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Two Nobel laureates had an online exchange with Tuoi Trereaders on Tuesday, with the participation of the director general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and a Vietnamese who is working for the US’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), as part of the 9thedition of the annual Meeting Vietnam conferences.

Professor Sheldon Lee Glashow (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979) and Professor George Smoot (Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006) answered questions on nurturing the love of science from the central city of Quy Nhon, where Meeting Vietnam is taking place and will last until August 17.

The exchange was also co-chaired by three other scientists, including Professor Rolf Heuer, CERN director general, Pham Quang Hung, a Vietnamese Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia, and Dr Nguyen Trong Hien, a Vietnamese astrophysicist who is the supervisor of NASA’s Astronomical Instrumentation Group.

First held in Hanoi 20 years ago, Meeting Vietnam 2013 features conferences on cosmology in the Planck era, general relativity and gravitation, the fundamentals and applications of nanophysics, and windows on the universe. 

Its agenda also includes classes in condensed matter physics and astrophysics, and seminars on teaching methodology for training college lecturers.

Meeting Vietnam is the brainchild of Vietnamese particle physicist Jean Tran Thanh Van, the third Asian to be given the prestigious John Torrence Tate Award, in 2011, for his international leadership in physics.

Below are several questions and answers selected from the exchange.

You must have dedicated all of your time to science in order to win the Nobel Prize. Would you please share with me your daily schedule? Do you have to be in the laboratory all the time? How do you juxtapose your love of science and that for your family? Have you sacrificed a lot when you go for research? (By Nhat Quang, a student at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Science)

Prof George Smoot: I work 16 hours a day. You should make smart choices and follow them until the end. Many people have achieved success thanks to their smartness and excellence but I choose diligence. There have been people who won the Nobel Prize and might work less than me because they are intelligent and chose the right topic at the right time, so they did not have to sacrifice much. But all of them dared to think and realize their big dreams.  

Take monks for instance. They love their family but they devote their life to their religion and society. The point here is choice. Everyone has their own choice. If you choose to do this task, you will have to spend less time on other work. Not everybody chooses the same pathway and is willing to dedicate their time and effort to follow it.

How did you find out new things and formulate such great theories? Could you Nobel laureates please tell me how to make scientific discoveries? (By Bao Tran, a high school student in Ho Chi Minh City)

Prof George Smoot: Expanding your knowledge by reading articles and works that have been published and then think of ideas before singling out which can be tested by experiments. Look for technological innovations in other areas and apply them to physics. The most important thing is prepare yourself by improving knowledge in case there is an opportunity to use it.

I am a girl and I am passionate about science. Could you Nobel laureates please let me know if you have female colleagues? Do female scientists suffer any disadvantage when they choose research as their career? (By two high school students)

Prof Rolf Heuer: In my opinion, it is very important that we have female scientists. At CERN, 15 to 25 percent of the researchers are women. However, we expect even more than that because many areas of research well suit women.

Prof Sheldon Lee Glashow: About twenty percent of the students are females at my university [Boston University] and Prof George Smoot’a [University of California, Berkeley]. In the US, people proactively support female scientists, for example two former deans of the physics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley are women. There have been efforts to help female scientists in the US because they think the number of female scientists is still small compared to that of their male counterparts.  

How do you come up with solutions to problems you or others do not know when you are doing research? I believe that it may require intuition and some special imagination. (By Tran Phuong Trang, 20, from the email address ganuong45@...)

Dr Nguyen Trong Hien: We have different solutions to different problems. I am an experimentalist so I opt for solutions that are different from theorists’. If intuition and imagination can solve problems, that would be great.

Hi Prof Hung. I am sure that you have been to laboratories in Vietnam. Can you please share your views on the difficulty you think our nation is facing? (By Ha Phuong Dung, 32)

Prof Pham Quang Hung: I have been to materials science labs at the Hanoi Academy of Science and Technology. I think they are pretty well equipped. Of course that is simply my opinion, as materials science is not my research discipline. My specialization is particle physics and since there is not any lab for this field in Vietnam, I hope that the government will provide funds to set up several particle physics labs in the future.  

As far as I have known, there are several PhD students doing research at CERN. How do you think about their capability? In general, will Vietnamese experts be able to stay and advance their career at CERN? (By a college student in Ho Chi Minh City)

Prof Rolf Heuer: 15,000 scientists are working at CERN, six of whom are young Vietnamese. They come there to work and research via institutes in France and Germany. I have yet to meet them in person so I cannot judge their performance. But they must be very good researchers as they were recommended by famous French and German research institutes.  

Would you please tell me how your day at work at NASA is, Dr Hien? If you had to give a piece of advice to young Vietnamese who want to do research like you, what would that be? (By Ha Phuong Dung, 32, from the email address nhatphuong@...)

Dr Nguyen Trong Hien: My day at work is normal but no two days are alike. Sometimes, I teach, sometimes I attend meetings to approve projects, and I also manage research work at the physics division at NASA. But my main job is creating astronomical instruments, analyzing data, and test these instruments.

My advice would be young Vietnamese you should improve their knowledge every day and go for their passions. For opportunities, they may come late but once we can do many things we like and we have the ability to do them, we will be able to perform very many tasks in different areas, not limited to any specific matter.

How many percent of success in science come from the research environment? And from our own will and passion? (By Tran Manh Cuong, a student at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology)

Prof Pham Quang Hung: The research environment, will, and passion equally count. But one thing we should have is passion. In the Vietnamese context, it is very hard for local researchers to attain success even though Vietnam is trying to create every good condition for scientific research. But it has not arrived there yet.