After a very competitive 6-month application process, Jake Horder was selected by the Australian Academy of Science to be among the 10 promising young Australian scientists to attend the Lindau Meeting of Physics Nobel Prize laureates in Lindau, Germany. This meeting happens only once every four years, providing Jake with a unique opportunity to engage one-on-one with the biggest names in the field. 

Read Jake’s detailed recount of his Lindau Meeting experience, from networking with Nobel Laureates to visiting renowned labs across Europe and delving deeper into the field of quantum optics.

The Lindau Meeting was one week out of a larger trip through Germany and Hungary, attending conferences and visiting labs of collaborators. It was an intense 5 weeks of networking and learning, and I wrapped it up with some time in the Alps which was also fantastic.

I spent two months in Europe, first attending conferences and visiting labs in Germany and Hungary, and finishing up with time in the Alps and Tatra Mountains. In between all that I spent an amazing week in Lindau, southern Germany, among 30 Physics Nobel Laureates and around 500 of the brightest young scientists in the world. The Lindau Meeting is a unique opportunity for emerging researchers to connect with some of the biggest names in the field, and to talk candidly and in a casual setting about their lives inside and outside of science. I was honoured to be selected among the Australian delegation, and the success of my application was in no small part due to the support of my team at UTS and TMOS. 

This may sound obvious but my lasting impression from the meeting is that the Laureates are mostly normal people like anyone else, and although I had kind of anticipated that, the exact type of normalcy I saw was a bit unexpected. Really the only thing in common among the Laureates is their passion for their work – in all other respects, they are just as varied in thought and behaviour as any random group of people. It was very helpful to meet personally the people behind the Prize, and not just the image you develop of the persona from reading about their achievements and impact. 

It was also a reminder that progress and innovation in physics are not possible alone. Working in groups, and across groups, is essential, and seeing the Laureates communicate in casual conversation it was clear that having the Nobel Prize on your CV is not enough to get your research out there – things happen when individuals talk together, and here the real currency is personability, humility, humour, soft leadership, encouragement. I think my experience at the meeting has given me a new perspective on the real image of a Nobel Prize winner that I ought to be looking up to. It is a much more grounded and honest image, and in that way, it is much more emulatable.

I especially enjoyed hearing from Alain Aspect, who did influential work in my field of quantum optics several decades ago. He was surprisingly blunt and honest about his interpretation of the results seen in entanglement experiments, essentially saying that the results confirmed what the theory predicted, but he didn’t have any strong opinion on what physically happens. In fact, he was far more interested in the technological and eventual commercial applications of his discovery. I found this very motivating since I also have many deep philosophical questions about quantum mechanics but I also have a desire to transform our control of quantum systems into commercial products. So chatting with Alain I saw that he had made that trade off and was still very excited about his work – he had given up trying to understand exactly how the quantum world works and had instead dived into helping build the quantum technology industry.