Read article 'The shock of the known'
Naturally, researchers take for granted that which is known, and instead focus on the unknown. Indeed, when I was at CERN working on the UA2 experiment, everyone was obsessed wih those areas of physic...
Read article 'Particle physics in 2054'
In a letter to the European Cultural Conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, in December 1949, Louis de Broglie advocated “the creation of a laboratory or institution where it would be possible to ...
Read article 'ICTP: the next 40 years'
CERN is 50 years old this year, just as ICTP turns 40. Both are international institutions of advanced scientific research with similar aspirations and, understandably, their histories are intertwined...
Read article 'Origins: the early days of CERN'
In 1946 a commission of the United Nations Security Council was entrusted with the task of making proposals to bring atomic energy under international control. It was one year after the devastation of...
Read article 'Going public: a new paradigm'
Most of the world’s computing power is no longer concentrated in supercomputer centres and machine rooms. Instead it is distributed around the world in hundreds of millions of PCs and game conso...
Read article 'More than just a conference'
When CERN’s Kurt Hübner and Günther Plass travelled to Rome in 1986 to join Sergio Tazzari of the Frascati Laboratory in search of a venue for the first European Particle Accelerator C...
Read article 'Smaller institutes look to gain from scientific fallout'
Large laboratories obtain scientific data in vast quantities and usually use this material for rapid research being driven by competition. The majority of important results are collected in as short a...
Read article 'The importance of funding outreach'
Science and technology play an increasingly important role in our everyday lives, and many of life’s decisions now depend on some sort of scientific or technical knowledge. At the same time, adv...
Read article 'CERN’s role on the European stage'
When the convention for the establishment of a European organization for nuclear research was signed in Paris on 1 July 1953, the 12 states who signed up to the formal establishment of CERN agreed tha...
Read article 'Science in the information society'
On 8 and 9 December 2003, CERN hosted a conference on The Role of Science in the Information Society (RSIS), immediately prior to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Our efforts to org...
