Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall [73]
However, reaching this landmark was quite a story, and this chapter tells the tale. So fasten your seat belt. It was a bumpy ride.
A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL
The story of CERN precedes that of the LHC by several decades. Soon after the end of World War II, a European accelerator center that would host experiments studying elementary particles was first conceived. At that time, many European physicists—some of whom had immigrated to the United States and some of whom were still in France, Italy, and Denmark—wanted to see cutting-edge science restored to their original homelands. Americans and Europeans agreed that it would be best for scientists and science if Europeans joined together in this common enterprise and returned research to Europe so they could repair the residue of devastation and mistrust remaining after the recently ended war.
At a UNESCO conference in Florence in 1950, the American physicist Isidor Rabi recommended the creation of a laboratory that would reestablish a strong scientific community in Europe. In 1952, the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (hence the acronym CERN) was set up to create such an organization, and on July 1, 1953, representatives from twelve European nations came together to create the institution that became known as “the European Organization for Nuclear Research,” and the convention establishing it was ratified the following year. The CERN acronym clearly no longer reflects the name of the research center. And we now study subnuclear, or particle, physics. But as is often true with bureaucracy, the initial legacy remained.
The CERN facility was deliberately built centrally in Europe on a site crossing the Swiss-French border near Geneva. It’s wonderful to visit if you like the outdoors. The fabulous setting includes farmland and the Jura Mountains immediately nearby and the Alps readily accessible in the distance. CERN experimenters are on the whole a rather athletic bunch, with their easy access to skiing, climbing, and biking. The CERN site is quite large, covering enough territory for an exhausting run to keep those athletic researchers in shape. The streets are named after famous physicists, so you can drive on Route Curie, Route Pauli, and Route Einstein on a visit to the site. The architecture at CERN was, however, a victim of the time in which it was built, which was the 1950s with bland International Style low-rises, so CERN buildings are rather plain with long hallways and sterile offices. It didn’t help the architecture that it was a science complex—look at the science buildings on most any university and you will usually find the ugliest buildings on campus. What enlivens the place (along with the scenery) are the people who work there and their scientific and engineering goals and achievements.
International collaborations would do well to study CERN’s evolution and its current operations. It is perhaps the most successful international enterprise ever created. Even in the aftermath of World War II, when the countries had so recently been in conflict, scientists from twelve different nations joined together in this common enterprise.
If competition played any role at all, it was primarily directed against the United States and its burgeoning scientific endeavors. Until experiments at CERN found the W and Z gauge bosons, almost all particle physics discoveries had come from accelerators in America. The drunken physicist who walked into the common area at Fermilab where I was a summer student in 1982 saying how they “had to find the bloody vector bosons” and destroy America’s dominance probably expressed the viewpoint of many European physicists at the time—though perhaps somewhat less eloquently and definitely with poorer diction.
CERN scientists did find those bosons. And now, with the LHC, CERN is the undisputed center of experimental particle physics. However, this was by no means predetermined when the LHC was first proposed. The American Superconducting Supercollider