Europe's long term plans for cutting edge astronomy and cosmology research

[Nereid]

"Review of Cosmic Vision 2015-2025" begins: "The Cosmic Vision workshop at UNESCO on 15-16 September 2004 showed that Europe is richer than ever in ideas for what should be done in space science in the coming years. This workshop brought us a major step forward in developing the vision of the future for Europe’s space science that we expect to present next spring. That long-term vision will be the culmination of the third of the major planning exercises that have framed European space science over the past two decades since the Horizon 2000 exercise in 1983-4.[/color]"

151 proposals, three themes in each of three discipline groups:
"From the Astronomy Working Group:

Other worlds and life in the universe
The early Universe
The evolving violent universe

From the Fundamental Physics Advisory Group:

Toward quantum gravity
Beyond the standard model
The gravitational wave universe

From the Solar System Working Group:

From the Sun to the Earth and beyond
Tracing the origin of the solar system
Life and habitability in the solar system and beyond"

If you've got a broadband connection, you might like to download one or more of the PDF presentations from one or more themes; lots of really exciting stuff!

If there are any physicists reading this post, you too might like to read some of the presentations; perhaps many of the key advances in fundamental physics in the next half century will come from space-based experiments?

 

[turbo]

Can you point us to transcripts of the talks that accompany the slide-shows? The slides and bullet points are certainly encouraging to somebody who (for instance) already knows why it might be important to demonstrate that the equivalence principal can be broken at some level, but people who have not studied the mechanics of gravitation might skim past that with no real comprehension.

Thanks for the link, by the way. At the very least, I can mine the presentation for names of researchers and continue to plow through papers on CiteBase. I'd love to read the texts of the talks accomanying the slides, though!