Forum Engelberg pays tribute to Curien
The 2004 Forum Engelberg paid tribute to its president, Hubert Curien, who will celebrate his 80th birthday this year. Curien is a former French minister for research and was president of the CERN Council during the crucial years 1994-1996, when the Large Hadron Collider project was approved. He is also known as one of the strongest promoters of European collaboration in science and technology.
The highlights of the 2004 conference, which was held in Lucerne on 1-4 March, included an interdisciplinary scientific programme with the theme "Science on the Agenda of European Politics", a young-scientists programme and a session on e-science and the Grid.
Under the patronage of the European commissioner for research, Philippe Busquin, and with the participation of present and former director-generals of the EIROforum research organizations (CERN, EFDA, ESA, ESO, EMBL, ESRF and ILL), along with government officials, ministers, friends and colleagues, the two-day colloquium covered presentations on European research-policy issues, present and planned research activities and projects, the dissemination of science, science and ethics, and the best practices for technology transfer.
The conference chairman, Luciano Maiani, concluded after the two days of interesting talks that: "Europe badly needs many more Hubert Curiens". For the full 2004 programme, see www.forum-engelberg.org.
Berkeley honours Gerson Goldhaber's life in physics
On 21 February the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory celebrated Gerson Goldhaber's 80th birthday with a "Gersonfest", which also marked the 50th anniversary of his arrival at the laboratory. The day-long symposium was organized around what one of the organizers called "the phase changes of Gerson's career", each of which corresponded to his favoured experimental techniques. These included deuterium-loaded photographic emulsions beginning in the 1940s, the hydrogen bubble chamber beginning in the 1950s, the solenoidal detector at SPEAR in the 1970s, and what George Trilling wryly described as the most dramatic phase change of all: "In the late 1980s Gerson decided to join the Supernova Cosmology Project, while I went into the Superconducting Super Collider. You can draw your own conclusions." During the festive dinner Maurice Goldhaber also recalled that his younger brother was so identified with the discovery of the charmed quark, that at a conference where both were speaking Maurice was introduced as "the Goldhaber without charm."
New Kavli institutes to advance research in cosmology, nanoscience and neuroscience
The philanthropist Fred Kavli has announced the formation of seven new scientific research institutes at leading universities in the United States and Europe. This announcement comes just one year after he inaugurated the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at SLAC in March 2003 (CERN Courier June 2003 p9). The network of Kavli institutes will address major challenges in the fields of cosmology, nanoscience and neuroscience. The new institutes will include the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. Led by Bruce Winstein, it will investigate a wide range of modern cosmology, from the nature of dark energy and dark matter to the connections between cosmology and string theory. Kavli himself has donated more than $100 million (~€82 million) to the institutes. The two established earlier are KIPAC and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, led by David Gross.
Programming-language pioneer visits CERN
A workshop set up to explore the potential for scientific computing of the Oberon programming language was held at CERN on 10 March and included the originator of the language, Niklaus Wirth, along with various experts, all of whom gave presentations. Wirth, who celebrated his 70th birthday in February this year, founded the influential school of computer science at ETH, Zurich, where he was professor from 1968 until his retirement in 1999. He is best known as the designer of the programming languages Pascal (1970), for which he received the Turing Award in 1984; Modula-2 (1980), which is a language of choice for industrial control applications; and Oberon (1988), which incorporates support for object-oriented programming and automatic memory management in a remarkably small package. Oberon greatly influenced the design of the popular Java and C# programming languages, and has opened up new options for the design of algorithms for scientific applications. For further information about the Oberon workshop, see: http://cern.ch/oberon.day.