SPEAKERS

PROGRAM

 VENUE

HOW TO REACH

Astrophysics
Oxford University, UK

Biomedicine
Technion, Haifa, Israel

Theoretical Physics
Instituto Max Planck Insitut fur Quantenoptik, Garching,

Alemania
 

Claude COHEN-TANNOUDJI
Physics

Physical-Chemistry
Harvard University, Cambridge - MA, USA

Amand LUCAS
Physics
University of Namur, Belgium

Ginés MORATA
Genetics
Centro de Biología Molecular Severo Ochoa, Madrid, Spain

Sir John PENDRY
Photonics
Imperial College London, Reino Unido

Jose Maria PITARKE

Lisa RANDALL

Theoretical Physics
Harvard University, Cambridge - MA, USA
Cancelled
Replaced by Jose Ignacio LATORRE
 

Arantxa URRETABIZKAIA
Literatura
Euskaltzaindia - Real Academia de la Lengua Vasca, Hondarribia, Basque Country

Rafael YUSTE
Neurobiology
Columbia Universtity, NYC, USA

Public Lectures

Victoria Eugenia, Donostia

Public Lectures

Victoria Eugenia, Donostia
 

Public Lectures

Victoria Eugenia, Donostia
 

Public Lectures

Victoria Eugenia, Donostia

Public Lectures

Victoria Eugenia, Donostia

Opening

José Ignacio

LATORRE
Theoretical Physics
Lisa
RANDALL Cancelled

Claude
COHEN-TANNOUDJI
Physics

Sir John
PENDRY
Photonics
 

Amand

LUCAS
Physics
 

Dudley
HERSCHBACH
Physics-Chemistry

Aaron CIECHANOVER
Biomedicine

José María

PITARKE
Physics

Arantxa
URRETABIZKAIA
Literature

Ginés

MORATA
Genetic

Juan Ignacio
CIRAC
Theoretical Physics

Rafael

YUSTE
Neurobiology
 

Dame Jocelyn
BELL BURNELL
Astrophysics

Jean-Marie

LEHN
Supramolecular  Chemistry

Public Lectures
Bizkaia Aretoa, Bilbao

Public Lectures
Bizkaia Aretoa,
Bilbao

Dame Jocelyn
BELL BURNELL
Astrophysics

Rafael

YUSTE
Neurobiology

Public Lectures

Victoria Eugenia, Donostia

Opening

Dudley HERSCHBACH
Physics-Chemistry
Homage to Niels Bohr: Prophet for Paradox
With his 1913 trilogy of papers, “On the constitution of atoms and molecules,” Niels Bohr gave great impetus to the dawning revolution that became quantum physics.  His elucidation of the hydrogen spectrum was greeted as “a triumph over logic.”  The seemingly simple model he devised, and endowed with uncanny properties, has had abiding appeal.  Akin to Newton’s solar system, Bohr’s model is still taught in high school and college courses, although only successful for one-electron atoms and inconsistent with modern theory.   Bohr was fully aware that the concepts he brought forth not only conflicted with classical physics but were rife with paradox.  Indeed, he welcomed paradox as intrinsic to quantum mechanics. As well as emphasizing that theme, my talk will describe how recent work, making use a technique borrowed from quantum chromodynamics, has enhanced the scope and accuracy of Bohr’s model.  Paradoxically, his model was found to emerge naturally as the infinite dimensional limit of the Schrödinger equation.

Juan Ignacio CIRAC
Theoretical Physics

The supercomputers of the future
What will supercomputers be like in 50 years’ time?
What will they be used for? How will they work? In this talk I will explain some of the achievements made over recent years in the field of Quantum Physics, which will help answer some of these questions … and maybe a few more too.

Public Lectures

Lisa RANDALL Cancelled
Theoretical Physics
Double disk dark matter

A review talk or talk about new work on dark matter.

Replace by:

José Ignacio LATORRE

Física Teórica

Aaron CIECHANOVER
Biomedicine

The Personalized Medicine Revolution: 
Are We Going to Cure all Diseases and at what Price?
Many important drugs such as penicillin, aspirin, or digitalis, were discovered by serendipity - some by curious researchers who accidentally noted a "strange" phenomenon, and some by isolation of active ingredients form plants known for centuries to have a specific therapeutic effect.  Other major drugs like the cholesterol reducing statins were discovered using more advanced technologies, such as targeted screening of large chemical libraries.  In all these cases, the mechanism of action of the drug were largely unknown at the time of their discovery, and were unraveled only later.  With the realization that patients with apparently similar diseases at diagnosis – breast or prostate cancer, for example - respond differently to similar treatments, and the clinical behavior of the disease is different in different patients, we have begun to understand that the mechanistic/molecular basis of what we thought is the same disease entity, is different.  Thus, breast cancer or prostate cancers appear to be sub-divided to smaller distinct classes according to their molecular characteristics.  As a result, we are exiting the era where our approach to treatment of these and many other diseases is “one size fits all”, and enter a new era of “personalized medicine” where we shall tailor the treatment according to the patient’s molecular/mutational profile.  Here, unlike the previous era, the understanding of the mechanism will drive the development of new drugs.  This era will be characterized initially by the development of technologies where sequencing and data processing of individual genomes will be fast (few hours) and cheap.

Rafael YUSTE
Neurobiology

The Brain Activity Map: Imaging the Activity of Entire Neural Circuits

In physical systems built with many components, emergent properties, such as magnetism, are often generated from the interactions among these particles. These emergent properties are often invisible when observing individual particles, since they depend on large-scale interactions between them. Likewise, the function of the brain has been mostly studied by examining the responses of individual neurons, yet it is probably an emergent property that arises from the coordinated activity of large numbers of neurons in each of its neural circuits.

To capture this emergent level of brain function, we have launched a large-scale, international public project, the Brain Activity Map Project (or BRAIN Initiative), aimed at developing new methods to measure and control neural activity across complete neural circuits in experimental animals and human patients. This technological effort will be an interdisciplinary project, incorporating into neuroscience many methods and approaches from the physical sciences and nanotechnologies. The data obtained with these new methods could prove to be an invaluable step towards understanding fundamental and pathological brain processes. Finally, the novel technologies developed by this project, like it happened with the Human Genome Project, could give rise to new areas of economic and industrial development.

Public Lectures
Bizkaia Aretoa, Bilbao

Dame Jocelyn BELL BURNELL
Astrophysics

Are black holes just science fiction, or are they real? Is there any good evidence for their existence? What are white holes, and wormholes? This talk will describe what black holes are, how they are formed and how we might (or might not) know if one was close to us. White holes, wormholes and how we might live off a black hole will also be briefly discussed.

Public Lectures

Claude COHEN-TANNOUDJI
Physics

Conservation laws are very important in quantum physics. Two examples of applications will be given in this lecture. The first one is optical pumping which uses transfer of angular momentum from polarized photons to atoms to produce highly polarized atomic gases allowing a very sensitive detection of magnetic resonance. The second example is laser cooling which uses transfer of linear momentum from photons to atoms to produce large radiative forces acting on these atoms and allowing one to cool them at extremely low temperatures. Various applications of optical pumping and laser cooling will be briefly reviewed showing how long term basic research is essential for improving our understanding of the world and for giving rise to a wealth of important applications.

José María PITARKE
Physics

Graphene

Graphene is a one-atom thick layer of carbon atoms. It is the thinnest imaginable material, a million times thinner than a piece of paper. It is a revolutionary new material that has the potential to impact almost every aspect of our lives; it is believed that graphene might well trigger the next technological revolution. Graphene has all superlatives. It is stronger than the strongest steel and harder than diamond. It can be graded as the most impermeable material. It is an excellent conductor of heat and electricity. It is flexible, stretchable, transparent, and the list goes on. This lecture aims at describing the fundamentals of graphene, its properties, and its applications.

Dame Jocelyn BELL BURNELL
Astrophysics

Are black holes just science fiction, or are they real? Is there any good evidence for their existence? What are white holes, and wormholes? This talk will describe what black holes are, how they are formed and how we might (or might not) know if one was close to us. White holes, wormholes and how we might live off a black hole will also be briefly discussed.

Public Lectures
Bizkaia Aretoa, Bilbao

Rafael YUSTE
Neurobiology

The Brain Activity Map: Imaging the Activity of Entire Neural Circuits

In physical systems built with many components, emergent properties, such as magnetism, are often generated from the interactions among these particles. These emergent properties are often invisible when observing individual particles, since they depend on large-scale interactions between them. Likewise, the function of the brain has been mostly studied by examining the responses of individual neurons, yet it is probably an emergent property that arises from the coordinated activity of large numbers of neurons in each of its neural circuits.

To capture this emergent level of brain function, we have launched a large-scale, international public project, the Brain Activity Map Project (or BRAIN Initiative), aimed at developing new methods to measure and control neural activity across complete neural circuits in experimental animals and human patients. This technological effort will be an interdisciplinary project, incorporating into neuroscience many methods and approaches from the physical sciences and nanotechnologies. The data obtained with these new methods could prove to be an invaluable step towards understanding fundamental and pathological brain processes. Finally, the novel technologies developed by this project, like it happened with the Human Genome Project, could give rise to new areas of economic and industrial development.

Public Lectures

Victoria Eugenia, Donostia

Sir John PENDRY
Photonics

The Science of Invisibility

Electromagnetism encompasses much of modern technology. Its influence rests on our ability to deploy materials that can control the component electric and magnetic fields. A new class of materials has created some extraordinary possibilities such as a negative refractive index, and lenses whose resolution is limited only by the precision with which we can manufacture them. Cloaks have been designed and built that hide objects within them, but remain completely invisible to external observers. The new materials, named metamaterials, have properties determined as much by their internal physical structure as by their chemical composition and the radical new properties to which they give access promise to transform our ability to control much of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Arantxa URRETABIZKAIA
Literature

We must be doing something right in relation to the Basque language
Some of the best things ever to happen to our language occurred between the nineteen fifties and 1982. The first was the creation of the Basque-medium schools (ikastolas) and their rise in popularity; and the second was the unification of the language to form a single, standard version that is both widespread and deeply rooted in our society today. It is mainly thanks to these two achievements that we are in the situation we are in today.

Jean-Marie LEHN
Supramolecular  Chemistry
Towards Complex Matter: Chemistry ? Chemistry !
The evolution of the universe has generated more and more complex matter through self-organization, from particles up to living and thinking matter. Animate as well as inanimate matter, living organisms as well as materials, are formed of molecules and of the organized entities resulting from the interaction of molecules with each other. Chemistry provides the bridge between the molecules of inanimate matter and the highly complex molecular architectures and systems which make up living organisms. Synthetic chemistry has developed a very powerful set of methods for constructing ever more complex molecules. Supramolecular chemistry seeks to control the formation of molecular assembly by means of the interactions between the partners. The designed generation of organized architectures requires the handling of information at the molecular level in a sort of molecular programming, thus also linking chemistry with information science. The field of chemistry is the universe of all possible entities and transformations of molecular matter, of which those actually realized in nature represent just one world among all the worlds that await to be created !

Public Lectures

Victoria Eugenia, Donostia

Amand LUCAS
Physics

Niels Bohr, X-Rays and the Secret of Life

The discovery of Bohr’s atomic model in 1913 coincided with several other breakthroughs in physics, notably the discovery of diffraction of X-Rays by an atomic lattice which revealed their electromagnetic nature and lead to their use for the determination of atomic structures. The X-Ray diffraction method was soon applied to large biomolecules whose structure could hint at their function in life processes at the molecular level. With respect to the nature of life, Bohr defended strong vues, inspired from the quantum complementarity concept, which although influential in creating a research legacy, would not be upheld by later discoveries in biology. The search for bio-molecular structures and functions triumphed in 1953 with the discovery of the DNA double helix boldly characterized by J. Watson and F. Crick as the “Secret of Life”. I will explain just how X-Ray diffraction of DNA fibers, measured by M. Wilkins and R. Franklin, guided Crick and Watson to their great discovery. In view of making X-Ray fiber diffraction understandable to a lay audience, I will present optical diffraction experiments to demonstrate visually which structural characteristic of the DNA conformations corresponds to each major feature of their X-Ray images. By the time of Bohr’s death in 1962, a prosaic kind of chemical complementarity had been found to preside all over bio-molecular processes but had nothing in common with the complementarity envisaged by the great quantum creator.

Ginés MORATA
Genetic
Biology at the XXI Century
The second half of the XX century and the beginning of the XXI have witnessed very important discoveries in Biology. They represent the commencment of a new era in which biological Technologies may profoundly alter Human Society and even determine the biological future of the human species. The new methods of genetic manipulation and the access to the genome of many species have made possible to generate genetically modified organisms that are having a great impact in Farming, Stockbreeding and Medicine.  Further development and refinement of these methods will opne the possibility to genetically modify the human species

Victoria Eugenia

Theater

República Argentina, 2
Donostia-San Sebastián

Official website
GPS: 43.3225,-1.9803

Bizkaia Aretoa
 

Avenida Abandoibarra, 3
Bilbao

Official website
GPS: 43.2686,-2.9375

Bus

All the lines stop at Boulevard, located at 5 min from Victoria Eugenia Theater.

Vallina Tel: +34 943 40 40 40
Taxi Donostia Tel: +34 943 46 46 46