March 12, 2016

The Astro-GR Meetings

Past, present and future

  1. Astro-GR@AEI (2006)
  2. Astro-GR@Como (2008)
  3. Astro-GR@AEI #2 (2008)Pau_Blackboard
  4. Astro-GR@Barcelona (2009)
  5. Astro-GR@Paris (2010)
  6. Astro-GR@Mallorca (2011)
  7. Astro-GR@Beijing (2012)
  8. Astro-GR@Atlanta (2013)
  9. Astro-GR@Rome (2014)
  10. Astro-GR@São Paulo (2015)
  11. Astro-GR@Benasque (2016)
  12. Astro-GR@Barcelona (2017)
  13. Astro-GR@Barcelona (2018)

The original idea of the meetings

I came in 2005 to the idea of organising a meeting which brought together scientists working on different fields related to theoretical and observational astrophysics and relativity researchers.

 

I was inspired by the informal meetings of Modest, which have a format that I think is good to follow.
As we say,

“MODEST is a loosely knit initiative of various groups working in stellar dynamics, stellar evolution, and stellar hydrodynamics.”

I wanted the same. And it seems I discovered a gap which had to be filled in, because it proved to be very fruitful.

To sum up, “Astro-GR@X” represents a series of meetings which take place at X.

The workshop aims to bring together theoretical and observational astrophysicists, cosmologists and relativists, with the goal of building new collaborative relationships -as well as strengthening existing ones.

The Five Golden Rules of Astro-GR

are to…

  1. Bring together theoretical and observational astrophysicists, cosmologists, and relativists
  2. Motivate new collaborations and projects
  3. Be run in the style of Aspen/ITP/Newton Institute/Modest meetings, with plenty of time for discussions
  4. Grant access to the slides in a cross-platform format, as e.g. pdf or odt and, within reason, to the recorded movies of the talks (in a free format which everybody can play, i.e. ogg) for those who could not attend, following the good principles of open access (read also the “Berlin Declaration” also, to get an idea of what I mean to do) And, of course:
  5. Apply the KISS principle (Keep It Simple and… Spontaneous):

it’s informal
it’s informal
repeat last item 10 times
recite aloud and backwards the Glagolitic alphabet five times
breathe deeply and, being zen, say again: “it’s (oooom) i-n-f-o-r-m-a-l” … you got it, didn’t you??

What does informal mean? Well, it means here:

no registration fee, nor poster presentation, nor proceedings.

An example:

If you’ve never been to an Astro-GR meeting I suggest you that you visit and read the pages linked in the links at the bottom. You could also download some of the talks (movies/slides) to get an idea of the topics we covered.