No. 115/2023

“If we are going to resolve global crises, the worldwide research community will have to become more f luid, interdisciplinary and transparent,” says Catherine Heymans, astrophysicist from the UK and Max Planck- Humboldt Research Award Winner. This would also require more diverse teams. Today’s most important, most pressing issue for the future is climate change, says Heymans. “What we need for that is the will to cooperate on solutions in cross-disciplinary teams that are as diverse as possible.” “The great thing about science is that you’re allowed to ask big questions,” says Heymans. “To answer them, we need teams of researchers involving as many diverse perspectives as possible, who have grown up differently and gone through various education systems. Teams like this are able to approach a problem from quite different directions.” Heymans emphasises that diversity in science and research is not only in tune with the zeitgeist but also politically correct. “In business it’s long been accepted as common sense that a diverse workforce that feels appreciated and at home in the workplace demonstrably improves results.” Heymans is a professor based at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh where she The British astrophysicist PROFESSOR DR CATHERINE HEYMANS teaches and conducts research at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. In 2018, she was granted the Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award, valued at 1.5 million euros, for her investigations into dark energy. In the context of a visiting professorship at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, she is one of the directors of the German Centre for Cosmological Lensing. DISCRIMINATION DAMAGES PROGRESS Science benefits from diversity. But those who don’t comply with the norm have to risk being disadvantaged. (laughs). But I did get to know another type of everyday reality and I’m very grateful for that opportunity. Your field of research is the energy transition. How well equipped is Germany for the transition? When it comes to the energy transition, reliability is extremely important – because we are talking about facilities that are large, expensive and dangerous. You can’t afford to make mistakes. This is something we in this country are good at, dealing with large- scale, complex systems and designing them to be reliable. Where we fall down, is getting the intersection between regulation and technology right. In what way? Every day, we hear that we need to speed up. And, at the same time, we create new regulations in Germany that slow things down. New LNG terminals go into operation and then for some reason are initially only granted a licence to operate for four hours a day. What’s the point of that? No country in the world would hit on the idea of imposing such a limit on remedial action if there were a gas emergency. Is over-regulation a locational disadvantage for Germany? We simply restrict ourselves to a ridiculous extent with our regulatory framework conditions. There’s a lot of ideology floating around and that is completely useless when you are searching for new solutions. It’s a disadvantage in comparison with competitors like the United States. There they are much more casual about things and maybe end up making a load of mistakes. But they get on with it – quickly and pragmatically. Neither of these is typical of the German system. We need a healthy combination of German thoroughness and American hands on! That is one of the good things about academic exchange à la Humboldt. We can learn a great deal from each other. Interview by GEORG SCHOLL FOCUS 20 HUMBOLDT KOSMOS 115/2023