Today, Wednesday 16th of March, the Technical University of Dresden has become a buzzing area in the city Dresden - pretty much outside the city center. What might draw some 7.000 physicists from around the world up here to the Southern parts of Dresden?
It is the 75th Annual Meeting and combined DPG Spring Meeting covering areas Atomic Physics, History of Physics, Biological Physics, Semiconductor Physics, and many more. In general fields that the "normal" citizen would not deal with on daily basis - besides using a mobile phone! Mobile phone technologies embodies quite a few outcomes of what is during this week is talked about in the several thousands of sessions. The program itself resembles -at first sight- more of a bigger city area phone book ;-)
Attended two press conferences - first on Monday the official kick-off one - by Prof. Wolfgang Sandner, president of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. Due to the recent developments at the Japanese nuclear plant #Fukushima the second press conference was fully on this topic yesterday at 11 AM.
Interesting to see what research is done in fields we are often are unaware, as we certainly don't see directly its implications to real life applications (even though the findings diffuse quite quickly into applications, like mobile phones, laptops, etc., that are becoming part of our life).
Yesterday at the official prize ceremony several scientists were honored for their outstanding work in the field. Besides these -men- one woman stood out: Hildegard Werth, science journalist at ZDF, Mainz. Special congratulations to her narrowing the gap between hightech research and daily life!
The hours race like electrons in Atto or Femto speed. So much to catch, one brain is just not able to bring all the interesting sessions together in broader context. The campus is just too big. How cool would be a TwitterWall in every venue with sessions - so in real-time one can grasp what is going on elsewhere. An idea for next year's conference here in Dresden - looking forward to it.
Earlier this afternoon at HSZ 01 (Audimax), where the room bursted almost as people streamed in to the sessions on philosophy and physics - this is really a big and general issue, to be applied also outside the physics world. Perhaps some videos to be on public later on YouTube.
During lunch I had the chance to talk briefly with Dr. Michael Jetter, University of Stuttgart, and Prof. Uwe Rossow, University Braunschweig. I mentioned a meeting I had earlier today, where the question occurred to bring more awareness about the "unseeable" physics into the world through performing arts. Also the question of whether research should focus on special outcome and applications. Unisono our view was that the researcher is more of an "artist" being left to his creativity to find unexplored new ways in the field without forced into a certain direction (driven by economic success). I wonder whether performances such as these can be used to facilitate this understanding in a broader sense (complementary to the work of Hildegard Werth).
... heading over to BEY118 to see interesting session.
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