| Published in : Article Written by Ana Galarraga on 2009-09-29 11:04 |
The nanotechnology congress has begun. Where? At the Kursaal conference centre in Donostia-San Sebastian. What is more, it has a great title: Atom by Atom . So as it is being held right here, and as we found the name attractive, we headed off to see what the opening ceremony was like and to listen to the speakers. In particular, to Kroto, Sir Harold Kroto.
But before him the two main organisers of the congress spoke first. One was José María Pitarke, the Director of CIC nanoGUNE, and the other, Pedro Miguel Etxenike, the Head of the Donostia International Physics Center. We have picked out a sentence from each of their speeches:
Pitarke: "Have a great time with science"
Etxenike: "With Atom by atom we are aiming to arouse people's passions".
Patxi Lopez, the President of the Basque Autonomous Community, also gave a speech, and after that Harold Kroto was called upon to speak. Kroto was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996, together with F. Curl and R. Smalley for discovering the fullerene. But we would give him a prize for the best speech of the evening. It was not only full, but amusing.
Among other things he confessed to us that as a child he wanted to be Superman, but he realised that Clint Eastwood was right: that a person had to be aware of his or limitations. Having been involved in graphic design for many years, he compared art with science, because both need creativity. And something he highlighted was that the image we have of scientists was incorrect: not all scientists are old men with greying hair wearing white coats; for example, Einstein was only 30 when he came up with the theory of relativity!
Kroto had many other interesting things to say, and afterwards lots of people went up hoping to appear in a photo beside him. And they managed to do so. From day one Harold Kroto, the "science festival star", has shown us that he is much nicer that some of the film festival stars.
| Keywords : Nanotechnology, prizes | ||||||||
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