Happy 9-11
That's Nov 9, not Sep 11, for you guys out there who use the weird month/day/year notation...
There is nothing to celebrate Sep 11, but Nov 9 is a day for celebration, and today we celebrate the 20 year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall which is as good a date as any for celebrating the end of the Cold War.
I was in Berlin a few weeks after the fall of the wall myself. That was on a trip that was planned before the fall of the wall, so it was pure luck that I experienced this historical event first hand.
It is hard today to imagine how east and west Europe was separated and practically two different worlds. Today, I have many friends from eastern Europe and the former USSR; that would not have been possible 20 years ago. We have students here at BiRC and at AU in general from the other side of the iron curtain. That would not have been possible 20 years ago.
Today is truly a day for celebration!
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313-323=-10
November 9th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Yes, it really was a miraculous day -- I don't know how it was in Denmark, but in the US people like me growing up in the 1970s/1980s seriously thought that sooner or later a US/USSR nuclear war was going to occur. And then the whole scenario suddenly became absurd.
Plus, as you state, it would hard to imagine science today without all those Eastern Europeans -- back then, most of their work was published in journals inaccessible to the West, and obviously they couldn't come over as students, postdocs, or faculty.