Magazine

When CERN was just five years old, and the Proton Synchrotron was preparing for beams, Director-General Cornelis Bakker founded a new periodical to inform staff what was going on. It was eight-pages long with a print run of 1000, but already a section called “Other people’s atoms” carried news from other labs and regions. Some 60 years and almost 600 Couriers later, high-energy physicists are plotting a new path into the unknown, with the update of the European Strategy bringing into focus how much traditional thinking is shifting, with new ideas and strong opinions in abundance. The first mention of quarks in the Courier was in March 1964, a few months after they were dreamt up almost simultaneously on either side of the Atlantic by George Zweig and Murray Gell-Mann, who passed away in May, and whose wide-ranging legacy is explored in this issue. Back then, the idea of fractionally charged, sub-nucleonic entities seemed preposterous. It’s a reminder of how difficult it is to know what will be the next big thing in the fundamental-exploration business.