In the previous week, I visitied the Institute of Physics of Czech Academy of Science, thanks to the invitation by Helena (Reichlova). She showed great interest since the last SPICE junior workshop in Ingelheim, but unfotunately I did not have chance to explain big ideas and basic aspects. My talk in that workshop was rather technical, as I was presenting the most recent result.

So the main purpose of this visit was to (try to) give a pedagogical lecture, instead of presenting what’s at the upfront of my research. Regardless of the outcome of my presentation, I enjoyed preparing the talk so much this time because I could feel that my work is now standing on a rather solid ground, and I could construct formal physical arguments and write down equations which exactly correspond to physical situations. This was a big difference compared to so-called “state-of-the-art”, which kind of seems not wrong and probably right. I always feel like I am swimming in an open ocean without much navigation…

Talking more about fundamentals, I personally believe that we don’t need to fully understand what other people are doing “now” although we have to “know” them at some point before writing papers. What is more important is to figure out the motivation of the research at the very beginning and understand fundamentals in the deepest level possible. For me, at least, that’s how I get the most creative ideas, and I don’t really get much motivation from Nature papers…

Anyway, hopefully most people seem to have understood my talk qutie well, which I could see from the level of questions. What I particuarly liked was a relaxed atmosphere of the seminar. People raised questions freely during the seminar, and I was not pressured to finish all the slides. I just focused on explaining physics to the eyes of the audience (I tried). Sure, there were things that I could not discuss much, but usually these are topics that can be discussed later.

On the second day, they took me to experimental labs. To me, everything looked amazing and exciting, but I tried not to touch anything 😂 Also, it was surprising that there is still a PC with Windows95, which was wired to their MBE machine.

Most of the time, I spent time with Helena and Jakub (Železný). It was funny to realized that I talked to Jakub about visiting Prague in 2018, but I could not make it (due to busy life after moving to Germany and Covid…). Anyway, we not only discussed physics but also talked about many other things, about life, career, academia, science community… Overall, it was very pleasant time in a friendly environemnt. They also took me to a nice local restaurnt for dinner, where I tasted quite nice Goulash and a local beer. It was pity that I had a slight stomach pain (probably eaten something wrong before the trip…) and could not fully appreciate the taste of food and beer.

In the airport on the way back, as usual, I had quite a lot of thoughts and ideas as I was sitting while waiting for the plane. Although I wanted to write down some equations, as soon as I was on board, I immediately fell asleep. When I opened my eyes, the plane was already flying above the Rhein river and was preparing for landing. I landed near 10pm, and I could finally come back to my home by midnight.