«Physics of the Universe Summit» bears a Greek stamp

The well known 40-year-old Greek physicist Maria Spiropulu (foto) – a professor at California’s Caltech University and a CERN researcher in Geneva, recently took the initiative of organising an ambitious meeting in Los Angeles, entitled “Physics of the Universe Summit”, where a few dozen scientists got together to talk about their craziest hopes and dreams for the universe.
“I want to set out the questions for the next nine decades,” Spiropulu said on the eve of the conference. She was hoping that the meeting, organized with the help of Joseph D. Lykken of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan, would replicate the success of a speech by the mathematician David Hilbert, who in 1900 laid out an agenda of 23 math questions to be solved in the 20th century. Organized into “duels” of world views, round tables and “diatribes and polemics,” the conference was billed as a place where the physicists could let down their hair about what might come, avoid “groupthink” and “be daring (even at the expense of being wrong),” according to Dr. Spiropulu’s e-mailed instructions. “Tell us what is bugging you and what is inspiring you,” she added.
(source: voice of greece)