a good dozen offers from US universities,» says the Heidelberg-born physicist. But he is staying in Germany, in order to assure for himself and his associates that the continuity of their joint work is not endangered.
Haensch continues to propagate the idea of free research which should not be restricted by being too strongly oriented towards achieving practical applications. And he himself can continue to be free in his research. Actually Haensch (born October 30, 1941) would soon, on reaching his 65th birthday, be required under Germany's academic law, to go into retirement. But for somebody of his top calibre a special arrangement was found, also with the intent of preventing a possible move to the United States. This means that Haensch can now serve for awhile longer as director of the Max-Planck-Institut for Quantum Optics in Garching, outside Munich. He may also keep his teaching chair at the Ludwig- Maximilians University in Munich. «I am very happy about this,» Haensch says. «This is ideal for my work: It guarantees the continuity and I can offer my associates a perspective.» In his lectures, he gladly presents a cartoon. It shows, behind a long stretch of fence, a chicken. And no matter how hard it tries, it can't get to the kernels of corn on the other side of the fence. But a tiny chick, which curiously and without any goal in mind, manages without much trouble to reach the other side and get to the corn. Haensch says it is the same with science. Researchers must not be too much concerned with aiming for practical uses. The great discoveries are always those made when scientists are filled with curiosity and not researching with a goal in mind. There are many examples of this in the history of science.
Along with his US colleagues Roy Glauber and John Hall, Haensch won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physics. «I was floored,» he said soon after the news arrived from Stockholm. «The first thing I did was embrace my secretary.» Haensch was honoured for a procedure which he and his associates developed for counting the ultra-fast oscillations of light waves. The elegant trick using a laser solved a decades-old problem in physics and now can boost the precision of atomic clocks by as much as 1,000 times. This promises big gains, among other fields, in communications technology and satellite-based navigation. Based on the so-called «optical frequency synthesizer» technology developed by Haensch, the firm MenloSystems was established in 2001 in Martinsried outside Munich - a spin-off from the Max-Planck Institut in Garching. The company and its 16 employees are specialized in precision measurements using optics technologies. «Our frequency synthesizer was not at all conceived as a product,» Haensch says, looking back. «All we wanted for our basic research was a high-precision measurement instrument.» And, like the curious chick in the cartoon, what came out was suddenly something of general practical use. Contact: Theodor Haensch: www.mpq.mpg.de/haensch/ © dpa - German Press Agency
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