It has closed now. But maybe not for good. The Hotel Metropole in Brussels
The hotel was almost brand new when 23 of Europe’s greatest physicists gathered here in 1911. They had been invited by the wealthy Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay.
From 30 October to 3 November 1911, the Hotel Metropole was the venue of the Solvay Council, dedicated to what soon would be called “The Theory of Radiation and the Quanta”.
This was the first of a series of meetings, called “Solvay Conferences”, named after Ernest Solvay, a wealthy Belgian industrialist and scientific philanthropist, who issued the invitations to this first meeting.
This was a time when the foundations of physics were being shaken by the emergence of the quantum theory.
The participants were 23 eminent scientists including Einstein, Kamerlingh Onnes, Lorentz, Nernst, Perrin, Planck, Poincaré, Rutherford, Skłodowska-Curie, Sommerfeld and Wien.
Their insights and exchange of ideas had a profound influence on the development of physics and chemistry in the twentieth century.
Derek Blyth’s hidden secret of the day: Derek Blyth is the author of the bestselling “The 500 Hidden Secrets of Belgium”. He picks out one of his favourite hidden secrets for The Brussels Times every day.
