Scientists come in two flavors, unifiers and diversifiers. Unifiers try to find the common threads underlying disparate phenomena. Diversifiers try to find more disparate phenomena for the unifiers to unify. Occasionally a diversifier may wear a unifier’s hat and consolidate what he knows and sometimes a unifier may take a break from his grand goal […]
When Brian Schmidt got his PhD in astrophysics in 1993, he was one of less than a handful of people that year that graduated with a thesis on supernovae. Five years later, still working on exploding stars, he would be part of one of two teams that independently discovered that the universe was not only expanding, […]
Heather Gray, a researcher working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN, was at this year’s Lindau meeting. I spoke to her over email before it started to find out about her expectations, and afterwards she told me about her impressions of the meeting and what it was like to watch the announcement from CERN with other […]
I admit to having been skeptical. The Higgs – so what? It’s not like this was unexpected. But the Lindau meeting is a good place to get many different perspectives on the new discovery: watching the CERN press conference, attending Lindau’s own press conference with Carlo Rubbia, David Gross and Martinus Veltman, listening to the […]
Two years ago at Lindau they started a new type of session called Master Class, in analogy with those offered by great masters, invited by the best music schools in the world. In this case it is Nobel laureates that listen and give advice to the select group of students who have come to Lindau. […]
Some fifty years ago the first lasers were developed. They were seen as a curious diversion of physics by some, but since that time they have proved to be a success story of science theory and application. The original nascent concepts of how light behaved were discovered by James Clerk Maxwell just before the 20th […]
Today, 4th of July 2012, has been a very long but exciting day. I was here in Lindau, writing my last blog at one o’clock in the morning, when I received an email from a colleague who warned me of a leak from CERN that appeared in the British newspaper The Telegraph, showing an unauthorized […]
The Lindau meetings have certain traditions – the polonaise comes to mind; the exclusivity (laureates and young researchers only!) of the afternoon discussion sessions; the boat ride. But now and again, Lindau tries something new. From 2010, I remember an "inverse panel", with Nobel laureates interviewing a panel of young researchers instead of the other […]
By their very nature, those discoveries that most change the way we think about nature cannot be anticipated This was Douglas Osheroff’s claim at the start of his lecture on Wednesday morning, where he promised to tell the young researchers at Lindau “how advances in science are made”. In his talk Osheroff offered five things […]
Today Douglas Osheroff discussed his view of “How Advances in Science are Made” at the 62nd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. Some days before the meeting I had a short email conversation with him, where we chatted about his finding, the need of interdisciplinarity of sciences and how he advanced in science. Osheroff was awarded the […]
"From a dream with atoms and spins and electrons dancing around, to a device that we use in our daily life” is how Albert Fert described the link between fundamental physics and its applications. His talk during the Tuesday morning session at Lindau focused on how fundamental research could be spun off into new electronic […]
Five minutes before the morning session we see three Nobel laureates – Tini Veltman, Carlo Rubbia and David Gross – moving around eachother next to the stand, preparing their laptops for the presentations, later displayed on the huge screens of Lindau Auditorium. Rubbia seems angry with the others because they are using his Mac connector. […]
