Now this is how a business meeting should be :)

Excerpts from Dennis Overbye's summary of the panel discussion at Strings 2005:

• The panel discussion, titled "The Next Superstring Revolution," took place at Strings05. [...] That it was a somewhat unusual occasion was not lost on anyone. No other field of science, said Jacques Distler, from the University of Texas, would be presumptuous enough to have a meeting about its next revolution.

• Dr. Shenker [...] had recruited his panel with an accent on youth, on the ground that the progenitors of the previous revolutions were unlikely to be the makers of the next.

• At the end Dr. Shenker invoked his executive privileges. He asked the audience members for a vote on whether, by the year 3000, say, the value of the cosmological constant would be explained by the anthropic principle or by fundamental physics. The panel split 4 to 4, with abstentions, but the audience voted overwhelmingly for the latter possibility."Wow," exhaled one of the panel members amid other exclamations too colorful to print here.
• Dr. Shenker concluded, "We have made some progress in sharing our feelings."

But was there beer ?