1. Hermann Staudinger Lecture

Nobelpreisträger Douglas Osheroff (Stanford University)

For the first Hermann Staudinger Lecture, on Friday, June 27th 2008, the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS) welcomed a world-renowned physicist, Douglas D. Osheroff of Stanford University, Departments of Physics and Applied Physics. In 1996 Osheroff was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics with David Lee and Robert C. Richardson for discovering the superfluidic nature of 3He. This discovery was made in 1971 while Osheroff was a graduate at Cornell University.

In the focus of Osheroff’s talk were discoveries and advances in science at large. By their very nature, those discoveries that most change the way we think about nature cannot be anticipated. How, then, are such discoveries made, and are there research strategies which can increase the probability of making such a discovery?