The dark matter problem is almost a century old. Since the 1930s evidence has been growing that our cosmos is dominated by a new form of non-baryonic matter that holds galaxies and clusters together and influences cosmic structures up to the largest observed scales. At the microscopic level, we still do not know the composition of this dark, or invisible, matter, which does not interact directly with light. The simplest assumption is that it is made of new particles that interact with gravity and, at most, weakly with known elementary particles. I will discuss searches for such new particles, both space- and Earth-bound, including those experiments placed in deep underground laboratories. While a dark matter particle has not yet been identified, even after decades of concerted efforts, new technological developments and experiments have reached sensitivities where a discovery might be imminent, albeit certainly not guaranteed.

The concept of transdisciplinarity has found a foothold in science. It is increasingly taking the place of the concept of interdisciplinarity and is making the concept of disciplinarity look pale. However, the concept of transdisciplinarity is not self-explanatory – as it is often understood – and the concept of disciplinarity is not at all outdated – as it seems. This becomes clear in the conceptual analysis of the concepts of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity.

This article presents a personal perspective on why it is interesting and important to test all kinds of fundamental laws and search for as-yet-undiscovered particles and interactions using laboratory-based non-accelerator techniques. Such room-scale experiments are already spearheading discovery, and can be expected to become even more important as accelerators reach seemingly inevitable limits.

The EU plays a high-profile role in the international arena, and yet this role still evades accurate conceptualization. Since the EU is not a state, it is commonly accepted as sui generis; a normative power influencing the world order mostly by means of direct and intermediary persuasion. Despite this position, in practice when championing the global normative agenda, the EU does not always demonstrate high efficiency as a leader. This article studies the EU’s efforts to push through regional and global versions of a financial transaction tax, meant to promote the common good through the positive externalities it generates for the economy. The aim of the article is to arrive at an adequate explanation for the (in)ability of the EU to act as an agent of global governance in this case. The focus of attention is the inner organizational limitations on the EU’s behaviour as a global actor.

Academic research and education are, more than ever, a collective endeavour. This article discusses how different modes of governance facilitate or obstruct collective action in universities. Based on theories of public goods and the resource-based perspective, we develop the concept of university commons in order to analyse the challenges arising from the governance of collective action. We examine how to effectively balance collegial and managerial governance to create a sustainable portfolio of university commons.

The necessity of an interdisciplinary approach to both research and education can today hardly be debated, especially when one thinks of the complexity and dynamics of changes in the human brain and behaviour related to digitalisation and informatisation. Real interdisciplinarity, however, has to be born within the individual, representing a kind of a particular state of mind. To achieve such a goal, reforms of both science and the educational system are needed, broadening the fundamentals of our knowledge. To support and elaborate this thesis, various ideas will be analysed related to one successful example of interdisciplinarity, represented, in the author’s opinion, in the history of development of bioethics.

In the eighteenth century, the French administration usually did not appoint foreigners to leading functions. The Upper Hungarian nobleman Móric Beňovský, who was commissioned by the French king to build a colony on Madagascar, was an exception. Soon, Beňovský developed fanciful accounts of his experience on Madagascar and eventually he became famous across Europe. His case raises the question about the conditions that foreigners had to fulfil in order to make a career in the French empire. This article seeks to answer the question of whether Beňovský’s Upper Hungarian origins contributed to shaping his career, self-fashioning, policy and knowledge production, that is, orientated these in a way that differed from the French colonisers. It claims that Beňovský chose to fictionalise his life and to conjure lies about his experiences on Madagascar because it was the only way to make a career in a system otherwise dominated by established networks of patronage. Furthermore, Beňovský’s fanciful information policy gives some insight into the way information was produced in the French empire: it shows that Versailles was very much dependent on a few informants, and that the logic of court patronage played a great role in knowledge production. Beyond that, the fact that Beňovský’s fantastic stories were considered trustworthy by the elite across the continent says a lot about European colonial imagination in the Enlightenment period.

This article is adapted from a speech delivered at the ‘2016 University Presidents Forum’ on 7 April 2016. Modern human society confronts two great challenges: one from the conflict between nature and humankind, the other from the clash of different civilizations. As one of the most innovative components of society, research universities should shoulder the responsibilities for, and contribute to the sustainable development of, human society and the peaceful development of the world. One possible road to take for research universities is to accelerate building innovative universities, and hand-in-hand develop an innovation network with other innovative components of society. Here, the concept of an innovative university, beyond the perspective of a single innovative component, refers to a university with an innovation capacity as well as an organizer, connector and coordinator of various innovative components, (1) adding value through innovation and creating excellence; (2) acquiring the competitiveness for resources, and optimizing and upgrading itself; and (3) developing the capability of consolidating high quality resources through openness, sharing and collaboration. However, research universities should realize that neither the capacity of acquiring nor consolidating high quality resources can be achieved by an individual university or universities in a single region. That means future innovation should be made through networks. Only those who have access to the key nodes of the network can stand on the central stage of the global innovation system. Thus, an innovative university plays an irreplaceable role in the formation and function of such an innovation network to sustain its position in the global innovation system. These are the mission and responsibilities of the leading research universities.

Is cohesion policy effective? Does it contribute to the reduction of development disparities and strengthen competitiveness in the European Union? These are the questions that have inspired a growing body of research on cohesion policy evaluation, and which has come to varied and inconclusive results. There has been significant variation with regards to the established (in)effectiveness of cohesion policy among different methodological approaches, which all have serious methodological shortcomings. In order to circumvent these, the authors have not only continued to rely on rigorous econometric methods but also focused on the potential benefits through an indirect estimation approach. They have confirmed that cohesion policy is de facto additional, i.e. that it effectively increases the structural expenditures of the recipient Member States, which, given the evidence on fiscal multiplier, should lead to stronger growth performance.

The article gives an example of how actors and processes should be differentiated from each other in an imperial context that concerns both a European and a non-European region. Some of the ‘Austrian’ missionaries who worked in the Catholic mission in southern Sudan were of Slavic or Italian origin. Their double identity shaped the way they conceived their pastoral work. Nevertheless, these missionaries were not the only group of people who were engaged in this Austrian colonial endeavour in mid-nineteenth century Sudan.

The paper addresses the question of how, in a research-intensive university, choices should be made to determine strategies that are appropriate for ambitious and creative institutions committed to both teaching and research at a high level. The paper calls for accountable real leadership at the university level and at lower levels. It also calls for organizational flexibility and flexibility in the allocation of material and immaterial resources.

On the one hand, ‘interdisciplinarity’ in all its formats, ranging from multi- to transdisciplinarity, has become the focal point of research agendas and a high priority of many funding bodies, while, on the other hand, universities by and large still remain discipline-oriented. This ‘tension’ is especially manifest between ‘science’ and ‘culture’ in the sense of bridging gaps between disciplines and research domains. The main roles of the Humanities and Social Sciences can be said to be the development of critical and independent thought, the identification and dissemination of important social and cultural values, as well as challenging widely held assumptions and beliefs. This article focuses on new ‘interpretations’ of knowledge seen as the fundamental link, which can, within university programmes, raise the awareness of the importance of the Humanities and Social Sciences on one hand, but, more importantly, also put into a much wider context the different ‘knowledges’ necessary for the contemporary understanding of how ‘science’ should be geared towards the individual, society, as well as the global community at large.*

Research about interdisciplinary research is less and less done by those doing it. This paper tries to reflect upon my own interdisciplinary practices and experiences. In the first part, I present an example of successful interdisciplinary research. Then, I attempt to introduce two nested cases of interdisciplinary scholarship and their development, one being my ‘Fakultät’ (which roughly equals a department) and the other, smaller one, being my research group. In the third part, I attempt to offer explanations for the development described with reference to some of the burgeoning literature on interdisciplinarity. Incentive structures, epistemological challenges such as disciplinary capture and structural effects of the hosting university are discussed. In a final section, othering as an inevitable process is used to elucidate the dynamics of developments within and beyond academia and to draw conclusions about the two cases presented.

Last year, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration announced the first detection of a gravitational wave. A century after the fundamental predictions of Einstein, the first direct observation of a binary black hole system merging to form a single black hole was made. The observations provide unique access to the properties of spacetime at extreme curvatures: the strong-field and high-velocity regime. It allows unprecedented tests of general relativity for the nonlinear dynamics of highly disturbed black holes. LIGO and Virgo realized a global interferometer network, and more detections were made, including a signal from a binary neutron star merger. The scientific impact of the various detections will be explained. In addition, key technological aspects will be addressed, such as the interferometric detection principle, optics, as well as sensors and actuators. Attention is paid to Advanced Virgo, the European detector near Pisa, which came online in 2017. We end with a discussion of the largest challenges in the field, including plans for the Einstein Telescope, a large underground observatory for gravitational-wave science.

This paper explores the Polish opinion about German colonialism in Africa in connection with the perception of Prussian rule ‘at home’. In late Imperial Germany, Prussian Poles tended to look at the German ventures in Africa with a very critical eye. Their interest in Cameroonian issues was due to the fact that both Poles and Cameroonians were facing the same difficulties at the same time, namely German attempts to eliminate local languages in schools and to take control of the lands. By establishing a link between Polish and Cameroonian suffering, Polish patriots wanted to make Poles aware of their political, economic and cultural subjection within a global context. In a certain way, this counter-hegemonic narration was supposed to deprovincialise the ‘Polish issue’ and make it part of the broader struggle against German imperial power. The Poles, however, did not support independence for Cameroon. They used the Cameroonian issues mainly polemically in order to advance their own cause in imperial Germany.

Many implications of the discovery of the Higgs boson are discussed, together with a short overview of the new challenges in particle physics. The paper also presents a non-exhaustive review of the current plans in the quest for physics beyond the Standard Model at high-energy accelerators.

Creativity is the generation of novel and useful ideas. Organizations, including universities and other research institutions, need to develop novel and useful products to satisfy constantly evolving customer needs. Furthermore, organizational procedures and processes develop over time, and continuous improvements in processes contribute to organizational efficiency. Thus, the development of novel and useful ideas in relation to products, procedures and services is mandated from many employees in modern organizations, including researchers and scientists. This creativity can take on many different forms, for example unconventional solutions to a wide variety of problems related to research, teaching and administration. Because many of these problems are comparable to that of workers in all kinds of jobs, I believe it is possible to draw on the rich knowledge in the field of organizational creativity to provide some insights into how to foster scientific creativity. The work of researchers and scientists is in many ways comparable to that of knowledge workers in other kinds of organizations: they are high-level employees who apply knowledge to do their work, oftentimes using creative thinking. A rich body of literature has dealt with creativity in these jobs where creativity is a core requirement, and has examined the organizational factors related to creativity. Before I summarize this research and highlight some important research findings concerning the rewards for creativity, the design of jobs, the processes leading to creativity, the organizational climate, and daily work events associated with creativity, I will disentangle different forms of creativity at work and describe a general model of creativity in the context of work.

This article discusses John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the contemporary film Ex Machina as a coherent group concerning the boundaries of knowledge and the perils of scientific Prometheanism. The development of AI (Artificial Intelligence) should be delimited and contained, if not curtailed or banned, and scientists ought to proceed in a responsible and cautious manner. An obsessive or excessive pursuit of knowledge, aiming to equal God and create humanoid beings, constitutes the essential feature of scientific Prometheanism, which can end in catastrophic destruction. Both Frankenstein and Ex Machina stringently critique scientific Prometheanism as one aspect of modernity, and expose the real dangers that AIs pose to the very existence of humanity and civilization. In Paradise Lost, Milton provides the epistemological framework for Frankenstein and Ex Machina. The article concludes that the union of science and arts in science fiction (films) can be very productive.

This article is an attempt to clarify the effects of the German labour market reforms, commonly known as the Hartz reforms. Competing arguments were used to identify the welfare implications for German society and the German economy in order to explore whether or not such labour market reforms might provide another German answer, following fiscal discipline, to the EU’s post-euro-crisis management. This paper confirms that the Hartz reforms effectively reduced German unemployment, but they did not fundamentally solve the problem. Moreover, such effects appeared to propagate an increase in size of the low-paid sector, declining wages and increasing income inequality. The reforms were not welfare-enhancing for individuals because of increased poverty levels in employment and unemployment, which further implied a counter-productive risk for the German economy because of the contraction of domestic consumption, and potential social instability for German society because of rising inequality and deteriorating living standards. Therefore, Hartz-style reforms are neither a desirable model for other EU countries, nor the answer to Europe’s post-euro-crisis management in a time of fiscal austerity and negative interest rates. The real danger to European integration, as argued in this article, is not the challenge from high unemployment, but from Germany’s complacency of a one-size-fits-all thinking and, being the EU’s leading country, its double standards towards and ignorance of the differential nature and contexts of the European unemployment issue compared with the German one. This article warns that the mishandling of labour market reforms could result in the collapse of the already fragile public confidence in European integration.