On 7 September colleagues and friends of Gabriele Veneziano gathered at CERN for an informal celebration of the renowned theorist’s 80th birthday. While a visitor in the CERN theory division (TH) in 1968, Veneziano wrote a paper “Construction of a crossing-simmetric, Regge-behaved amplitude for linearly rising trajectories”. It was an attempt to explain the strong interaction, but ended up marking the beginning of string theory. During the special TH colloquium, talks by Paolo Di Vecchia (NBI&Nordita), Thibault Damour (IHES) and others explored this and numerous other aspects of Veneziano’s work, much of which was undertaken during his 30 year-long career at CERN. Concluding the day’s proceedings, Veneziano thanked his mentors, CERN TH and chance – “the chance of having lived through one of most interesting periods in the history of physics… during which, through a wonderful cooperation between theory and experiment, enormous progress has been made in our understanding of nature at its deepest level.”
