Göttingen: A City That Created Modern Science
Welcome to #sdAb2027 — a meeting held where mathematics, physics, and chemistry were reinvented.
Header image: Aula am Wilhelmsplatz, University of Göttingen — © Julian Herzog, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
For much of the past three centuries, an unassuming town in Lower Saxony has sat close to the very centre of the scientific world. When you arrive in Göttingen for #sdAb2027 , you arrive in a place where whole branches of science were, quite literally, born.
THE GEORGIA AUGUSTA
The University of Göttingen — the Georgia Augusta — was founded in 1734 by George II, Elector of Hanover and King of Great Britain, as an Enlightenment university built around free inquiry and original research rather than rote learning. It quickly became one of Europe's most influential seats of learning, and generations of students captured the feeling in a single Latin boast: Extra Gottingam non est vita — “outside Göttingen there is no life.” It was here, too, that George Christoph Lichtenberg held Germany's first professorship of experimental physics, pairing rigorous science with the wit that made him one of the great aphorists of his age.
Image: Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855). Portrait by Christian Albrecht Jensen, 1840 — Wikimedia Commons, public domain
THE MATHEMATICAL CENTRE OF THE WORLD
No name is more bound to the city than Carl Friedrich Gauss, the “Prince of Mathematicians,” who spent his life here directing the observatory. Those who followed read like a roll-call of the discipline: Bernhard Riemann, Dirichlet, Felix Klein, Hermann Minkowski, and David Hilbert, whose 23 unsolved problems, posed in 1900, set the agenda for a century of mathematics. Emmy Noether, whose theorem underpins all of modern physics, taught here as well — brilliantly, and in defiance of the barriers placed before a woman in the academy.
In 2027 — the very year #sdAb2027 comes to the city — Göttingen celebrates the 250th anniversary of Gauss's birth, with dozens of events planned across the town.
THE BIRTH OF QUANTUM MECHANICS
In the 1920s, Göttingen became the crucible of the quantum revolution. Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan formulated matrix mechanics here, while James Franck's experiments confirmed the quantum nature of the atom. Young physicists from every corner of the world made the pilgrimage to study, and much of the language we still use to describe the subatomic world was first spoken in these lecture rooms. The city's chemists — from Friedrich Wöhler to the Nobel laureates Walther Nernst and Otto Hahn — were transforming their own field in parallel.
Some 47 Nobel laureates have studied, taught or researched in Göttingen — a concentration so remarkable it earned its own name: the “Göttingen Nobel Prize wonder.”
A CONSCIENCE AS WELL AS A MIND
Göttingen's scientists were also willing to stand on principle. In 1837 the “Göttingen Seven” — among them the Brothers Grimm and the physicist Wilhelm Weber — were dismissed from their chairs for protesting the king's suspension of the constitution. Well over a century later, in 1957, the “Göttingen Eighteen,” including several Nobel laureates, publicly refused to take part in the nuclear arming of West Germany. Many of these figures now rest side by side in the Nobelrondell of the city cemetery, their headstones inscribed with the equations they gave the world.
STILL CREATING KNOWLEDGE
That tradition is very much alive. The Max Planck Institutes, the University Medical Center Göttingen and the wider Göttingen Campus keep the city at the research frontier — including the super-resolution light microscopy pioneered here by Stefan Hell (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2014), and Erwin Neher — who won the 1991 prize for co-inventing the patch-clamp technique to measure currents in single ion channels — both still work in the city today. Göttingen still describes itself, simply, as “the city that creates knowledge.”
With around 700 new doctorates conferred here every year, the odds are good that you'll spot a jubilant, newly-minted PhD being wheeled through the old town to kiss the bronze Goose Girl on the market square— the Gänseliesel, whose 120-year-old tradition of doctoral kisses has made her the most-kissed girl in the world. Catch that moment, and you'll have witnessed three centuries of Göttingen science being handed to the next generation. We are delighted to welcome you into that story.