Charting the future of European particle physics
The original CERN convention, which was drafted nearly 60 years ago, foresaw that the organization should have a role as co-ordinator for European particle physics, as well as operating internati...
ESO and CERN – 50 years later
1948: The 5 m Hale telescope is inaugurated in Palomar, California. 1954: At the instigation of Jan Oort and Walter Baade, a group of renowned European astronomers meets to discuss how, by poolin...
An important day for science
On 4 July 2012, particle physics was headline news around the world thanks to a scientific success story that began over 60 years ago. It was a great day for science and a great day for huma...
From ionization of air to beyond the LHC
In August, some 100 physicists will gather at Bad Saarow in Germany to celebrate the centenary of the discovery of cosmic rays by the Austrian scientist, Victor Hess. The meeting place is close t...
It’s good to blog
It all started a year ago over dinner with a good bottle of wine in front of us. Steve Gourlay of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Stuart Henderson of Fermilab and myself talked about the future...
Authors and supporters
The first “high-energy” accelerators were constructed more than 80 years ago. No doubt they represented technological challenges and major achievements even though, seen from a 2012 p...
Towards a more confident future
Gloom and despondency about the economic climate fill the newspapers to saturation point. The eurozone is, once again, destined to fragment and disappear – there is a depressingly strong sensati...
Trends in isotope discovery
It all started innocently enough with a review article I wrote in 2004 about the nuclear driplines, which described the exploration of the most neutron- and proton-rich isotopes (Thoennessen 2004). Th...
Accelerator-driven systems for nuclear energy
Some years after Ernest Rutherford invented nuclear physics, he expressed a wish for “a copious supply of atoms and electrons which have an individual energy far transcending that of the α ...
From the Tevatron to Project X
The end of September marks the end of an era at Fermilab, with the shut down of the Tevatron after 28 years of operation at the frontiers of particle physics (CERN Courier March 2011 p5). The Tev...