Opening Ceremony

Right now Florian Schreck (who substitudes for Rudolf Grimm as our opening speaker) is talking about ultra cold stuff. Finally gives me some time to blog 🙂
The ceremony went well so far, the Festsaal at the ÖAW is just beautiful and Thomas and Kathi were almost as cool as Schreck’s atoms. The sound guy next to me however was so sunk into his cell phone that we almost screwed up the European anthem.

I really have to send my sister a photo of ~300 physicists standing up to the IYPT2010 logo she designed and listening to the Austrian anthem 🙂

I’ll make sure to get some photos and upload them to gallery.iypt.at later!

It looks like there are no politicians who are going to talk. Sadly Heinz Fischer is abroad. But to be perfectly blunt: I think that most of the young physicists in here enjoy Florian Schreck’s talk about lasers, atoms and the Doppler effect much more than any politician’s speech.

update: Wow, how cool is that – now that the “report” is over, the audience takes the role of the opponent and asks questions about the accuracy of his experiments and points out some errors. 😀

update 2: Alan Allinson has just opened the 23rd IYPT. I’ve updated the website in the very same second he said “opened” 🙂

update 3: The drawing of lots:

1 Croatia
2 United Kingdom
3 Korea
4 Switzerland
5 Russia
6 Nigeria
7 Australia
8 France
9 Poland
10 Germany
11 Iran
12 Kenya
13 Georgia
14 New Zealand
15 Sweden
16 Austria
17 Slovakia
18 Belarus
19 China
20 Czech Republic
21 Singapore
22 Bulgaria
23 Chinese Taipeh