73rd Meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau

For 16 years now, Countess Bettina Bernadotte has continued the family tradition of chairing this event, which was founded by her father Count Lennart Bernadotte in 1951: the Nobel Laureate Meeting. In her opening speech, she pointed out the responsibility of scientists to work for peace and humanity, just as the Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweizer had called for in 1954, who gave his highly acclaimed speech in Lindau 70 years ago to the day. The scientists around Otto Hahn took up Schweizer's appeal and 18 Nobel Laureates signed the "Mainau Manifesto" at the end of the Lindau meeting in Mainau the following year, calling for the disarmament of nuclear weapons. Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell had already formulated a similar manifesto a few days earlier.

The main sponsor of the Lindau event is the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the responsible FDP Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger gave a welcoming address. She emphasized how important freedom is for science. However, she did not take the opportunity to clarify to the assembled international scientific elite how she would like to reconcile the freedom of science and the allocation of funding in her institution. There had been considerable irritation and many calls for her resignation in recent days, whereupon Stark-Watzinger dismissed her State Secretary Sabine Döring.

There will be numerous lectures on AI on Monday afternoon under Artificial Intelligence in Physics, moderated by the well-known German-Austrian quantum physicist Rainer Blatt, who is researching ion traps for quantum computers in Innsbruck. Sir Konstantin Novoselov will give a very practical demonstration of how valuable AI already is in materials research, for example in the field of graphene. And at the end of the conference on Mainau Island, there will be a panel discussion on the topic of "How to preserve Trust in Science in the Age of AI".

The series of quantum physics lectures will be opened by the Austrian "Pope" of quantum information technology and quantum teleportation, Anton Zeilinger (Nobel Prize in Physics 2022), under the title "A Voyage Through Quantum Wonderland". For Zeilinger, there are no fixed facts in quantum physics; he sees all findings relative to the current state of knowledge. On Tuesday, several laureates will also give an overview of the development of quantum physics, such as Alain Aspect (Nobel Prize in Physics 2022) with "From Einstern and Bell to Quantum Technology" or David Gross (Nobel Prize in Physics 2004) with "Fifty Years of Ouanten Chromodynamics".

A third focus is the topic of "Physics-Based Solutions to the Energy Challenge", which will be discussed on Wednesday under the moderation of Wolfgang Lubnitz from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion.

Many physicists in Lindau

This time, it was once again mainly physicists who were invited. Around 40 accepted the invitation, including the German Nobel Prize winners Klaus von Klitzing (Physics 1985, quantum Hall effect), Georg Bednorz (Physics 1987, high-temperature superconductors), Hartmut Michel and Johann Deisenhofer (Chemistry 1988, molecular structure of the reaction center of photosynthesis in the purple bacterium), Stefan Hell (Chemistry 2014, high-resolution fluorescence microscope), Theodor Hänisch (Physics 2005, laser spectrography with frequency comb) and from Austria Anton Zeilinger (Physics 2022, entangled photons, quantum communication). Klaus von Klitzing is the last physics prizewinner to receive the prize alone.

There will be 645 "young scientists" from over 90 countries. They can listen to the lectures and discuss with the Nobel Prize winners in "open exchange" forums. But some will also be able to present their work on stage. Many of them have submitted abstracts of their work, 21 were selected by the peering committee and a further 14 were chosen by the young scientists themselves in a vote.

(mma)