One on one with the Minister of Education
Leiden Observatory is the world’s oldest university observatory. It’s currently located on the university’s science campus at the edge of the city, but for over a hundred years it occupied a building downtown. This building, called the Old Observatory, dates from 1861 (the Observatory itself was founded in 1633) and is suffering from many years of poor maintenance. Last year, our Minister of Education, Culture and Science, Ronald Plasterk, allocated 2.8 million euros to restore the Old Observatory to its former glory. Today the minister was invited to start the restoration works by lifting one of the telescope domes off the roof.
I needed a break from my uncooperative collapse model, so I went to have a look. Also, I didn’t want to miss any possible mishaps. You never know what might happen when you let a secretary of state operate a mobile crane. They’re used to running the country, not a heavy piece of construction equipment.
As it turned out, not quite surprisingly, everything went just fine. The dome did swing about a bit during its descent, but it didn’t knock into the building or against any astronomers. The dome landed safely on the right spot. A local newspaper, the Leidsch Dagblad, was on scene to film the occasion. Pictures by myself and others are gathered here.
Because I didn’t want to sit through half an hour of speeches before the main event, I arrived later than most guests. Now I had to watch from behind a fence, but this turned out to have its virtues. After Plasterk put the dome on the ground, he led the party back to the Old Observatory building. He looked around before stepping through the door and noticed a bunch of people watching (and photographing) him from behind a fence a few metres away. Of course, those people were me and a few other students.
Plasterk turned around and headed straight for us. He must have heard us talk English, because he asked (in English) whether we were tourists. When we said we were students at the university, he told us he used to study there as well. In fact, as a biology student, he spent a lot of time at the Old Observatory. (For some reason, the biology faculty held classes there for many years.) We talked briefly about the difficulty of astronomical observations in Leiden nowadays, what with the generally poor weather, and we agreed this wasn’t such a bad thing, as it means we get to go to Chile every now and then to use much bigger telescopes. He then wished us a nice day and went back inside to finish the official programme.
This impromptu chat didn’t go unnoticed by the gathered journalists, who seemed to think that anyone talking to the minister must also be noteworthy. I’ve never had so many cameras pointed at me. Now let’s see if those journalists can find out why Plasterk displayed such interest in us.