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From June 29th through July 4th, 25 Nobel laureates and over 550 young scientists from all over the world are gathering in Lindau, Germany, at the 58th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. This year's meeting is dedicated to physics.
Beatrice Lugger, managing editor of ScienceBlogs.de, is in Lindau and will be sending her impressions of the meeting daily through July 4.
ScienceBlogs.de is also undertaking a German-language blog covering the meetings, here. Additionally, keep an eye out for short video interviews, in English, of Nobelists at Lindau on the ScienceBlogs homepage. Here are the firstand second daily dispatches.
Dancing Physicists
It was midnight, the band played "Sex Bomb," and all were shaking. Physicists dance as long as they can. We have fact-checked this. Even after the band stopped playing, some didn't want to leave. The get-together-evening was a lot of fun. More dancing physicist photos here.
Climate Debate: A Lot of Hot Air
Laura and Wolfgang, bloggers at the ScienceBlogs.de blog on the Meetings, report on the Climate Panel:
Most of the panelists themselves said: "I'm no expert."
Today eight Nobel laureates spoke with Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the PIK in Potsdam about climate change and energy challenges. As an idea by the organizers of the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting, this sounded great at first. Some of the leading thinkers in physics coming up with new ideas. But as we had to learn this noon, they are not experts on climate change, and even experts have their problems, as we know.
We learned: Nuclear fusion is not an option (Jack Steinberger); biofuels are bad (Hartmut Michel); Norway gets warmer, but so what? (Ivar Giaever); we need more research (Klaus von Klitzing); usable powers are nuclear or solar (Carlo Rubbia); the public should not fear nuclear power plants (Douglas Osheroff)...and there's a 60 percent chance that climate change really is made by humans. Beatrice speculates that it's all a lot of hot air.
The Coldest Place In the Universe
This afternoon the scientific leader at CERN, Jos Engelen, and the Leader of the Large Hadron Collider Project, Lyn Evans, gave insights with a live stream and a discussion with Nobel Laureates. Florian of ScienceBlogs.de reports:
"The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is really a huge thing! A 34-mile tunnel, gigantic detectors—and all this must be cooled in order to function optimally. And 'cool' doesn't mean that there are a few air conditioners. The whole machine has to be cooled down to 1.9 Kelvin to operate efficiently."This is even colder than space with a temperature of 2.7 Kelvin. So CERN will be the coldest place in the universe. More about astrophysics, cosmology and CERN in the lectures tomorrow!
Beautiful Proteins
Macroproteins look like dreadlocks combined in secret, complicated ways, and huge effort is needed to get insight into their structures. This was the topic of this morning's lecture by the Nobel laureates Johann Deisenhofer, Hartmut Michel, and Robert Huber, who where honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1988, for determining the three-dimensional structure of a photosynthetic reaction center.
Finally, you can now check out Monday's highlights on video.
Physical Science
Comments
With half of the 'Standard Model' missing, shrouded within a mathematical haze of pure speculation (guessing), and CERN LHC being built upon these antiquated precepts, there is no telling what surprises await the CERN experiments! It will take the LHC discoveries to extricate the physics community, from their stagnated, depressing, and quagmired current positions! At least one sector of the 'Standard Model' will receive a tsunami of change, that will send the mathematicians, and physicists scrambling wildly to install these new, much needed corrections! There is no doubt, that the future world desperated energy needs lie in LHC technologies; however, the production course should be traveled with extreme caution! The LSAG 'safety report' covers only 2008 lower energy 'start-up' operation projections, and nothing toward the pre-planned decade to come, precision energy upgrades to begin in 2009! This report only covers those issues on previous public dockets of concern, and nothing toward the 'new' emerging risk assessments, that are going on -- 'Behind Closed Doors'! CERN is grappling with multiple variance-calculation paradoxes, even as Michelangelo Mangano (and others) penned the expedited 'quiet the public', 'Safe Status' safety report! One such non-public evaluation concerns: ALICE heavy (Pb) ion collisions, scheduled for 2009 (once financed). This project can create hyper-density plasmatic fields, that can affect a gravitational curvature, which could allow a compression singularity vortex to form, and an event-horizon expansion! This is known as the: Einstein-Rosen Bridge: QUANTUM WORMHOLE! Director General Robert Aymar, Catherine Decosse, Michelangelo Mangano, Stephen Hawking, CERN Theory Unit, and LSAG are in discussions, at this time!
Posted by: Robert I. Marsh II | July 2, 2008 7:43 AM
I can't wait until I obtain my desktop LHC! The quantum wormholes it creates will be too small to send a person through, but if the ERP bridges are stable enough I may be able to establish some type of communication with "the other side."
Posted by: Al Fin | July 2, 2008 11:47 AM
The LHC technologies, if long-term successful, could release information involving the manipulation of matter, luminosity (plasma), and energy; thereby leading to a controllable, and sustainable nuclear fushion process! An entirely 'new' branch of energy physics could be born, with unimaginable outgrowth potential! Still with extreme caution! The Quantum Wormhole kinetic expansion, would be initiated by an opposite and equal reaction, of quantum inverse ('ghost') radiation, engaging super-symmetric 'feed-back loops'!
Posted by: Robert I. Marsh II | July 11, 2008 8:59 AM