Meetings of minds

Abstract

Meetings can be the bane of a working life – but they can also be its lifeblood. The latter are the ones where you meet up with old colleagues and find new ones, where a chance remark starts off a new train of thought, or where you find a useful new tool, method or whole discipline. All these types of meetings feature in this issue, from the small groups of amateur and professional astronomers, through a focused discussion meeting of deep Earth specialists, to the major international meeting that was the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science at the University of Hertfordshire – notable for the buzz of enthusiasm running through the week. There’s a common thread to these groupings. They all involve specialists getting together and learning more. Whether it is amateur and professional observers working together to their mutual benefit, or mineral physicists, chemists and seismologists using different tools to understand the same obscure place, they share a purpose, and that’s to understand more about the natural world. The best way forward is generally agreed to be specialist working with specialist – the future is multidisciplinary. And if Science Minister Lord Drayson is to be believed, this is also a way to succeed in gaining research funding from an increasingly hard-up government and ultraefficient research councils. So it was indeed a coup to have the Minister speak at the EWASS meeting, and spend a surprising amount of time looking round at one of the most exciting, enjoyable and effective meetings this year. I just hope he noticed. Editorial NEws