The Ourense Campus Marie Curie room at the University of Vigo will host the 7th Aquae Talent Hub on 15 March, a meeting of restless and curious minds looking to learn about innovation, share knowledge and broaden their network of contacts.

Attending the event will be Pablo Martínez Ruíz del Árbol, physicist and senior scientist at the Zurich Technology Institute (ETH), who will be giving a master class, and the expert in design thinking, Irene Lapuente, who will host the workshop.

Aquae Talent Hub is a platform for promoting new ideas and a space for reflection and dissemination of enterprise and innovation. In 2017, it was held in Elche, Murcia, Málaga and Santiago de Compostela, and this year it is planned for Marbella, Alicante and Murcia, as well as Ourense. The common denominator for all of them is innovation in its different perspectives: social, cultural, solidarity, collective and scientific.

In his master class, Pablo Martínez Ruíz del Árbol will explain how knowledge of the particles that form our universe has advanced and how physicists structure their thought, design their experiments and establish connections to achieve their aims. Accompanying him, the public will explore a number of historic examples in particle physics and learn about the current challenges in the field, such as the discovery of the Higgs boson, dark matter and searches in 'new physics', which are revolutionising the current theoretical framework.

A PhD who worked on the calibration and construction of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva (Switzerland), Pablo Martínez Ruíz del Árbol is an associate fellow and senior scientist at the ETH, where he leads and coordinates searches for dark matter with the CMS. He currently works as a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Physics Institute of Cantabria (IFCA).

• Does thinking like a physicist help us?

Before the master class, the expert in communication and education, Irene Lapuente (a physicist in training), will host a workshop to explore how the thought processes used by physicists can help us in our daily lives. ‘Our culture encourages us more to generate answers than ask questions. We feel more comfortable answering. However, the seed of knowledge lies in asking questions’, reflects Lapuente, founder of La Mandarina de Newton, a company that combines science and technology to foster creativity. At the workshop, the public will learn about how the universe began, what it is made of, how physics studies it, how the quantum mechanism works and how mistakes can be a source of inspiration, all through participative activities and games.

Aquae Talent Hub is a free event, although places should be booked online as numbers are limited.

Further information: www.aquaetalenthub.com.