Annual Report 2007

Throughout 2007, the committee of the SPS was busy with the preparatory work for the centennial of the society to be celebrated in 2008. Besides the organisation of the ceremonial act, that will take place in Bern the 27th June 2008, the walk through the archives turned out to be a quite difficult task. The past committees didn’t pay attention to the society’s archives and therefore the reconstruction of the first century of SPS was very demanding. Fortunately, Alessandra Hool, a historian of science from the University of Bern, chose this task for her diploma thesis and brought light into the dark. She searched a variety of Swiss archives in order to find all necessary puzzle pieces that were relevant for the creation of the Swiss Physical Society in 1908 and its evolution in the twentieth century. The result will be presented in terms of a printed book in 2008.

The Society’s most important event in 2007 was the annual meeting at the Uni Irchel in Zurich. Besides the traditional sessions, a variety of topical session has been presented. The session on Physics and Medicine attracted quite a few new clients. The first session on Physics in Industry as well as the topical sessions on Computational Physics and Challenges of Future Energies, respectively, were successful and rounded out the scientific program. The meeting attracted more than 400 participants. More than hundred people even joined the conference dinner and the visit of the most valuable archives of the ETH library.

In September, the SPS contributed a half-day session to the Annual Congress of the Academy of Sciences, dedicated to the Tercentenary of the mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler. The congress was organised by our colleagues of the Swiss Mathematical Society and held in Basel, where Euler was born.

Right before the call for papers for the annual meeting 2008 in Geneva, the new SPS website has been started up. The new website is more concise and much easier to manage than the old one. With the website, the committee wants to gain more transparency and flexibility. It is planned to offer more functionality to our members in terms of online services. As an initiation, the online conference registration tool has been integrated into the new web system. By the end of 2008, the SPS website will be completely trilingual.

The preparatory work for the annual meeting in Geneva has been started already some time ago. We hope to present another interesting and fruitful meeting in March 2008 with the participation of the three NCCRs on Nano, MaNEP and Quantum Photonics. Regarding the annual meeting 2009, we approached our eastern neighbours. We are planning to hold the 2009 conference together with the Austrian Physical Society in spring 2009. First of all, however, we have to put through the Centenary in 2008.

Tibor Gyalog, Januar 2008