Tuesday, July 3, 2012: Morning session

Tuesday I got to sleep in a little and have a nice breakfast at the hotel before heading over to the Inselhalle for the talks.

Since I got there a bit earlier than Monday I had time to look for a good seat.  I took one in the front row.  A few minutes later Dr. Kohn came and sat by me.  This was two days in a row getting to sit by a Laureate!  Before the Lindau Meeting I wanted to memorize all the Laureates that were going to attend so when I ran into them I would at least know their name and topic of their prizewinning research.  However, there are only so many hours in the day, so I did not actually get everyone memorized.  So, sitting by Dr. Kohn, I sneakily opened my program book to Dr. Kohn’s page for a little refresher.  He won a 1998 Physics prize for his work that lead to the density functional theory.  He’s one of the older Laureates that was at the meeting; he was born in 1923.

Links to the morning talks are below.

Dr. Martinus J.G. Veltman “The LHC at CERN and the Higgs”  Dr. Veltman is a good speaker and a funny guy.  I like his skeptical approach to explaining the Standard Model, Higgs, etc.  He didn’t have time to go through all his slides but was planning on talking more about the connection of particle physics to cosmology and the problems of it.  He ended with saying, “Theory would say the universe should be like hand sized, but this goes against experimental data.”

Dr. Carlo Rubia “Neutrinos: a Golden Field for Astroparticle Physics”  Dr. Rubia spoke very quickly but was almost perfectly on time with his talk.  He gave an overview of neutrinos and the many experiments that are trying to detect them.

Dr. David J. Gross “A Centruy of Quantum Mechanics”  Dr. Gross’ talk was an overview of how quantum mechanics was developed and all the successes it has had.  It works over huge time and space scales, explains things inside the nucleus as well as large systems, it works with Maxwell’s equations.  Still there are some things it doesn’t explain well, and we may be at a transition point to a new theory–just as 100 years ago they transitioned from classical to quantum.

Coffee Break

During the break I introduced myself to Dr. Kohn and asked about his talk on Thursday called “Blindness and Physics.  A Progress Report.”  I asked something like, Have you switched to more of a medical area of research?  He responded by basically saying, No, it’s just math.  Come to the talk and you’ll find out.

I got up to stretch my legs and get some water.  When I returned to my seat, Dr. Kohn was not next to me, but I hoped he would come back.  Another student asked if the chair was free and I said, No, a Laureate is sitting there.  As the second set of talks was about to start, Dr. Kohn still hadn’t come to sit and it seemed clear that he had moved.  Just as I started to feel silly for waving away the other student, Dr. Rubia sat next to me.  Awesome!  Just announce confidently that a Laureate is sitting next to you, and it shall be so.

I introduced myself to Dr. Rubia and asked him if he was relieved his talk was over.  He said not really because he still had several other things to do this week–he’s in the panel about CERN tomorrow and also was on the energy panel on Friday.  It would have been nice to talk more with him.  He was quite talkative, made gestures with his hands, and touched my arm at a couple points in the conversation.  He was one of the two Laureates scheduled to do the Nature filming with me on Wednesday, so I was definitely looking forward to interacting with him more.

More talks

Dr. Albert Fert “The Present and Future Impact of Spin Electronics on the Information and Communication Technologies”  Dr. Fert’s talk was quite technical.  I didn’t grasp all the details, but the idea of using spintronics in electronics and thus reducing their power consumption is exciting.  Dr. Rubia, who was sitting next to me, seemed agitated (he was sighing and making hand gestures) that Dr. Fert went over time.

Dr. William D. Phillips “Creating Artificial Magnetic Fields to Act on Neutral Atoms”  At the beginning of Dr. Phillips talk, one of the Lindau photographers came and stood directly in front of Dr. Rubia so that he could get a close up of Dr. Phillips presenting.  Dr. Rubia did not appreciate someone standing in front of him blocking his view, so he swatted the camera man out of the way.  Dr. Phillips talk was a bit hard for me to understand as it’s something I really haven’t heard about before.  I could tell Dr. Phillips was excited about his work.  As he presented he walked on the stage instead of just standing at the podium and made a lot of emphasizing gestures with his hands.  I got the feeling that if I had the chance to ask him personally, he would be able to explain his research so that I understood.  I found out later that the tie Dr. Phillips is wearing shows Luke Skywalker’s view as he is about to blow up the Deathstar.

Dr. Brian D. Josephson “The Real M-Theory”  Now this was an interesting talk.  Not very easy to follow, but definitely different.  From what I gathered, Dr. Josephson is working on a non-math based theory that encompasses more than traditional physics.  For example, ways of explaining biological systems, brain activity, organized movement of flocks of birds .  I certainly can agree with the overall idea that there are many systems and phenomena in the universe that we can’t explain well with our current physics system.  However, Dr. Josephson’s presentation was hard to follow–not because of its technical depth but because of the organization and presentation.  His last slide was a painting his wife did of a sheep all by itself, and it symbolized Dr. Josephson being separate from the rest of the physics community.  Not really surprisingly, Dr. Rubia also seemed agitated during this presentation.