Science and Happiness - Conference August 31, 2023
August 31, Niels Stensen alumni and fellows will gather at Antropia, Driebergen, for a conference dedicated to Science and Happiness. At the conference, they will focus on the personal joy one may experience as a scientist, as well as on the ways in which science may contribute to the happiness of our fellow human beings. Niels Stensen alumnus Carlo Beenakker has kindly agreed to deliver the keynote address.
The Joy of Being a Scientist
More often than not, scientific exploration is a source of immense joy. There is such a thing, apparently, as ‘scientific bliss’. The Niels Stensen Fellowship will explore this phenomenon by surveying its alumni. They will be asked what makes them happy, as practitioners of their science, and what they think would be needed to ensure their academic well-being in the future. The results of the survey in hand, at the conference they will explore the following questions:
- how to maintain a proper work-life balance, especially when nurture (parental or otherwise) must be juggled with an academic career;
- how to ensure social safety in the workplace, by addressing, among other things, attacks on academic freedom;
- whether the old hierarchical academic structures, organized around chairs for domineering individual professors, should continue to give way to team science, on the supposition that a greater focus on teamwork would further the well-being of senior as well as junior scientists.
Furthering the Happiness of Our Fellow Human Beings
As befits the Niels Stensen Fellowship, part of the 2023 conference will focus on some of the specific ways in which academics could further the happiness of their fellow human beings. We will not zoom in on the well-known boons brought by medical science, nor on the enlargement of material prosperity for the masses, made possible through applied science. Instead, we will turn our minds to a happiness that goes beyond material well-being and economic prosperity and focus on what we need to achieve bliss outside of the marketplace, as beings that love, nurture, and explore the beings with whom we share this planet. Most scientists will immediately recognize that exploration can be blissful (a fact already referred to, above), but what about love, and what about nurture, do they fit in with scientific practice and the scientist’s life, and if so, how?
