When Brian Schmidt got his PhD in astrophysics in 1993, he was one of less than a handful of people that year that graduated with a thesis on supernovae. Five years later, still working on exploding stars, he would be part of one of two teams that independently discovered that the universe was not only [...]

Heather Gray, a researcher working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN, was at this year’s Lindau meeting. I spoke to her over email before it started to find out about her expectations, and afterwards she told me about her impressions of the meeting and what it was like to watch the announcement from CERN with [...]

If you don’t know English, you can still understand Shakespeare’s stories, Sir Harold Kroto told me after his lecture at Lindau on Thursday. But, crucially, “you cannot understand his use of language, because language is a cultural thing – and the culture is lost in translation.” ‘Lost in translation’ was the title of Kroto’s lecture [...]

By their very nature, those discoveries that most change the way we think about nature cannot be anticipated This was Douglas Osheroff’s claim at the start of his lecture on Wednesday morning, where he promised to tell the young researchers at Lindau “how advances in science are made”. In his talk Osheroff offered five things [...]

“From a dream with atoms and spins and electrons dancing around, to a device that we use in our daily life” is how Albert Fert described the link between fundamental physics and its applications. His talk during the Tuesday morning session at Lindau focused on how fundamental research could be spun off into new electronic [...]

Heather Gray, originally from South Africa and currently working at CERN, is one of the attendees producing a video diary to document her time at the Lindau meeting this year. I caught up with her over email just before the start of the meeting to find out what a day’s work at CERN is really like [...]

In less than two weeks time I’ll be boarding a plane from London to Zurich and then zipping across the Swiss-German border to Lindau by train. I’m pretty excited about it – it will be the first time I’ve stepped foot outside of the UK since before I started my Physics degree five years ago, [...]