Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings

Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings

2008 Lindau meeting features one-on-one discussions of young doctoral candidates in physics with Nobel Laureate professors on the future of physics. The first 5 interviews are recorded by a Nature Publishing video called Missions in space-time. The first three titles (now available) include: "Dark Matter," "The Quantum Lattice," and "Fiber & Sunlight."

Ominously, the young acolytes were European or Asian, while all the professors were American or English. This generational shift of experimentation and theory from America to Europe (and the LHC) marks another inflection point and maybe one that we do not want to look at.

While most of the tipping points we are presently facing, including the financial crisis, have a positive implication or potential outcomes, this one of: America's loss of scientific focus, education and most of all participation by our youth, does not. Our youth are our future, and if our youth are not part of the technological renascence in physics, especially energy, we will face an economic loss far exceeding that which we face today. (Hopefully a new administration will see the light, as it were.)