2017 Meeting of the World Science Forum

Roy Jerome (Jerry) Peterson 2018 FIP Chair

The World Science Forum was formed in 1999, with its origins in a meeting called by UNESCO in Budapest, Hungary. This Forum met on November 7-11, 2017, in Jordan, at a conference center near the Dead Sea, advertised as the lowest place on earth. The theme of this meeting was ‘A Forum on the Social and Economic Relevance, Influence and Responsibilities of Science’. This Forum was hosted by the Royal Scientific Society of Jordan, and included an impressive array of sponsors and speakers, including Jordanian royalty. See WorldScienceForum.org for many more details.

The WSF is an advocate for science in general, with an emphasis on the advantages of science for development. The assembly passed an ambitious Declaration (worldscienceforum.org/contents/declaration-of-world-science-forum-2017-110045), emphasizing water, energy, and food. Our field of physics certainly has at least some relevance to these issues, most strongly in the broad field of providing energy. This Declaration also called for the creation of a new Arab Science Forum. I suggest that FIP offer its assistance to this group, once the idea gets underway. I will seek some names and contacts for possible cooperation.

There were over 900 attendees at the November 2017 WSF meeting, from over 100 counties. I counted about 60 attendees from the USA from the posted list of attendees.

At this November meeting, major UNESCO awards were awarded. The UNESCO Kalinga prize for the popularization of science was given to Erik Jacquemyn of Belgium, and the UNESCO Sultan Qaboos Prize for Environmental Preservation was given to the National Parks Board of Singapore.

The next meeting of this World Science forum is expected in 2019, but there is no site selected as yet.

Jerry Peterson is a professor of physics at the University of Colorado and was a Jefferson Science Fellow for the U.S. Department of State. After receiving his undergraduate (1961) and graduate (1966) degrees in Physics at the University of Washington, he was an instructor at Princeton University and on the research faculty at Yale University. Jerry’s research interests have covered many arenas of nuclear physics, including nuclear astrophysics, nuclear reactions, nuclear fission, and applications of nuclear reactions to computer memory elements.

Jerry worked as an analyst in the Office of Economic Analysis of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, where he focused on energy and the environment with an emphasis on coal and nuclear energy.