Annual-Report-2024 - Flipbook - Page 6
Résumé and Outlook From Council and Foundation
The Common Ground
Lindau is – and always has been – a place for the free flow
of ideas and thoughts. For almost 75 years, the Lindau
Nobel Laureate Meetings have offered the international
scientific community a haven in which to meet, with the
ambition of gathering excellence in research and of transcending differences of geography, gender, class, origin,
and religion. At Lindau, scientists from all over the world
talk to each other, learn from each other, and hopefully
carry the “Lindau Spirit” back to their home countries,
providing new impetus for tackling the urgent problems
which assail humanity and which can only be solved
through international cooperation.
In 2024, we followed this principle by assigning responsibility for a substantial part of the Meeting’s core
themes to the Young Scientists. Based on our conviction
that today’s Young Scientists – this time, representing
386 institutions and 91 countries – may be tomorrow’s
Nobel Laureates, we invited them to share insights into
their cutting-edge research on how to employ artificial
intelligence for physics; on physics-based solutions to
the energy challenge; and on the potential for crossdisciplinary research in physics. And we have also continued our interest in the methods by which science
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can best be practiced, dedicating two workshops to the
Lindau Guidelines, which foster new approaches to global,
sustainable, cooperative, and, above all, open science.
We often evoke the “Lindau Spirit”, and indeed, when
you read reports about the Lindau Meetings from the
1950s and 1960s, you will find that one of the most-used
terms to describe the atmosphere is “der heitere Geist von
Lindau.” Serenity, even cheerfulness, was the attribute
associated with the picturesque, romantic island-city
located on the lake. And yet, it was not only the city that
inspired this sentiment.
We may think of our times as particularly difficult,
even dire. But let us not assume that those years in
post-World War II, Cold-War Europe were easy ones.
Indeed, when the great physicists of their time met in
the 1950s in Lindau, they were beset by one fear, that of
humanity’s self-destruction through nuclear war. Albert
Schweitzer, the Nobel Peace Laureate of 1952 and great
humanist, whose visit to Lindau we commemorated last
year, probably acted as a catalyst to promote the 1955
Mainau Declaration – as well as the historic new declaration which we owe to the Laureates assembled on
Mainau in 2024.
