announcing the Stromboli Summer Research Intensive 2025
Years ago, when I attended the first edition of the Kefalonia Foundations workshop my heart and mind expanded as I discovered such an amazing way of doing research: a dozen people (masters and PhD students and postdocs) living together in a house immersed in nature on a Greek island, sharing accommodation, cooking and eating together on a big table, talking physics all day and night, only taking breaks to swim, sing around a guitar, and talk about life. It’s there that I met and got to know some of my favourite people of all time.
It’s been years, but I’m finally organising a similar event on one of the most magical places on this planet: Stromboli. Pitch black sand, dramatically shapen basaltic cliffs, deep-blue almost purple water, picturesque white houses, and, of course, the calm, imposing, majestic, all-powerful Iddu. The island itself is the upper third the most active volcanos in the world, erupting constantly, several time an hour, constantly releasing tension, sending incadescent pyroclasts flying in the air and rolling down the N-E side of the island, the sciara del fuoco, offering a truly moving spectacle at night.
Seemingly paradoxically, many find the volcano a calming presence, a direct illustration of our place on geological and astronomical timelines. I’ve spent a good chunk of my summer there, swimming in the deep and transparent water, admiring the milky way, eating granita, and reading and writing. The mind empties and you can go deep into your ideas. It’s where I taught myself special relativiy as an undergrad, and wrote some of my favourite research.
This year, Guilherme Franzmann and I are going to gather 12 early-career researchers to work in small groups on some foundational topics in physics. For a week, we’ll live and work together on the coast of Stromboli, exploring questions proposed by the participants in quantum mechanics, quantum information theory, quantum field theory, classical and quantum gravity, thermodynamics, statistical physics, and philosophy of physics.
If you are interested, read more about the workshop and apply at ssri.it; applications will be open until the first week of April.
