There are conferences about almost any topic in the world during the year. They are promoted as opportunities for a broad kind of audience, such as academics, engineers and researchers, to present and learn about the status and trends in selected topics. The conferences offer the space for networking of the attendees-speakers, which means the opportunity to have knowledge exchange at different levels of interest.
The attendees usually comment about the conferences referring to satisfaction, finding what they were seeking or their perception of the event. However, talking about the relevance and persistence of some addressed subjects is not common because that is something that can be evaluated only in the future. We can see what some famous conferences did so in accordance with modern times, we could incorporate it as part of the best practices now. I think it is worth, at least as general culture, to take a couple of those conferences for pondering about such practices.
One of the events that I selected is the First Congress of Chemists held in Karlsruhe in 1860, which I described some time ago (Aguilar-Garib, Citation2019). That meeting had a well-defined aim which can be understood with a quote attributed to Robert Bunsen ‘A chemist who is not a physicist is nothing at all’, showing that the intention of the conference was not only to share ideas and experiences, but reach to conclusions on having a branch of the chemistry devoted to finding general laws of the chemical phenomena as in physics. Among the about 100 attendees, there were scientists that contributed knowledge such as the carbon weight, benzene structure, periodic table of elements, photochemistry, crystal physics, isotopes and isolation of some elements. Adolf von Baeyer, one of the attendees, became a Nobel Prize awarded. The deliberations headed by Cannizaro that continued after the meeting are probably the most important achievements of this congress.
The second choice is a conference that was attended by people whose research led to the basic science that was taken for impressive applications, it is the Fifth Solvay Conference on Electrons and Photons, held in 1927 in Brussels. There were 29 attendees, 17 of them were or became Nobel winners. Their contributions are well known: quantum mechanics, the surface tension of mixtures, Schrödinger equation, Pauli exclusion principle, Heisenberg uncertainty principle, solid state physics, surface chemistry, x-ray crystallography, photoelectric effect, Bohr model and thermionic emission. There is a reference to the discussion held at the conference (VI. General Discussion at the Fifth Solvay Conference 1985) with remarks by Einstein, Dirac and Heisenberg. The development of the quantum theory could be taken as evidence of the many questions that remain unanswered by the end of the conference, which at the same time were the inspiration for future work still in progress.
These two conferences have in common that both were aimed at more than sharing experiences, they had at least one session devoted to debate, leaving a record of said discussion. The discussion was not forced to be conclusive, allowing further controversy. Long after the meeting ended, the argumentation about several points continued, so that the meeting was still in the mind of the attendees. Given the advances in communication, further discussion was mostly epistolary, giving the chance of having written material and sketches. Attendees of these conferences were also authors of several journal papers with the necessary details to reproduce experiments, discuss the results and validate the strength of the conclusion.
There are many conferences that consist of delivering talks by experts and have a short questions and answers session afterwards. Sometimes that session is too short, so quick comments are given instead of full answers. Despite the opportunity for having long conversations out of the sessions, such knowledge exchange is not available to everybody. There are no rapporteurs of the sessions accounting for the discussion, if any, held in the question and answers session. There are panels, but no special sessions for discussion only. The proceedings consist of short papers of no more than four pages long with basic details, far from the level of a journal paper.
Conferences are already productive for the attendees and that is the reason they are willing to travel, prepare material, be in exhibitions, and network, including at a social level. In the case of people fascinated on the topics of a conference that they did not attend; I suppose that they would be delighted having a proceedings book that includes a report of the sessions or comments regarding the aim and achievements of the conference.
Building excellent conferences requires a combination of speakers, attendees, and topics. Moreover, having transcendental conferences demands other activities such as those performed by events that became famous: debating the concepts and ideas presented, as well as the written record, available today through modern media. Some practices followed by those conferences were highlighted here with remarks that probably will not be provided by feedback questionnaires.
Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Facultad de Ingeniería Mecánica y Eléctrica, San Nicolás de los Garza, NL, Mexico
References
- Aguilar-Garib JA. 2019. Editor’s message: Global meetings and the international year of the periodic table of chemical elements. J Microw Power Electromagn Energy. 53(2):67–68.
- VI. General Discussion at the Fifth Solvay Conference. 1985. Unpublished Manuscript From Folder Labelled Notes From Solvay Meeting (1927), Editor(s): Jørgen Kalckar, Niels Bohr Collected Works, Elsevier, Vol. 6, p. 99–106.. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876050308703323).