Win your personal competition

Today I want to talk about Johannes (Jan) Burgers. Again a person with extra ordinary skills. He was born 1895 in Arnhem. He finished his Physics university degree in 1917 at the University of Leiden.

At the same time he stumbled over a note in the library, where the yearly contest of the Dutch Teyler foundation was announced. Year over year it was to submit a scientific work about a specific topics from different research fields.

This time it was about the Rutherford-Bohr model . Burgers was up to the challenge (since it was close to the topics he was studying anyways).

I do know the principles of this model (see the representation of the silver Atom on the right), but when I tried to understand, what Burgers actually researched on, I failed.

Theoretical Physics is just too high for me. And this true for the majority of all the people. So Burgers thinks he was the only one to submit a contribution and consequently he won the first price.

So, “that was easy”, you think. You wouldn't have taken part anyways, right? And the submission was so convincing that it earned him not only the first price, but also the acknowledgement of this study as a PhD thesis, a job at the Teylers museum and a professorship at the same time. And he was only 23 years old back then.

So, you see, even if you’re the only contestant, it is still worth taking place. You will never know, what else you can gain. I think, every day we should challenge ourselves, so (as Jan) we can then win prices we probably didn't think about.

You probably wonder, why I chose Jan for this weeks presentation. Well, after he got professor, he continued to make great contributions to the world of physics. So the contest was not the end, but actually the beginning of a very productive working life. He also made mayor contributions to fluid dynamics and the rheological modelling of viscoelastic materials like polymers. That were I "met" him.

I gave a presentation about mechanical modelling of polymers two weeks ago and one part was about the “Burgers model”, which was names after Jan. To give the audience a better feeling on the influence of the model parameters I created a small online demonstrator. Since it is there any way, I thought I share it with the community here. Probably some are interested in this kind of modelling.