What follows is the Heinz Nixdorf Memorial Lecture that Norman Davies, as the recipient of the Erasmus Medal of the Academia Europaea, gave on the occasion of the 25th anniversary meeting of the Academia Europaea in Wrocław in September 2013.

In recent years, the notion of ‘excellence’ and its interconnectedness with research, development and innovations has become extremely popular across Europe. At regional and national as well as at the EU level, various initiatives have been taken to strengthen the science base, and to establish centres, or clusters of outstanding achievements. Researchers, universities, and funding agencies will have to work their way towards a culture of creativity, which needs a leap of faith based on the high-trust principles of governance and accountability, and which provides more space for risk-taking and thorough rethinking of common wisdom in order to achieve real breakthroughs at the frontiers of knowledge.

Cosmology is a subject that interacts closely with particle physics. But as well as being a fundamental science, it is also the grandest of the environmental sciences: it is concerned with the complex structures that constitute our present cosmos, and how these gradually emerged during the 13.8 billion years that separates us from the ‘big bang’.

This is a historical account from my personal perspective of the development over the last few decades of the standard model of particle physics. The model is based on gauge theories, of which the first was quantum electrodynamics, describing the interactions of electrons with light. This was later incorporated into the electroweak theory, describing electromagnetic and weak nuclear interactions. The standard model also includes quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong nuclear interactions. The final capstone of the model was the Higgs particle discovered in 2012 at CERN. But the model is very far from being the last word; there are still many gaps in our understanding.

Almost ten years after the first production of cold antimatter at CERN, the confinement of antihydrogen has recently been achieved for the first time. Several experiments installed at the Antiproton Decelerator intend to test the symmetry between matter and antimatter by means of trapped anti-atoms. In addition, in the coming years it is planned to study the effect of gravity on antiparticles for the first time. Meanwhile, evidence from the Large Hadron Collider hinting at a violation of charge–parity symmetry beyond the Standard Model of particle physics has yet to be confirmed. A violation of the discrete symmetries that describe the relation between matter and antimatter could explain the excess of ordinary matter in the Universe.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is the highest energy machine for particle physics research ever built. In the years 2010–2012 this accelerator has collided protons to a centre-mass-energy up to 8 TeV (note that 1 TeV corresponds to the energy of about 1000 protons at rest; the mass of one proton is about 1.67×10–24 g). The events delivered by the LHC have been collected and analysed by four apparatuses placed alongside this machine. The search for the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model and the search for new particles and fields beyond this theory represent the most important points of the scientific programme of the LHC. In July 2012, the international collaborations ATLAS and CMS, consisting of more than 3000 physicists, announced the discovery of a new neutral particle with a mass of about 125 GeV, whose physics properties are compatible, within present experimental and theoretical uncertainties, to the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model. This discovery represents a major milestone for particle physics, since it indicates that the hypothesized Higgs mechanism seems to be responsible for the masses of elementary particles, in particular W± and Z0 bosons, as well as fermions (leptons and quarks). The 2013 Physics Nobel Prize has been assigned to F. Englert and P. Higgs, ‘for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider’.

Since its formation in 1950s as the economic community, the EU has created the monetary union and is increasingly evolving also into a political union – part of which is also a union or Europe of citizens. This article explores the development and the existing EU legislation and case law of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) on Union citizenship. The article emphasises the importance of the case law of the CJEU for the development of this concept, focusing especially on the case law pertaining to access to social security benefits in another Member State, the rights of students, tax relief, and personal rights such as the right to write a name in a certain way and the right to family life. Case law of the CJEU has, inter alia, confirmed that even economically inactive Union citizens lawfully residing in another Member State have a right to access to social benefits under the same conditions as the Member State’s own nationals. The concept of the Union citizenship is of key importance in the development of EU law, as it expands the scope of the applicability of the provisions on free movement of persons and other fundamental freedoms. New challenges and questions linked to Union citizenship are arising over time, which should also be regulated at the EU level in the future. Therefore, further development of this concept can still be expected in the EU.

Despite its postmodern articulation, the spatial turn is productive for literary studies because, paradoxically revisiting Kant’s modern attempt to base the structure of knowledge on the presumably scientific character of geography and anthropology, it has improved methods of historical contextualization of literature through the dialectics of ontologically heterogeneous spaces. The author discusses three recent appropriations of spatial thought in literary studies: the modernization of traditional literary geography in the research of the relations between geospaces and fictional worlds (Piatti, Westphal), the systemic analysis of the genre development and diffusion with the help of analytical cartography (Moretti), and the transnational history of literary cultures (Valdés, Neubauer, Domínguez, and so on). In conclusion, the author presents the tentative results of the research project ‘The Space of Slovenian Literary Culture: Literary History and the GIS-Based Spatial Analysis’, which might represent a matrix for further developments of the spatially-oriented literary science. Using GIS technologies, the project maps and analyses data about the media, institutions, and actors of Slovenian literature in order to explain how the interaction between ‘spaces in literature’ and ‘literature in spaces’ has historically established a nationalized and aesthetically differentiated literary field.

A. Fraenkel and Y. Bar-Hillel in their classic Foundations of Set Theory (published in 1958) wrote ‘There is probably no country which has contributed, relatively to the size of its population, so much to mathematical logic and set theory and Poland. Leaving the explanation of this curious fact to sociology…’.1 However, the development of logic (and any other scientific field as well) in a given country, is not a linear function of the size of its population. In fact, there are several factors that conditioned the enormous development of mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics in Poland, particularly in the years 1918–1939. The following circumstances can be taken into account as elements for a sociological explanation of this fact (curious or not, but that is another matter): the philosophical context (the rise of the Lvov-Warsaw School), the mathematical context (Polish Mathematical School and the Janiszewski program, the co-operation of philosophers and mathematicians in teaching and doing logic, the amount of logical teaching in secondary schools and universities, and several organizational enterprises (the place of logic at universities, journals, scientific societies).

This paper is concerned with Twardowski’s role as a teacher and a founder of the Lvov-Warsaw School of logic and philosophy as well as with his main contributions to philosophy: the distinction between the content and object of presentations and his defense of objective truth, which initiated a debate on the eternity of truth in the School. It would perhaps be no exaggeration to say that the emergence of the Lvov-Warsaw School was the result of the premeditated efforts of one philosopher, namely Kazimierz Twardowski. Therefore, I will first present Twardowski’s role as a teacher and founder of the School and then move on to his theoretical achievements.

The most famous achievement of Jan Łukasiewicz (1878–1956) was to give the first rigorous formulation of many-valued logic. In this paper I discuss his motivations for this, which were philosophical, and the legacy of his work.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, a part of mathematical research was focused on unification: the goal was to find ‘one sort of thing’ that mathematics is (or could be taken to be) about. Quite quickly sets became the main candidate for this position. While the enterprise hit a rough patch with Frege’s failure and set-theoretic paradoxes, by the 1920s mathematicians (roughly speaking) settled on a promising axiomatization of set theory and considered it foundational. In parallel to this development was the work of Stanislaw Leśniewski (1886–1939), a Polish logician who did not accept the existence of abstract (aspatial, atemporal and acausal) objects such as sets. Leśniewski attempted to find a nominalistically acceptable replacement for set theory in the foundations of mathematics. His candidate was Mereology – a theory which, instead of sets and elements, spoke of wholes and parts. The goal of this paper will be to present Mereology in this context, to evaluate the feasibility of Leśniewski’s project and to briefly comment on its contemporary relevance.

This paper describes Tarski’s project of rehabilitating the notion of truth, previously considered dubious by many philosophers. The project was realized by providing a formal truth definition, which does not employ any problematic concept.

This paper summarizes logical investigations in Poland in the years 1945–1975 conducted by logicians living and working in the country. We concentrate on mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics. Thus, we omit works in semantics (except logical model theory) and methodology of science; that is, other branches of general logic (logic sensu largo). We also skip investigations into the history of logic, one of the favorites of Polish logicians, except for mentioning reconstructions of some earlier systems. We also try to outline sociological circumstances relevant for the development of logic after the Second World War.