On 23 May 2019, the Belgian Physical Society, the European Physical Society, and the sister-universities UCLouvain and KU Leuven will celebrate the person and the work of Monsignor Georges Lemaître (1894-1966), who was a professor at the yet undivided University of Louvain, and the original founder of the theory of the Big Bang.
For the development of a new and highly efficient scenario for heating of fusion plasmas using Ion Cyclotron Resonant Heating (ICRH), the joint team consisting of Yevgen Kazakov and Jef Ongena, from the Laboratory for Plasma Physics of the Royal Military Academy (Brussels, Belgium) and John Wright and Steven Wuktich from the Plasma Science and Fusion Centre at MIT (Boston, USA) was awarded last July the prestigious Landau-Spitzer Award.
The May 2016 issue of the journal Nature Physics features an ‘Insight’ on nuclear fusion — a collection of commissioned Commentaries and Reviews highlighting various aspects of fusion science, from the basic physics involved to the practical difficulties ahead.
On 24 October 2015, the European Physical Society [EPS], the Belgian Physical Society [BPS, short for ‘Belgische Natuurkundige Vereniging – Société Belge de Physique’] and the International Solvay Institutes [ISI] honoured the Hotel Metropole in Brussels as EPS Historic Site. At the initiative of Ernest Solvay, the Hotel Metropole hosted in 1911 the first Solvay Council where the foundations of Quantum Physics where laid. A commemorative plaque was unveiled in the lobby of the hotel by the President of the EPS, Christophe Rossel, and the President of BPS, Jef Ongena, following an academic session attended by 80 participants.