Opening Session xvAnother striking paragraph in the text written in 1912 concerns the lifetime
of the Institutes, which was fixed to be 30 years. This rule reflects, I believe, the
optimism that prevailed at the time of the foundation of the Institute, that all
problems of physics would be solved after a finite amount of time.
We clearly deviate from this rule, and for good reasons. Science, like history,
is not finished. Today’s conference will not be a replay of the 1911 conference in
which we will reproduce, on the occasion of the international year of physics, the
discussions between Einstein, Lorentz and Marie Curie. No, we will be interested
in new questions, in new challenges, in new physics. These new questions can be
asked now thanks to the new knowledge gained by the discoveries made by our
predecessors and could not have been anticipated in 1911.
I am convinced that Ernest Solvay and Hendrik Lorentz would not be disap-
pointed in learning that the end of physics did not occur 30 years after the foun-
dation of the Institutes. They would share our excitement in trying to answer
the new questions that enlarge further our vision of the universe. They would be
delighted to see that the same enthusiasm and passion for understanding natural
phenomena animate today’s researchers as they inhabited the participants of the
1911 Conference.
*****
We can now start our work. I would like to thank all of you for your positiveanswer to our invitation and for being with us today. I would also like to thank the
rapporteurs, the session chairs and, of course, our conference chair David Gross, for
all the preparation work that went into this meeting. Finally, as you can see, we
have tried to arrange the conference room in a way that recalls the setting of the
early days.
Thank you very much for your attention.