Alfred Wegener: Difference between revisions

The summer semester of the year 1900 was coming soon and with it a chance to alter Alfred's academic program. It was typical at that time for Berlin students to leave for the summer term, from May to August, especially during their first years. Students headed generally for smaller and rural universities. Meanwhile, for his own first semester away, Alfred settled on the university in Heidelberg. The freedom to move about in this way was built into the German university system. In Germany, admission to any university at all was admission to all the universities in the system. This sytem allowed students to move on to whatever university offered the concentration of disciplines most useful and congenial to them, no matter where they had begun their study. It allowed them to study the subject with different teachers in different locations.

 

 

Heidelberg was far to the west and south of Berlin. Other than Munich and Passau, there were no German universities father away. Heidelberg lay among hills of forest and vineyard on the south bank of the River Neckar -- a tributary of the Rhine --, and about 100 kilometers south of Frankfurt-am-Main. Heidelberg had acquired considerable fame as a scientific and medical university in the middle of the 19th century. It was here in Heidelberg that Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff made the fundamental advances in spectroscopy which allowed the analysis of the composition of stars by study of their absorption spectra. The university also maintained a new astronomical observatory on the Königstuhl, 335 meters above the town.