VietNamNet Bridge – Dam Thanh Son, Nguyen Trong Hien and Luu Le Hang are scientists who have made great contributions to world science and human civilization.

I’m very proud to attend all 10 Meet Vietnam events, stretching over two decades. (Since 1993 the Rencontres du Vietnam (Meet Vietnam) science and education foundation has organised numerous international conferences aimed at helping young scientists establish contacts with international colleagues. It has also organized thematic scientific schools throughout the country with the goal of improving the tertiary education system. The architect of the foundation is physicist Jean Tran Thanh Van.)

The first Meet Vietnam took place at the guesthouse of the Ministry of Defence in Hanoi in late 1993. At that time, it was among the most luxurious places in Hanoi to welcome foreign guests to Meet Vietnam, including Jack Steinberger – a Nobel Prize winner. After the meeting, he sent a letter to US President Bill Clinton asking him to lift the embargo on Vietnam.

In 1993, Vietnam and the United States had not established diplomatic relations yet. To travel to Hanoi, J.Steinberger and many other Western physicists had to go to Paris or Bangkok to ask for a visa at the Vietnam Embassy there.

However, hundreds of physicists in the US and the West still went to Hanoi to attend the Meet Vietnam event, respecting the invitation of Prof. Tran Thanh Van.

Dr. Dam Thanh Son and Dr. Nguyen Trong Hien were present at the first meeting. Son was 24 years old at that time while Hien was 30. Their presentations at the meeting were their doctoral theses that they were about to defend. Son returned home from the Moscow Institute for Nuclear Research to introduce a new vision for the structure of the atomic nuclei.

Hien worked for NASA and he returned home from Princeton University. His report raised new and interesting results, obtained after a study tour in South Pole by a research team at NASA, with Hien as a member.

The second Meet Vietnam took place at Reunification Hall in HCM City in late October October. At that time there was a total eclipse that could be observed in Binh Thuan. Up to 220 physicists from 40 countries attended the event.

Son and Hien did not miss it. And the meeting had a new face: Ms. Luu Le Hang (ie Jane Luu). She was born in 1963 in Saigon. Getting a PhD degree at the age of 26, she became an assistant professor at Harvard University.

The report by Jane Luu revealed that she and David Jewitt had discovered dozens of asteroids in the Kuiper Belt, far beyond Neptune; and an asteroid that was named 5430 Luu.

Two decades later ...

Since then Son, Hien and I have regularly attended Meet Vietnam. Hien and I went to the Loire Valley in central France to attend Meet Blois, a conference on astrophysics, also hosted by Prof. Tran Thanh Van. Hien then received an invitation to return to Vietnam every summer to lecture at the University of Hue.

In August 2013, Luu Le Hang also received the invitation of Prof. Van to attend the opening of the International Centre for Interdisciplinary Science and Education in Binh Dinh but unfortunately she could not return due to personal reasons.

During the past two decades, I’ve been keeping track of these scientists’ scientific success.

On April 29, 2014 Dam Thanh Son was elected by the National Academy of Sciences/NAS as an academician, after a thorough evaluation from the leading physicists. NAS was established in 1863 and currently has 2,200 academicians. At least 200 NAS academicians are Nobel Prize winners.

In early 2005, P.K. Kovtun, Dam Thanh Son and A.O. Starinets published a work on a model of a liquid black hole in 10-dimensional space. In Physical Review, the authors predicted that the physical condition existed in the first 10 microseconds of the universe was a nearly ideal fluid, later called constant KSS.

Theoretical predictions of the KSS group were checked and certified as correct by the largest experimental centers in the United States such as RHIC and Duke. In May 2010, the journal Physics Today of the American Physical Society published three articles in the same issue to praise the work of the group KSS.

In 2014, Hien also achieved great success. The "age" of the universe is currently 13.798 billion years. One theory is  that our universe was born from the Big Bang. Another theory, which is the Inflation Theory. According to this theory, the universe erupted from nothing, or more precisely, from a singularity which is smaller than an atomic nucleus, exploded with a velocity greater than the speed of light, and in a very short moment, about one of billion billion billion seconds ...! Thus, the universe is not eternal, but it is impermanent.

Group BICFP2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) of the Astronomy Center of Harvard - Smithsonian with Hien as a member wanted to find evidence for the theory of inflation, through the observance of cosmic microwave background radiation at the South Pole.

I also want to mention the brilliant success of Jane Luu.

In 2012 the Kavli astrophysics prize award was given to Dr. Jane Luu, David Jewitt and Michael Brown for discover the Kuiper Belt. This award is considered the Nobel prize of astronomy, with $1 million in cash.

The same year, David Jewitt and Jane Luu also won the Shaw Award, with $1 million.

Mankind’s understanding about the solar system has improved considerably over the last dozen of years. The Vietnamese scientist, with her outstanding inventions, has helped enrich knowledge of mankind in the last several centuries about the solar system and changed people’s perceptions about the infinite universe where they live.

Ten years ago, the solar system was described as a system of planets, where the Sun is at the center, surrounded by nine celestial bodies that bear the sun’s attraction. These include eight major planets and one “subordinate” planet, located in three groups.

The first group included four planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars – the small planets, solid, and composed primarily of rocks and metals.

The second group included four large planets. Two largest, Jupiter and Saturn, are composed of helium and hydrogen, while the main components of the other smaller two, Uranus and Neptune are ice (water, ammonia and methane). They have very large sizes but have small density.

The third group was believed to comprise Pluto only.

However, the understanding about the solar system could not explain the phenomena and information collected by modern equipment used in astronomy.

Jane Luu, together with her colleague David Jewitt, a professor of astronomy in the Earth, Planetary, and Space Science Department of UCLA, then decided to conduct scientific research work in an innovative and bold way – surveying slow-moving objects outside the solar system.

They successfully proved the existence of a belt which comprises numerous objects in the region of the solar system beyond the planets, extending from the orbit of Neptune to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is called the Kuiper Belt.

In 1992, after five years of working hard, Jewitt and Luu found a meteorite and named it 1992 QB1 which had the diameter of 280 kilometers, or 1/8th of Pluto.

This paved the way for dozens of discoveries by the research team and hundreds of other discoveries by the astronomy community around the world.

The discoveries all showed that there exist thousands of objects, from big to small, from comets to interplanetary dust. Of these, five objects are bigger than others, including Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, Eris and Pluto.

These are called the dwarf planets because of their slight weight. The group of dwarf planets is the third group of the solar system, which in the past was believed to consist of Pluto only.

For her great achievements, the scientist has received many prestigious awards. In 1991, a short time after receiving her doctorate, she received the Annie J. Cannon Award from the US Astronomical Union.

And in recognition of her services of discovering more than 30 new small planets, one of the planets has been named after her, Asteroid 5430 Luu.

The three young physicists of the first Meet Vietnam - Dam Thanh Son, Nguyen Trong Hien and Luu Le Hang - have brought fame to Meet Vietnam and their home country.

Ham Chau (Lao Dong)