German Nobel laureate arrives in Vietnam for physics conference
(TUOI TRE) – A German Nobel laureate has arrived in Vietnam to chair a nanophysics conference in a central city.
Klaus von Klitzing, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1985 “for the discovery of the quantized Hall effect,” landed in Quy Nhon City – the capital of the central province of Binh Dinh – on Sunday to attend the 9th edition of the annual Meeting Vietnam conferences.
He is scheduled to chair the “Nanophysics: from Fundamentals to Applications” conference that is taking place in the city and will last until August 10.
Klitzing will also partake in the inauguration of the conference building of the International Center of Interdisciplinary Science Education, a US$6 million research, convention, and science complex located in the same city, on August 12 before leaving the country one day later.
Four other Nobel laureates are coming to the Southeast Asian nation for the Meeting Vietnam events, slated for July 28 to August 17, with the participation of over 180 other physicists from 29 countries and territories together with 30 Vietnamese scientists.
The four are Sheldon Lee Glashow (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979), Jack Steinberger (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988), David Jonathan Gross (Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004), and George Smoot (Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006).
On the sidelines of the conferences, the physicists will engage in an online chat organized by Tuoi Tre newspaper on August 12.
They will meet with Vietnamese students who won medals at the 2013 math and physics Olympiads, and present them with souvenirs as a sign of encouragement the same day.
One of the scientists, David Jonathan Gross, is scheduled to come to Ho Chi Minh City on August 8 and give a presentation at the HCMC University of Science on August 10.
First held in Hanoi 20 years ago, Meeting Vietnam 2013 features conferences on cosmology in the Planck era, general relativity and gravitation, the fundamentals and applications of nanophysics, and windows on the universe.
Its agenda also includes classes in condensed matter physics and astrophysics, and seminars on teaching methodology for teacher training college lecturers.
Meeting Vietnam is the brainchild of Vietnamese particle physicist Jean Tran Thanh Van, the third Asian to be given the prestigious John Torrence Tate Award in 2011 for his international leadership in physics.
(Source: Tuoi Tre)