Solvay Conferences

The Solvay Conferences were a series of meetings of leading physicists and chemists, arising out of a successful first meeting of specially invited experts held in 1911. Ever since 1911, the Solvay Conferences have shaped modern physics and chemistry.

The people who attended these include scientists such as Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Henry Poincare, and Ernest Rutherford, with Niels Bohr, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Shrondinger also attending later conferences.

Sponsored by a wealthy Belgian industrialist and inventor, Ernest Solvay, the meetings were convened, originally largely at the instigation of Walther Nernst, to address the important question of how quantum physics could be reconciled with the main body of classical physics.

At the Solvay Conference, a conclave of Nobel laureates and other distinguished scientists actually talked to one another, with an enthusiasm.

Ernest Solvay (16 April 1838 – 26 May 1922) was Belgian chemist, industrialist and philanthropist who developed a cheap method of making soda ash. The International Solvay Institute for Physics was established by Ernest Solvay in 1912, in the wake of the first successful Solvay Conference of 2011. One important task of the Institute was to organize the subsequent Solvay Conferences.
Solvay Conferences

Ernest Solvay