You wanted what?

Photo: Barbara Warmbein

You wanted what?
Sometimes even the language of mathematics isn't universal. This realization came during March at the German lab DESY where a party was thrown by the Asian ECal team in thanks for the use of the DESY Calorimeter Group's test beam. At the multinational gathering, physicists compared the way they use their fingers to count: Most of them trying to order a beer in Japan by holding up one finger would receive four beers! The Asian team also gave a crash course in katakana, Japanese phonetic writing, and kanji, symbolic characters of Chinese origin. According to them, accelerator translates literally as "add-velocity-machine."

Barbara Warmbein, ILC Global Design Effort