Irish students pay a virtual visit to CERN
One might expect that 200 students meeting physicists in the PS control room at CERN would disturb normal operations. However, the physics students from Dublin, Republic of Ireland, and Armagh, Northern Ireland, were not physically there - they were connected to CERN by the latest video technology. So on 6 October the PS control room had to accommodate only two additional screens and six physicists from CERN.
Organized by Steve Myers, head of the Accelerator Beams Division, and a graduate of Queen's University Belfast, and Ronan McNulty, a lecturer at University College Dublin, the videoconference was a pilot project that will be expanded to bring this technology to many more schools in Ireland.
The virtual visit was made on the 100th anniversary of the birth of E T S Walton, the Irish physicist who split the nucleus with John Cockroft in 1932, for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1951. The students were taken on a virtual tour around CERN and allowed to challenge the scientists with questions about physics and its uses.
The students also used the opportunity to get to know the panel as people, not just physicists, and asked them how they became involved with CERN.
Steve Myers paid a visit (real, not virtual) to Belfast earlier in the year on 2 July, where he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Science (Engineering) for his services to the subject by his alma mater, Queen's University Belfast.
A nursery for CERN's leadership
I was pleased to see again the picture of CERN's PS magnet group (CERN Courier October 2003 p38). I do not know to what extent all readers are aware that it turned out to be a "pépinière" (or "nursery" in English, in the horticultural sense) for high-level CERN leadership: one Nobel laureate (Simon van der Meer), two directors (Giorgio Brianti and Günther Plass, previously division leaders) and two division leaders (Bastiaan de Rad and Lorenzo Resegotti).
How did this come about? I do not quite know the answer. Maybe in the early days CERN was particularly attractive to "adventurous", enterprising, capable and highly educated young people, and in those days the screening was rather strict. My own application was via the Ministry in Bonn, and I was told that Werner Heisenberg had to endorse it before it could continue to CERN; subsequently I was interviewed by John Adams, Mervyn Hine and Christoph Schmelzer.
Helmut Reich, University of Fribourg.
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