My Walk to the 15. International Vienna Congress [Week Two of Six Week Health Challenge]

Again my thanks to @sweetsssj and @healthsquared for the challenge.
My todays walk was 5 km total, with an tremendous interesting event between the walks.

This famous coffee house had an appearance in the TV show Grimm and the Movie A Dangerous Method, starring the lovely Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, patient and affair of Viggor Mortensen as Sigmund Freud.

Cafe Sperl, luminary of the Viennese coffeehouse culture

First I traversed the Gumpendorfer Street

the moon is haunting me even at daytime

Then I took a shortcut through the Viennese Nosh Market

the first stalls open its gates

Passing the Art Hall Vienna with exclusive cuisine by heuer and a small disco.

food for your stomach, movement for your legs

Far on the horizon you can see the St. Stephen’s Cathedral

sad roads

A short wait before crossing to ...

modern Viennese low-floor tramway

... the Otto Wagner Pavilion by the famous Austrian urban planer of the same name

at the lower floor there used to be parties at my time

Next I crossed the quite big Ressel Park..

one of the more infamous parks in Vienna

... landing in front of the Charles Church

the most outstanding relict from the baroque time

Passing some random art installations

art in public space merely

a base jumper?

Passing Viennas most famous fountain

in the summer the water shoots sky high, lightened with beautiful colors

A turn at the french ambassy

diplomatic matters

I ended up in the House of Industry, attending the 15 Viennese Congress discussing the future of Europe. A famous bonmot by Charles Joseph de Ligne in the 19th century was “The Congress dances, and nothing gets achieved”, criticising that the politicians were more interested in balls and wine. Nowadays they dance with words.

Emperor Franz Joseph

Nigel Farage, member of the european parlament and Václav Klaus, former president of the Czech Republic caused split reactions on their views, part aplause and part booing, i had a blast :)

buzz phrases where united in diversity, advantages of brexit for competition, EU as cause for rise in nationalism

At lunch I had an Apfelstrudel, a Viennese speciality.

Austrian pastry

Second half of the event Dan Shechtman, nobel prize laureate in chemistry, talked about his attention to detail, when his father gifted him a magnifying glas and he observed every flower, then upgraded to a microscope, then to an electromicroscope, and that all parent should buy their children a threedimensional microscope.

third from left is Dan Shechtman, nobel prise laureate in chemistry

Jerome Isaac Friedman, nobel prize laureate in physics, said that the most important thing as a scientist is curiosity and that companies only invest in results in the unforseable future to please the shareholders and that politicians don’t like the word curiosity at all and tell them to rephrase it.
According to him and Sir Tim Hunt, nobel prize laureate in physiology or medicine, the best inventions were discovered by chance. Sir Tim Hunt recommend the book The Cunning of Uncertainty by Helga Nowotny

They also criticized the EU for funding projects with innovation potential as there is no such thing and the importance of funding basic science.
As example there was mentioned that the only company who emploed scientists and didn’t kill their creativity by letting them do whatever they wanted was Bell Labs (and Phillips according to Sierd Cloetingh, president of academia europaea) and since the invention of the transistor there, there were no true discoveries anymore, only evolution like microprocessors and confirmations like gravitational waves through the general theory of relativity.

Silicon Fen was mentioned as Europes Silicon Valley.

All the scientists were clearly against the idea of the goverment encouraging people to start a career as an entrepreneur with the argument that science is about sharing secrets while entrepreneurs keep secrets and therefore there is no true inovation possible. Sierd Cloetingh, president of academia europaea said that inovation in Europe started with the fall of the berlin wall.

Sazo Tomazic, professor of electrical engineering university of Ljubljana had an interesting point in that revenue grows logarithmically in relation to economy and compared that to an electric feedback loop which eventually burns out and that the only solution is to keep growth rate at zero and improve the quality of the economy.

Later on i had the pleasure to attain to a discussion of the three nobel price laureates Dan Shechtman, Jerome Isaac Friedman and Sir Tim Hunt sitting 1 meter in front of them.

As Dan Shechtman asked for a better funding system, i proposed decentralized proof of stake. I tried my best to explain, one attendant in the crowd at least knew bitcoin, and the moderator understood it as crowdfunding.
And despite the talk about curiosity, they neglected the idea, Jerome Isaac Friedman stated that the risk would be too high as results weren’t guaranteed. They couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea, that their high quality ideas, theories and thoughts, no matter how false, would actually be the result. All looked at me as I was talking about some fringe technology, I was so embarassed :)

Guys, we are not even the 1%, we are the 0.1%, so keep posting, learn and improve quality, as we learned, quality can allways improve, but growth is not forever.

Link to the event com.sult