The story of how life formed on Earth keeps unfolding, revealing new clues about how our planet evolved from being hostile to life to the lush and diverse place we know today. The new topic cluster ‘The Rise of Life‘ leads through important discoveries in the field featuring lectures from Nobel Laureates John Mather, Christian […]
How has our picture of the universe developed in the history of cosmology?
George Smoot from MIT to “The Big Bang Theory”
As Nobel Week 2014 is approaching Linda Moussakova shares an overview of the various art projects related to the Nobel Prizes.
The Hubble Space Telescope has shown us distant galaxies and planets orbiting other stars, deepening our knowledge of the Universe. Nobel prizewinner John Mather works on Hubble’s replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope. He believes we are in a golden age of astronomy. But the young researchers he meets are not convinced. There are
This morning, having rested after the Opening Ceremony at Lindau, and Spain’s fantastic match in the European Cup Final, we have heard wonders from Brian Schmidt – 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the acceleration of the universe – who opened the conference with a very stimulating talk on the Standard Model […]
Schon während seiner Kindheit fand Nobelpreisträger John Mather eines immer am aufregensten: “Zeugs zu bauen, um Sachen zu messen” (“build stuff to measure things”). Das klingt nicht unbedingt so, als würde man dafür einen Nobelpreis bekommen. Aber die Rolle der Meßgeräte wird oft unterschätzt… Gerade wenn es um Astronomie geht, spielen die Meßgeräte eine außerordentlich […]
In Lindau geht es nicht unbedingt um die neuesten, wissenschaftlichen Entdeckungen. Sondern es geht vor allem darum zu sehen, wie andere Leute arbeiten, was und wie andere Menschen denken und natürlich wollen die Jungen von den alten Heroen lernen. Lehrreiche Einblicke gab dabei nicht zuletzt das Panel “On being a scientist”. Dabei stellten sich Françoise […]
When you throw together six distinguished physicists (David Gross, John Mather, Carlo Rubbia, George Smoot, Gerardus ’t Hooft, and Martinus Veltman) into debate on what CERN will teach us about the dark energy and dark matter you can’t guarantee the same kind harmony that these physicists strive for in their own theories. There was a majority agreement […]
John Mather is humble when describing his measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation despite the fact that Steven Hawking described this measurement as possibly the most important discovery humans have ever made. The cosmic microwave background radiation is the remnant glow of the Big Bang; it is the primary evidence. Mather is careful to […]
There it was, that darned noise again. Nobody could possibly be happy cleaning pigeon droppings. Yet Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were being forced to do it. As good scientists they simply could not avoid it, since they had to discount the role of this "white dielectric substance" in the noise that was plaguing their […]
The confluence of great minds at Lindau is also a meeting of contrasting perspectives. Each scientist has his own specialty in which he is likely the world expert, but each scientist also tries to generalize his work to solve the biggest problems in the world. It seems to be true that scientific research is highly […]
