The second International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics, ICNFP 2013 was held in Kolybari, Crete from 28 August to 5th September and it attracted a large number of CERN physicists, experimentalists and theorists alike. The following lines do not aim at offering a detailed report on a conference; this would lie outside the scope of this PH Newsletter. Rather, the following is a comment about how to communicate the science we do at CERN beyond the community of experts working on it - and it is a comment on the specific twist that was given to this communication by ICNFP 2013.

Participants of the ICNFP 2013.

In the view of many of us, there is a rather sharp divider between science and scientific outreach: we use a different language for both, and we start being uncomfortable when the arguments by analogies often invoked in scientific outreach show their narrow limitations. One somehow feels that the greater public has difficulties in disentangling science from science fiction and that our efforts remain often limited to communicating excitement rather than furthering understanding. In engagements with the greater public, such limitations are almost unavoidable. The situation is different, however, if it comes to discussing with physicists from other fields: they speak our universal language albeit in different dialects. And they are a very precious group for targeted communication since we may learn from them as much as they can learn from us, and since a better understanding of the physics opportunities at CERN within the broader physics community will help to maintain a broad basis of our science at Universities. In my view, ICNFP 2013 was refreshing in the way in which it combined a broad interdisciplinary exchange without compromising on a high profile programme.

The coherence of the scientific programme was ensured by a broad range of high-profile talks. On the theory side, this included for instance overviews by Guido Altarelli on high energy physics and the guiding principle of naturalness after the Higgs discovery, by Ignatios Antoniadis on Mass hierarchy beyond the standard model and by Lisa Randall on Dark Matter. On the experimental side, this was paralleled by reviews from all four LHC experiments, and overviews on other experimental programmes in nuclear physics and astrophysics. In addition, there were approximately one hundred more detailed talks. The majority of the two hundred participants was certainly from high energy and nuclear physics, but I estimate that up to a quarter of all the participants came from neighbouring and not-so-nearby fields, including quantum optics and solid state physics. For this diverse group, ICNFP offered a rare opportunity to experience from first hand the richness of the physics in which CERN is involved, and it gave us some insights into the question that are pursued in other fields. One could listen, for instance, not only in the evening to George Zweig's historical account of the birth of the quark model that he repeated two weeks later at CERN, but one saw him also discussing in the regular programme the physics of acoustic perception on which he has been researching in recent years. There were also interesting talks ranging from the quantum hall effect to non-extensive statistical mechanics, to recent proposals on measuring gravitational waves. And there was throughout the coffee breaks and common dinners a substantial exchange between participants from these different communities. The traditional outreach to the general public (Emmanuel Tsesmelis in Greek and Daniel Denegri in English) happened in evening presentations in locations nearby and was clearly separated from the interdisciplinary exchange at the conference. While talking with the younger participants, I sensed the interest in this mix of high-profile speakers and a breadths of topics that exceeded significantly that offered by many other topical conferences. ICNFP was clearly a very good conference, and for the physicists attending from other fields it was also an advertisement and an invitation for discussions of the physics done at CERN.