“An open world where each nation can assert itself solely by the extent to which it can contribute to the common culture and is able to help others with experience and resources, must be the goal to be put above everything else.”

These wise words were stated by Physicist Niels Bohr in his open letter to The United Nations on June 9th, 1950. And it seems fitting to welcome you all to the Open World Conference 2022 in the same spirit.

A conference about Open Science and Global Dangers, marking the centenary of Niels Bohr’s Nobel Prize in 1922, and the United Nations’ announcement of 2022 as the International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development.

It is a true pleasure for me to welcome you to Copenhagen – the place where Niels Bohr grew up and did most of his research on physics.

The coming days are a celebration of Niels Bohr’s vision of an open world. A world where nations can work together and collaborate by sharing science and technology.

But the next days are also an occasion to continue important discussions on the potentials and challenges of an open world. One of the questions of the conference is “How can we be as open as possible, and as closed as necessary?”. Investigating this balance of openness across academic disciplines is a core theme at the conference.

It has been said that Bohr was not only a physicist, but in many ways also a philosopher. Bohr engaged in questions like “What is consciousness? What do we understand by free will? Are there limits to our knowledge?”. His physical theories made him reflect on the relationship between description and reality in new ways, and he used these two different academic fields and ways of thinking to better understand the world and make the unknown known.

Today, I am standing here in front of experts from many different academic fields. Some of you come from the field of humanities or social sciences, and others from natural sciences or health sciences. Some of you have travelled across the world, some across the country, and some - like me - across the city.

Now, you have all come together for a common purpose. To explore questions set in motion by Bohr’s research.

Questions that for example manifests themselves in Bohr’s Open Letter to the UN, in which he shared his vision of an open world.

In this letter he addressed the hopes and dangers associated with the nuclear revolution which he experienced firsthand through his involvement with the Manhattan Project.

Bohr wrote his Open Letter after an ended conflict. As a way of asking the question of how research can exist and play a crucial role in times when conflicts emerge and escalate.

Research must exist within the concrete possibilities of everyday life – but it exists to ask questions and give answers that are beyond everyday life.

Some answers can help societies evolve here and now. Others have no immediate use but are indispensable in the bigger picture. Bohr asked both the big, abstract questions, and the more concrete questions that we relate to in society.

Just as Bohr points out, the nations of the world must focus on how they can contribute to each other. How they can help each other in becoming wiser. How they can give, instead of how they can take.

Science knows no national boundaries which we celebrated this year - a hundred years after Bohr’s Nobel Prize-win – when our Danish Chemist and researcher, Morten Meldal has been granted the Nobel prize in collaboration with two researchers from the United States.

Bohr encouraged us to keep meeting across the world and across academic disciplines to learn from each other and find new answers.

With that in mind, I wish you all an enlightening and rewarding Open World Conference.

 

(Det talte ord gælder)