Forgot your password?
Document Actions
V EPS Forum Physics and Society
CERN, Switzerland 28-29 March 2012
Physicists in the marketplace: opportunities and threats
The fifth EPS Forum Physics and Society will take place in CERN, Geneva (2012). Previous meetings were held in Graz (2006), Zakopane (2007), Ratnieki (2009) and El Escorial (2010). The meetings have dealt with issues like science education, physics in schools, teacher training, ethics, innovation and communication.
The Forum will follow the same general pattern as the previous meetings. The first part of the meeting will be devoted to invited keynote contributions to define the issues of physicists in a global marketplace. The Forum will there split into groups to address the different aspects and draft reports. After the meeting the report will be edited for publication in Europhysics News and elsewhere and submitted to the EPS Board for further consideration.
The purpose of the meeting is to explore the challenges experienced by physicists who leave their field of study to pursue alternative careers in the marketplace outside teaching and university based research.
It is widely recognized, that a knowledge society is a prerequisite for growth. Value is only created if knowledge may be transformed into know-how and know-how-to-do. Today it is widely recognized that a society is unable to grow and sustain an advanced science system unless an equally advanced production is present.
Today production is off-shored to emerging economies in Asia and elsewhere where labour costs are more favourable. European physicists therefore have a choice to be smarter, work harder, work cheaper or move into other fields.
The EPS conference secretariat is handling the registration. More details, including programming, invited keynote speakers and conference fee will be available at the FPS homepage http://fps.epscommittees.org as well in the next issue of EPN. Please stay tuned.
Ove Poulsen, FPS Lead Convener