A highly unscientific investigation into the most artistic corner of Hallerstrasse 6
Every year, somewhere around a thousand scientists pass through ISSI’s doors. Astrophysicists fresh off a redshift argument, climate scientists still smelling faintly of glacier, heliophysicists who insist the Sun is “actually very calm, most of the time”, and planetary scientists quietly convinced that whichever moon they currently study is the most interesting object in the Solar System. They come from every continent, in every discipline ISSI covers, for Workshops (or even Breakthrough Workshops), Fora, International Teams, and Working Groups. They argue, they calculate, they discover, they eat far too much Swiss chocolate in the coffee corner.
And then, before they leave… almost all of them pick up a pen.
Because tucked in the corner of ISSI sits an unassuming but quietly legendary object: the ISSI Guestbook. Page after page, team after team, year after year, our visitors leave behind a signature, a note, a doodle, or, in a small number of magnificent cases, something that can only be described as fine art with a fountain pen.
Naturally, the people who watch this happen most closely are ISSI’s own staff. And naturally, they have opinions.
For more than sixty years, diffusion has provided one of the central frameworks for describing the transport of energetic particles in the Earth’s radiation belts. In this framework, changes in particle distributions are often interpreted as the result of gradual, stochastic transport, much like a drop of ink dispersing through water. It is a simple, elegant idea, and it has helped anchor the field ever since.
As one of the first scientific results to emerge from the ISSI International Team 640, “Beyond Diffusion: Advancing Earth’s Radiation Belt Models with Nonlinear Dynamics”, led by Miroslav Hanzelka and Oliver Allanson, a new paper asks whether some of what we have interpreted as diffusion might instead be the observational signature of coherent, collision-less dynamics.
If you’ve recently had a coffee in ISSI’s common area and felt the Moon watching you—or spotted an alien contemplating a galaxy—you’re not imagining things. You’ve encountered the latest addition to our institute: a stunning, wall-sized space science mural, hand-painted by our very own C. Baier and Fabio Crameri.
