Welcome to the Belgian Physical Society
As a national physical society, and member of the European Physical Society, our goal is to promote physics and support physicists. For this purpose, we organise a range of activities and membership benefits.
On these pages you will find information about membership, and about the BPS general meeting. Also archived issued of B-Phy, our electronic magazine, can be downloaded, and there is a job section for those of you seeking employment.
Flanders, Belgium and CERN
November 30th 2018
Palace of the Academies, Brussels
Symposium led by Walter Van Doninck - former Vice President of the CERN Council and Thinker-in-Residence at the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (KVAB).
CERN is a role model for international scientific research in Europe and beyond. This symposium will offer both a general introduction to CERN as well as a Belgian and Flemish perspective. What is the legacy of CERN for mankind? What is its scientific and industrial return for Belgium? What discoveries and technological improvements await in the future? National and international scientists reflect during the symposium resulting from the KVAB Thinkers' Programme "Flanders, Belgium and CERN" with Walter Van Doninck.
Participation is free of charge but please register in advance for this full day symposium that includes coffee breaks, lunch and reception.
Registration link:
http://www.kvab.be/registratie/?eventid=68&_=popup...
2019 Colloquium of BNCPAP
This is the first announcement for the 2019 Colloquium on
Quantum Information: the second Quantum revolution?
organised by the Belgian National Committee for Pure and Applied Physics (https://sites.google.com/site/physbel).
Please mark the date and venue in your agenda: March 30, 2019 at the Royal Academy.
BOOK OF THE MONTH - October 2018
“Quantum Sense and Nonsense†by Jean Bricmont
Springer Verlag
Available as e-Book or softcover
Quantum Sense and Nonsense goes into the meaning of quantum physics in considerable depth … .
If you want to get a distinctly different picture of quantum physics
and an understanding of why, even after 80-90 years, physicists may be happy with the results of the calculations … .
Topics like determinism, the “role of the observer†and nonlocality are dealt with in didactic and
accessible way to all, with a minimum of mathematics.
Highly recommended to students, teachers and everybody interested in a cornerstone of
modern physics.
Excerpt from the Preface:
"There are many mysteries in contemporary physics, and some of them have
been around for almost a century: What does quantum mechanics mean?
What does it say about the world and about our place in it?
Those mysteries have been used ...
APS Landau-Spitzer Award 2018 to a Belgian team !
For the development of the new highly efficient 3-ion heating scenario for Ion Cyclotron Resonant Heating (ICRH), the American Physical Society (APS) awarded the joint team consisting of members of LPP/ERM-KMS and of the Alcator C-Mod group at MIT, with the prestigious Landau-Spitzer Award "for experimental verification, through collaborative experiments, of a novel and highly efficient ion cyclotron resonance heating scenario for plasma heating and generation of energetic ions in magnetic fusion devices."
To show experimentally that the theoretically derived new ICRH scenario is indeed very efficient is the work of Yevgen Kazakov and Jef Ongena of LPP/ERM-KMS. First experimental successes were achieved in October 2015 on the tokamak Alcator C-Mod in collaboration with John Wright and Stephen Wukitch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Plasma Science and Fusion Cente...