Credit: ED GERSTNER

From 29 June to 4 July 2008, 24 Nobel Prize winners and 557 young scientists from 67 countries gathered in the Bavarian town of Lindau, on the bank of Lake Constance (pictured), to take part in the 58th Annual Lindau Meeting of Nobel Laureates. The meetings were initiated in 1951 by Lindau physicians Gustav Parade and Franz Karl Hein, with the aim for Nobel laureates to come together and address an international audience. Since then they have evolved under the patronage of Count Lennart Bernadotte of Wisborg and his wife, Countess Sonja Bernadotte, to become a unique a forum for laureattes to pass their experience, knowledge and enthusiasm for scientific discovery onto a new generation of scientists.

The young scientists were chosen from 20,000 applicants, including undergraduates, postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers. The focus of the meeting alternates each year between physics, chemistry, and physiology and medicine, and every fourth year an interdisciplinary mix of all three. This year's focus on physics couldn't have been more timely. With the Large Hadron Collider at CERN due to be switched on in just over a month's time (announced during the meeting), the sense of anticipation of history in the making felt by laureates and young researchers alike made for an atmosphere that was electric.

Each day began with a series of six half-hour lectures given by the laureates. The themes of the lectures included historical accounts of the laureates' paths to Stockholm, “words of advice to young people” on what it takes to do good science — with Iver Giaever providing the most comprehensive list of advice including to be curious, competitive, creative, stubborn, self-confident, sceptical, patient and, most of all, lucky — to their take on emerging developments at the cutting edge of scientific research, from carbon electronics to particle physics. All the lectures can be viewed online at http://www.lindau-nobel.de/.

But the real magic occurred in the afternoons, when the young researchers were given the opportunity to engage face-to-face with the laureate (or laureates) of their choice. We and other members of the press weren't allowed into these meetings. But we did get a flavour of these interactions from more intimate meetings between laureates and researchers that we'd arranged for Nature's documentary vodcast on the event (soon to appear on the nature.com website). In each of these encounters, the initial star-struck awe of young scientists to being sat next to a real-life Nobel prize winner (and to our cameras) was quickly forgotten by their shared excitement for physics and the challenge of getting to grips with such weighty subjects as subatomic supersymmety, solar energy production, the search extra dimensions, Bose–Einstein condensation, quantum mechanics and the Anthropic Principle, and the future of optical telecommunications.