{"id":11734,"date":"2021-05-20T09:27:37","date_gmt":"2021-05-20T08:27:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/?p=11734"},"modified":"2021-06-04T12:02:03","modified_gmt":"2021-06-04T11:02:03","slug":"uniting-the-world-with-greater-understanding-of-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/uniting-the-world-with-greater-understanding-of-the-universe\/11734\/","title":{"rendered":"Uniting the world with greater understanding of the Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"
I was once invited to speak at the United Nations headquarters in New York about the power of science to unite people and nations.1<\/sup>\u00a0I started my speech with stories about my father who fled Russian invasion when the Japanese occupation of Korea ended after the WWII, my childhood experience growing up in then-divided Germany visiting the mine field behind the Berlin Wall, and my professional experience working with Berkeley students from around the world who survived bombing or fled the home countries as refugees.<\/p>\n I also used examples of successful international scientific organisations such as CERN<\/a>, which is now an observer of the UN General Assembly, and a recent amazing success about launching the SESAME synchrotron radiation laboratory<\/a> in Jordan based on the treaty signed by Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, Palestine, and Turkey for research in materials science, medicine, biology, and even archaeology.<\/p>\n I finally discussed an international research centre I founded in Japan which hosted scientists from more than 35 countries in less than 10 years of history. I named it the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU<\/a>). I told the UN delegates that I picked this name to make it clear that anybody is welcome irrespective of their origins, as long as the individual wants to devote time to uncover physics and mathematics of the Universe, and it is about time that we will start receiving job applications from other planets.<\/p>\n Here I would like to describe another example of my endeavour to build an international team to pursue basic questions anybody in the Universe must have wondered: How did we come to be? What is the fate of the Universe? How was our home \u2013 the Solar System and the Milky Way galaxy \u2013 formed from gas and dust? The project is called the Prime Focus Spectrograph<\/a> for the Subaru telescope.2<\/sup>\u00a0Now more than a hundred scientists from Japan, US, Brazil, Taiwan, China, France, and Germany are working together. The cost of the project is about $90M, and they all chip in their share of costs, expertise, and people. It is a very collegial collaboration with a clear common goal. Kavli IPMU is the lead institution for and manages the project.<\/p>\n