Max-von-Laue-Festakt

Max von Laue would have been a real pleasure to be here today to experience what has become of his discovery of the century and what breathtaking possibilities he opened in discipline-wide research of matter 100 years ago. Petra Dreyer and Max von Laue, in other words, fit together excellently and we would not have been able to find a better divination partner today than the highest physicist in our country, our Federal Chancellor, Ms. Dr. Merkel, one of the world's most renowned biochemists, Ada Jonath from Israel, and the first mayor of our beautiful city, who legally abides by the nomenclature. A world-wide unique structural research center is currently being built on the Science Campus Hamburg-Bahnfeld. The University of Hamburg, the Helmholtz Center, DESY, Max Planck, Max Planck Arbeitsgruppen, and other non-university partners. A unique wide spectrum of light sources offers a research infrastructure that is world-leading. This is flanked by two large new research centers. On the one hand, the Center for Free Electron Laser Science, a cooperation between DESY, the Max Planck Society, and the University of Hamburg. The three partner institutions combine their expertise in the research of structural changes in atoms, molecules, condensed matter, melting, and biological systems. With the founding of a Center for Structural and Systems Biology, three top-of-the-range research fields, structural research, system biology, and infectious research, are to be bundled under one roof. The goal is to use the synchrotron radiation sources at DESY for the life sciences. The combination of disciplines, physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine, as well as the planned collaboration of institutions from the northern German area, are unique in the biomedical basic research. In the early stages, DESY already wrote history with Petra. Over 30 years ago, researchers discovered the gluon with the facility. This is the so-called adhesive that holds the atomic nucleus and thus the world together in the innermost. In the history of DESY, one thing stands out above all else. Here, the researchers understand the use of large devices for important questions of humanity and thus for the benefit of each individual person. Their foresight is also the basis for the success of Petra 3. Certainly, as in the days of Max von Laue, this is still true today. Science lives mainly on the inescapable urge for knowledge of individual research personalities. But today, scientists are more than ever dependent on cooperation, because the experiments have become more complex, more complex, and more expensive. And that is why researchers from various disciplines and nations work together and use the synergies. Interdisciplinarity and internationalism have also crystallized as essential success factors here at DESY. Over 3,000 guest researchers from more than 40 nations at DESY speak a clear language every year. And what international projects can achieve, the current discoveries at the European Nuclear Research Centre CERN, for example, in Geneva, show us. And many of us ask themselves with excitement, will the recently found particle end the almost 50-year search for the Higgs boson and thus close the missing gap of our standard model? But I am quite certain that even if these questions are answered, new ones will happily emerge. But answers to all these questions complement our worldview on the one hand, but they also form the groundwork for the technologies and innovations of tomorrow. And they set the path for progress in economy and society. And that is of course of utmost importance for a relatively low-raw material industry nation like Germany. That is why we need basic research. It is elementary for us. So, are you ready? Are you ready? Four hands. And we'll start with Lauer. Three, two, one. Lauer.