Gravitational Waves: From Cosmology to Black Holes

The First Solvay Conference on Physics took place in 1911 at the Metropole Hotel in Brussels. It was followed by 55 other Solvay Conferences on Physics and Chemistry. As it is well known, these played a crucial role in the development of modern science.

 The particular feature of the Solvay Conferences is that discussions are central. The format designed by Lorentz, with few «rapporteur reports» followed by intense discussions is still adopted today as it favours scientific interactions among the participants. The reports are normally circulated before the meeting. Participants do not come to Solvay conferences to present a talk, but rather to take an active part in the discussions. Both reports and discussions are published in the proceedings.

The famous 1927 Conference «Electrons and photons» is exemplary from this point of view. The meeting lasted 6 days. There were only 5 reports by W.L. Bragg, Compton, de Broglie, Born-Heisenberg, and Schrödinger. The rest of the time was devoted to discussions, in which the other 24 participants (among whom were Bohr, Mme Curie, Dirac, Einstein, Kramers, Lorentz, Planck, to name a few) were extremely involved. [The proceedings also contain a report by Bohr, but this report was only written for the proceedings and not presented at the conference. ]

The 30th Solvay conference will therefore emphasize open discussions over presentations and will be divided in five half-day sessions:

• Testing and Using General Relativity
• Gravitational Waves from the Early Universe
• The Physics of Nuclear Matter from Neutron Star Mergers 
• The Provenance of Binaries and Gravitational Wave Backgrounds
• Future Opportunities in Gravitational-Wave Physics, Cosmology and Astrophysics

Participants are requested to attend the full conference, arriving no later than the evening of Wednesday 21 October and departing no earlier than Saturday 24 October after 6:30 p.m.