Read article '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...
Read article 'An important day for science'
CERN’s director-general, Rolf Heuer, looks beyond the results announced on 4 July to a wider significance.
Read article '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...
Read article '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...
Read article '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...
Read article '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...
Read article '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...
Read article '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 ...
Read article '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...
Read article 'CERN and the EPS: a joint endeavour'
The European Physical Society (EPS) was founded at CERN in 1968. Today it represents more than 100,000 physicists through its 41 national member societies and it provides a scientific forum ...
