Welcome to Berlin Science Week @ HU!
For a place like Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, every week of the year is ‘science week’. It is simply what we do here.
In most people’s daily lives, and sometimes even for politicians and businesspeople, science appears to happen in an ivory tower. The Berlin Science Week therefore offers an opportunity to students, staff and associated researchers and to anyone interested to gain an insight into current discussions and cutting-edge developments in academia. And moreover to simply see first-hand how science is done in its different disciplines and research areas.
We at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin put a lot of work into expanding the boundaries of knowledge: not only by analysing and discovering, but also by presenting and explaining our research to the public. We would like to discuss with you what the relevant factors are for the different phenomena and why an understanding without context is impossible.
Scientific progress is in fact influencing many aspects of our daily lives, be it in physics, chemistry or mathematics, in social sciences, law or the humanities. Because it is like that and it is not always easy to comprehend, it is even more important to explain what we are doing in our fields.
Research and science means to test ideas, to ask for answers, and to discuss by taking different perspectives on a subject. In our understanding science and scientific progress is not straightforward. Scientific research requires asking questions, analyzing findings, and questioning well-established knowledge by discussing and debating it. It means to ask: What is the relevance in our discoveries? What is the reach of this development? Research is always a joint effort, discussion and debates are essential for our attempt of understanding the world. We don’t claim to know everything, but we are working hard to find out more.
BSW@HU is part of Berlin Science Week