{"id":4070,"date":"2011-10-19T19:30:59","date_gmt":"2011-10-19T23:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4070"},"modified":"2011-10-20T09:54:26","modified_gmt":"2011-10-20T13:54:26","slug":"solvay-centenary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4070","title":{"rendered":"Solvay Centenary"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The first Solvay conference was in 1911 (at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels, where I stayed one night of my recent trip to Belgium, without knowing the history), attended by the great men of the early days of quantum theory, and one woman (Marie Curie).  For more about the 1911 conference, see this <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1109.3785\">recent paper by Norbert Straumann<\/a>.  Today the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.solvayinstitutes.be\/index.php?pageid=4&#038;ssid=5\">25th Solvay conference<\/a> got underway in Brussels City Hall, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first conference.<\/p>\n<p>Like the first one, this conference is by invitation only, and it upholds a policy of confidentiality that goes back to 1911, with not even a schedule or list of attendees for the scientific session publicly available that I can see (just the statement that they are &#8220;most of the prominent physicists working on the subject).  We do however have Lisa Randall reporting on <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/lirarandall\">Twitter<\/a> about the proceedings.  Evidently she&#8217;s the only woman there [<em>note added: wrong interpretation, Eva Silverstein is also there, but the number of participants has doubled since 1911<\/em>]:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Seems ratio of x to y chromosomes hasn&#8217;t changed in 100 years since first Solvay conference in 1911&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The only other source of info on the internet seems to be <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cms.caltech.edu\/news\/397\">this Cal Tech news item<\/a>, which lists the Solvay chair as David Gross and rapporteurs as:<br \/>\nJohn Preskill (Quantum Computation)<br \/>\nAnthony Leggett (Quantum Foundations)<br \/>\nIgnacio Cirac and Steven Girvin (Control of Quantum Systems)<br \/>\nFrank Wilczek (Particles and Fields)<br \/>\nEdward Witten (String Theory)<br \/>\nAlan Guth (Cosmology)<\/p>\n<p>The gender distribution may have stayed the same, but it looks like the age distribution is somehat different. Today the average age of the chair and Rapporteurs is about 61, back then it was about 46.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The first Solvay conference was in 1911 (at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels, where I stayed one night of my recent trip to Belgium, without knowing the history), attended by the great men of the early days of quantum theory, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4070\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4070"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4076,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4070\/revisions\/4076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}