Tuesday: Round table and general conference

A special session on Tuesday evening will be opened to a wider audience, beyond the ICAP delegates.

Round table

First, a round table chaired by Jean Dalibard and entitled "The emergence of a new field, 1985-1995: from atom cooling and trapping to Bose-Einstein condensation" will gather major actors of atomic physics in the last decades. It will be an opportunity to ask your questions to these great physicists. This event is sponsored by the Quie2t Coordination Action.

General conference on the Higgs boson

The round table will be followed by a general conference by Michel Spiro, president of the CERN Council, about the last exciting results at CERN. The title is: 'HIGGS Boson, LHC, CERN, projection towards the infinites'. See the abstract below.

 

Tuesday: Jazz evening

After these two conferences, all the delegates are invited to participate in a free jazz evening, with a concert and a buffet. Enjoy Guillaume Petite's jazz band!

 

Wednesday: Free afternoon

Wednesday afternoon is free. You are encouraged to take this time to visit Paris or its surroundings, unless you prefer to have a look to the IFRAF labs. Tourist information will be available at the conference desk.

At 18:30, we propose a trip on a "bateau-mouche", a 1:15 hour cruise on the Seine river through Paris. If you are interested, please sign in at the ICAP registration desk and enjoy! Participation is limited to 400 persons.

 

Thursday: Conference dinner

The conference dinner will take place on Thursday night, in a wonderful abbey in the South of Paris. You will have the opportunity to taste the famous French food and wines. Don't forget to register to take part in this event, for which a financial participation is asked.

 

Abstract of Michel Spiro's conference:

Particle physics combines chance (through quantum theory) and necessity (the laws of the Standard Model). At CERN, the European organisation for particle physics open to the world and now the world capital of particle physics, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produces billions of collisions, each one with its own specific individual characteristics, the apparent result of chance, whereas the examination of all these collisions will delineate the new laws of physics and new necessities.
The great story of the Universe from the Big Bang to the origins of life, the scientific adventure of the modern age, is also an uninterrupted sequence of conjunctions of chance (quantum) and necessity (laws). This subtle mixture of contingency or randomness and determinism invests all aspects of what we could today call scientific cosmogony.
Thus, the Higgs mechanism which starts to be studied at the LHC thanks to the recent discovery (the last results on the recent discovery will be presented) and which is the source of the phase transition that enabled particles to acquire mass when the primordial Universe cooled down, will make it possible to distinguish more clearly the roles played by chance and necessity in the origin of mass. Similarly, the discovery at the LHC of a new symmetry, supersymmetry (the last results on the search will also be presented), would improve our understanding of the role of randomness in the shaping of the Universe.
The LHC adventure is situated at the epistemological crossroads of knowledge, rich in potential discoveries, rich in technological breakthroughs and rich in an original template for world collaboration.