“I wish you success during this conference. I have no doubt that your experience here will contribute to your professional and personal life and will help you to establish new contacts. I hope you will have a fruitful time here and that the friends you make here will stay with you for a lifetime,” said Vladimir Nikiforov, Vice Rector for Research, in his opening speech.
On the first day participants participated in three popular science lectures. Vladimir Vinogradov, head of International Laboratory “Solution Chemistry of Advanced Materials and Technologies” talked about nanochemical products that don`t harm human health or the environment. Alexander Khokhlov, famous space science popularizer and instrumentation engineer at Research Institute of Robotics and Cybernetics, commented on the current status of the space industry and benefits received by space researching. Those participants who were versed in advanced math enjoyed the lecture given by Egor Gurvitz, president of Optical Student Chapter of ITMO University who shared how to make objects invisible.
Mr. Vinogradov, who was the first speaker, talked about complicated nanochemical processes in simple words. First of all he mentioned the scale of materials researched by St. Petersburg scientists – the particles analyzed at the Laboratory are equivalent to atoms. Mr. Vinogradov also mentioned three projects conducted at ITMO University this year. These are an innovative chemical for firefighting consisting of quartz nanoparticles, which suppresses fire and prevents a material from further ignition; innovative ink made of nanocrystalline titania and also the coating for vascular grafts, which prevents thrombosis.
Alexander Khokhlov in his speech declared that soon enough people will no longer launch spacecrafts for researching celestial objects situated farther than the orbit of Mars. Relatively soon Cassini, Rosetta and Philae orbiters will complete their missions. It may provoke some kind of stagnation in the research process especially in the case of Jupiter Polar Orbiter which will not reach Jupiter and its satellites.
“Most of you who are seated in front of me were born when people stopped launching spacecraffts with spacemen farther than 400 kilometers above Earth. The previous generations made lots of plans to research space. They even developed many theories and ideas and there is nothing for us to do but put them into practice now. However man has not done it yet due to the lack of money,” noted Mr. Khokhlov.
The engineer also said that the two main reasons of this tendency are limited budgets and lack of officials who are interested in it. He was sure that development of modern technologies allows to organize a man-tended mission to Mars by 2026. It is also very important to convince governmental representatives to develop this track so as to explore extrasolar planets. Currently there are more and more enthusiastic people in Russia and other countries who make space research popular. That`s a very positive trend, supposes the expert.
Egor Gurvitz talked about how the idea of invisibility can be applied for the space-time continuum. Using complicated mathematical and physical formulas the researcher explained how the characters from Star Trek disappeared. According to Mr. Gurvitz parts of the environment need some time to change their position. However “space-time windows” are too small to hide something.
Apart from communicating with each other the young researchers will try to present their ideas to the public. The culmination of the Congress will be in several days, at the brain battle called ITMO University Science Slam. The audience will choose the most interesting and inspiring speeches on April 15.
