Stockholm hosts Europe's first Open Science Forum
From 25 to 28 August, the first European Open Science Forum (ESOF) was held at the Stockholm City Conference Centre in Sweden's capital city. More than 1800 people participated in this first pan-European scientific meeting, coming from a total of 68 countries and including 350 journalists. The aim was to provide an interdisciplinary forum for open dialogue, debate and discussion on science and technology in society, and the meeting took the form of a variety of exhibitions and seminars.
Particle physics made its appearance at ESOF in two sessions and several exhibits. The "From quarks to galaxies" session was supported by the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA), and organized in particular by Michael Kobel of Bonn, who is an active member of both the European Particle Physics Outreach Group and the International Linear Collider Communication Group. The five speakers - Gerard 't Hooft (Utrecht), Licia Verde (Pennsylvania), Ugo Amaldi (Milano Bicocca), Ulf Danielsson (Uppsala) and Albrecht Wagner (DESY) - covered a wide range of topics, from string theory to hadron therapy.
In another session, "The top 10 mysteries of the early universe", devised by Rolf Landua (CERN), the audience discovered the results of a survey among leading scientists, presented in reverse order as in the "top 10" music charts on television. John Ellis (CERN) and Licia Verde also had to answer questions, but could turn to the audience for help.
Three exhibitions at the conference centre also contained particle-physics themes: the ECFA exhibition, the CERN and Swedish exhibition, and the exhibition by EIROforum, the collaboration of seven European inter-governmental research organizations. Outside the conference, in open spaces and in universities in Stockholm, "Science in the city" attracted the general public.
Alexei Sissakian celebrates his 60th birthday
On 14 October, Alexei Sissakian, vice-director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna and full member of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, celebrated turning 60 years of age.
Born in Moscow, Sissakian graduated from the Physics faculty of Moscow University in 1968, and started work at the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, JINR, under the guidance of Nikolai Bogoliubov. Beginning as a junior scientist, he progressed to become vice-director in 1989. Since then he has contributed greatly to the improvement of the JINR scientific base, the renovation of the institute as an open international centre, the development of wide co-operation with national and world research centres, and the training of qualified scientific personnel.
Sissakian's main scientific activities concern the physics of elementary particle interactions, approximation methods and quantum-field-theory equations, the quantization problem of systems with non-trivial geometry, symmetry and topology. He is an acknowledged specialist in the phenomenology of multiple particle production, and is an active participant in the preparation of scientific programmes and the realization of experiments at the Institute of High-Energy Physics' U-70 accelerator (2 m propane chamber collaboration, "thermalization", etc), at the JINR Nuclotron at CERN (DELPHI, ATLAS) and at Fermilab (CDF).
Sissakian is professor at Moscow State University, and scientific leader of the chamber of high-energy particle physics at the Moscow Physics and Technology Institute. He was one of the initiators of the idea to open the International "Dubna" University for Nature, Society and Man. Alongside all this, he is also a member of the Commission on Particles and Fields of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA) and a number of special councils and editorial boards of scientific publications.