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This article is part of our Summer Sojourns 2012 series highlighting summer adventures of FIU students.
The Lindau Nobel Laureates meeting is an annual gathering of Nobel Laureates and young researchers from around the world. Laureates from the respective fields of science are invited to the Lindau Meetings for physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry and the economic sciences. The 62nd Lindau Meeting this summer was dedicated to physics.
Doctoral candidate Idaykis Rodriguez was one of 80 students from the United States selected to attend the meeting. She and the other students attended an orientation in Washington, D.C., where they got a chance to meet and get to know one another better. (Upon receiving the conference materials, the Cuban-born Rodriguez was surprised to learn her photo had made the coverof the conference program.) The students were flown in groups to Germany and split between two hotels on the picturesque island of Lindau.
Rodriguez and her husband Vicente (also an FIU grad) met in Paris at the conclusion of the meeting and enjoyed a two-week vacation in France and Italy.
Rodriguez was the only student from FIU and, as she later learned from a Lindau meeting organizer, the only physics education researcher at the conference.
“At first, meeting so many students that study nuclear, plasma and high energy physics, I felt a little intimidated to share with them that I was a physics education researcher,” she says. “Half of the people I met didn’t know what it was and half may have heard of it. But once I explained that what I do is research how people learn and teach physics, they showed genuine interest in the field, which often sparked philosophical conversations about knowledge, expertise and the meaning of science. This is something that I love and research, so I was delighted to hold such conversations. In fact, many were journaled for my personal research.”
Here the Nobel Laureates file in for one of the morning sessions.
The week-long conference featured talks and presentations from the Laureates in the mornings. In the afternoons, participants could attend any of several “discussion sessions” with the Laureates who gave a talk that day. Rodriguez says those were a more intimate and informal conversation where students had the opportunity to ask questions about the research and about their own interests.
“It is just incredible to get personal advice on your work from a Nobel Laureate doing similar work,” says Rodriguez. “The presentations from the Laureates also ignited discussion among conference participants, creating many heated debates about climate, energy, sustainability, and, the most thrilling news of all, the Higgs Boson.”
The conference was held the week of the public announcement of the CERN discovery of the Higgs Boson, the particle that confirms the standard model in physics that describes what the universe is made of. “It was a monumental event in the field of physics and the center of conversation between the great minds of CERN, researchers and the Laureates,” says Rodriguez. “It was amazing to see how science really crosses all barriers and boundaries.”
Rodriguez (far left) met young researchers from around the world.
In the evening, the conference would schedule social events. This gave Rodriguez a chance to dine with researchers from Jordan, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands. Rodriguez says, “The list is endless of how many countries and nationalities were there. I even met physicists from Cuba, my native country.”
Rodriguez (middle) and her new-found friends enjoyed themed dinners, including German night.
U.S. delegation sponsors organized special lunches and dinners with invited Laureates and international students from China, Turkey and India. Rodriguez was thrilled when she sat next to a Laureate one night.
“He was quite elderly, but his spirit and passion were so strong that he was the most adorable and inspiring person I met at the conference,” says Rodriguez. “We talked about the physics of music and how the voice travels in air. We also talked about how beautifully his wife sings.
“On a different occasion, I was able to ask two Laureates about my research question on what it takes to be a physics expert. One of them answered truthfully, and his answer was what I expected. The other was thinking really hard and concluded that this question was too difficult to answer without proper time to think. He had to go to another engagement and could not finish our conversation.
“I was just pleased to know that if my research question was tough enough to stump a Nobel Laureate, I must be asking the right questions,” she says. “Most of the Laureates are very down to earth, regular people. They’re simply interested in talking with students. They are professors as well, and giving advice and listening to students is, after all, their favorite thing to do. Together we do science.”
The two-time FIU alumna, who is set to defend her dissertation in 2013, says the overall experience was “scary, intimidating, energizing, empowering, inspiring, amazing, a lot of fun, and most of all, unforgettable.”
“I was first afraid of not measuring up to these brilliant minds, but then I thought if I was selected to come I had a responsibility to add value to the conversation,” says Rodriguez. “I began to feel proud and inspired to continue my research and strive to make a difference.”
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