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News from ICTP 85 - Monitor
ICTP's visiting scientists and their family members can enjoy free bus tours of Trieste, thanks to the city's Tourism Promotion Board and the unflagging enthusiasm of Sergio Bradaschia, a retired Triestine shop owner who has helped organize the tours since their inception in 1992. This year, the number of tours has reached fourteen. Sites to be seen include Duino Castle and Rilke Path, wedged along the Adriatic Sea just northwest of the ICTP; Grotta Gigante (the Giant Cave), the world's largest single-room cave cut from the soft limestone of the Carso; the Sanctuary of Monte Grisa, the modern triangular church that sits atop the seacoast east of Barcola; plus the piazzas, monuments and churches that make Trieste one of the most intriguing in mid-sized cities in Europe.
CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, Switzerland, recently announced that the southern portion of Route Pauli, one of the facility's major crossroads, has been renamed Route Salam to honour the memory of ICTP's founding director. The road runs near the site of the Gargamelle bubble chamber where experimental physicists discovered "neutral currents" in 1973. The CERN discovery showed that the Salam-Weinberg-Glashow theoretical model corresponded to physical reality. The model successfully unified two of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force. In 1979, Abdus Salam, along with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their theory.
Viqar Husain, a young Pakistani physicist who was a postdoctoral student at the ICTP during the early 1990s, recently received the top award of US$2,500 from the Gravity Research Foundation for his essay, "Demise of the Cosmic Censor?" Each year, the USA-based Foundation awards this prize to a researcher for the best essay on the theory of gravitation. Husain currently works at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
On 26 May, 50 kindergarten children from Trieste, ages five and six, visited the Centre. They came here not only to see the facilities but to thank ICTP staff members for the computers that the Centre's Microprocessor Laboratory had donated to their school. The youngsters, accompanied by their teachers, walked through the Main Building, stopped at the Library and then spent about an hour at the Microprocessor Laboratory where they were treated to super-slow images created by the Laboratory's new video camera. The camera reduces motion to such slow speeds that they could see an insect's wings flap during flight.
John Fennessy, ICTP's new Chief, Administration, arrived at the Centre on June 1. He comes to Trieste via the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Lebanon, where he served as the Deputy Director for the past two years. The UNRWA in Lebanon has approximately 300,000 refugees in its care and employs about 2,500 staff members. Fennessy has worked as an administrator in the United Nations for more than 20 years.
