Eduard Artemyev

Recently I came across this nice video from the 1987 Soviet Russia, demonstrating an early version of photoshop ("Олдскульный Фотошоп", as they say...):



Characteristic: the tenor voice of the speaker who with plenty of intonation and jovial enthusiasm sings his text. The device demonstrated is not Russian, but according to this discussion a modified (i.e. translated) version of a French system.

Now, this has been blogged plenty of times, and interesting enough, many viewers noticed that at 2:12 a very famillar piece of music appeared. Younger generation have heard the modern version: "Resurrection" by the Moscowian group PPK. This piece is a classic piece in the dance/trance/clubbing scene - hey, I listened to this stuff 10 years ago.



The piece appearing in the above video is much older than PPKs version: it was scored for the "Siberiade" movie and is composed by Eduard Artemyev in 1979. (I was apparently by far not the only one wondering about this.) Here is the piece in its full length:



The style is very similar to the famous contemporary Greek electro-virtuoso Vangelis. Try to compare Artemyev's piece with Vangelis' "Alpha" from 1976, which is constructed in a very similar way and has a similar soundscape, even if the melodies are quite different.

Artemyev also scored the music to several of Tarkovskys movies, here I would like to emphasize Stalker, which is definitely my personal favorite (there will be a lost more on this in upcoming posts)! The scene below was conceived in the same time period (1979) as the Siberiade, but is in my opinion much more timeless and universal.




I wonder how many eastern European synthesizer artists existed during the cold war era. To date, I only know one.

And... I completed a post about Soviet Russia without adding a single Yakov Smirnoff type joke!

I have seen the LIGHT!

There are ten things any physicist must have done or seen during his career.

Point one is to split the unsplittable - an atom. I had my chance for the first time as a student at our 400 keV van de Graaf accelerator where we shot protons on LiF targets measuring some resonances. I had big expectations about this. Well - not directly imagining to hear a popping sound when the atoms fall into smaller fragments, but we could at least estimate the energy released hereby. Still, it was remarkably undramatic experience.

This is not true for point 2: seeing the light! And of course I don't think of ordinary light, but Cherenkov radiation, which is emitted when e.g. electrons move faster than the speed of light of the media they move in. Last summer I visited the Institute for Nuclear Chemistry in Mainz, where they have a small nuclear reactor, a TRIGA mark II by General Atomics.

I stood on top of the reactor core and looked directly into water pool which contained it. The core usually operates with up to a 100 kW.

The video below shows a short 250 MW pulse which I recorded with my crappy mobile phone camera. They dimmed the light in the reactor hall first (which is why the video starts black) and I had no idea of how strong the flash would be.

There are plenty of videos out there showing the same effect much more beautifully. Still, I like this video a lot: it was the first time I witnessed Cherenkov radiation.

Me: "WHOA! ....... Das ist ja Wahnsinn!"



What are the other 8 points a true physicist must see? I have not decided yet. (If you have any ideas, let me know. :-)