At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam they currently offer an audio tour by the artist Jeroen Krabbé. In a lovely, soft-accented English he recounts his personal experiences with the various exhibits over the many years that he has been visiting the museum – from the view as a child, a painter and actor, a parent and as a grand parent. His insights are both moving as well as fascinating and deep.
While reading Playing with Planets, I heard a similar voice in my head. Starting with personal experiences, Gerard ‘t Hooft lets his mind wander over the various aspects of life, speculating on the affects of new scientific developments on our lives in the future. The topics that he covers include flying kites (What is the highest you can possibly let a kite fly?), rising sea levels from global warming, modern dike construction and building floating cities on the ocean or in the sky. The topic that really grips his mind, however, seems to be space travel and colonization (mainly by robots), as well as ultimately moving around asteroids or even planets. (The latter is the origin of the title of the book.)
It is clearly important to ‘t Hooft that each of these speculations is firmly based on current scientific knowledge. They can thus be a motivation or even inspiration for actual scientific progress or technical developments. On this point he seems to take issue with the unfounded, wild speculations that he perceives to feature in most, if not all of, science-fiction writing. I am not much of a sci-fi buff myself, but to me such novels were always more of an enquiry into human nature – by placing people in unusual circumstances – rather than a real attempt at predicting or driving scientific progress. All the same, the author is well aware that he is stretching the limits of the possible when considering astro-mechanics.
My only criticism of his space-related speculations is that I believe they are severely constrained by the limited resources on Earth. When we realize that we have hit Peak Oil (or the equivalent for other materials), any interest in space travel and colonization will be put on the back burner. Nevertheless, I much enjoyed wandering the world, following this enquiring and original mind.
The music was enchanting. The Dysons stopped before the door, not wanting to break the magic of the superbly played Bach prelude. When the last cadence had rung down they walked in to find Edward Teller sitting at the piano apologizing that he was just passing by and that the instrument begged to be played while he was waiting for them to return home. It was a remarkable journey that had brought Teller, best known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, to the Dysons’ home at Berkeley. Even more remarkably, his journey was not without parallels.
If we were to trace back the wordlines of influential physicists to their birth, we would find several of them to converge in a tiny domain of space–time: Budapest, fin de siècle. In fact, those of Theodore von Kármán, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller never really diverged significantly. These compatriots all went from Hungary to Germany and eventually to the US. And they all changed the history of the 20th century.
Kármán Tódor, Szilárd Leó, Wigner Jeno˝, Neumann János and Edward Teller (Teller Ede in Hungarian) were all born to well-to-do Jewish families living within walking distance of each other. They all completed their studies in Germany, learning from masters such as Ludwig Prandtl, Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. Eventually they found refuge in the US from the menace of anti-Semitism, where they all joined the defence effort: von Kármán helped establish the modern US Air Force and founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Szilard patented the nuclear chain reaction and triggered the Manhattan Project, through a letter signed by Einstein to President Roosevelt; Wigner played an instrumental role in building the first nuclear reactor; von Neumann did important calculations for the Manhattan Project and described the principle of modern computer architecture; and Teller drove the creation of thermonuclear weapons.
In his book, first published in 2006 and now available in paperback, István Hargittai follows the lives of these five “Martians of Science”, and asks the inevitable questions: What was behind this remarkable surge of talent? Was it just a random rogue wave? What made these broadly educated, brilliant men seek the ultimate weapon? How did they see the role of scientists in society?
The author makes a critical assessment in the final chapter of their roles and weightings in science in comparison with other scientists of the 20th century. He even ventures to answer the intriguing counterfactual: What if they had stayed in Hungary?
That these five represented just the crest of a bigger wave is borne out in George Marx’s Voice of the Martians (Akademiai Kiado 2001). In addition to them, Marx presents personalities such as Dennis Gabor, the inventor of hologram; Arthur Koestler, the writer whose Darkness at Noon can be compared in its influence to George Orwell’s 1984; Paul Erdõs, the vagabond mathematician of “Erdõs number 0”; Val Telegdi, whose experiments explored the nature of weak interactions and who spent much of his time at CERN until his death a few years ago; and many others. From this long list of portraits a broader picture emerges, that of the fate of the central-European scientist in the 20th century.
Both authors draw on existing biographies but they supplement them with a wealth of detail from their personal conversations with their subjects or their respective colleagues, friends and family. Even so, with their scope and emphasis on exploring trends and connections, these books cannot do justice to each individual. They are instead excellent introductions that invite, and provide a guide to, further reading.
In the mid-1970s quantum chromodynamics (QCD) was generally referred to as the “candidate” theory of the strong interactions. It was known to be asymptotically free and was the only plausible field-theoretical framework for accommodating the (approximate) scaling seen in deep-inelastic scattering, as well as having some qualitative success in fitting the emerging pattern of scaling violations. Moreover, QCD could be used to explain qualitatively the emerging spectrum of charmonia and had some semi-quantitative successes in calculating their decays. No theorist seriously doubted the existence of the gluon but direct proof of its existence, a “smoking gluon”, remained elusive.
In parallel, jet physics was an emerging topic. Statistical evidence was found for two-jet events in low-energy electron–positron annihilation into hadrons at SPEAR at SLAC, but large transverse-momentum jets had not yet been observed at the Intersecting Storage Rings, CERN’s pioneering proton–proton collider. There, it was known that the transverse-momentum spectrum of individual hadron production had a tail above the exponential fall-off seen in earlier experiments, but the shape of the spectrum did not agree with naive predictions that were based on the hard scattering of quarks and gluons, so rival theories – such as the constituent-interchange model – were touted.
The three-jet idea
This was the context in 1976 when I was walking back over the bridge from the CERN cafeteria to my office one day. As I turned the corner by the library, it occurred to me that the simplest experimental situation to search directly for the gluon would be through production via bremsstrahlung in electron–positron annihilation. Two higher-energy collider projects were in preparation at the time, PETRA at DESY and PEP at SLAC, and I thought that they should have sufficient energy to observe clear-cut three-jet events. My theoretical friends Graham Ross, Mary Gaillard and I then proceeded to calculate the gluon bremsstrahlung process in QCD, demonstrating how it would manifest itself via jet broadening and the appearance of three-jet events featuring the long-sought “smoking gluon”. We also contrasted the predictions of QCD with a hypothetical theory based on scalar gluons.
I was already in contact with experimentalists at DESY, particularly my friend the late Bjørn Wiik, who shared my enthusiasm about the three-jet idea. Soon after Mary, Graham and I had published our paper, I made a trip to DESY to give a seminar about it. The reception from the DESY theorists of that time was one of scepticism, even hostility, and I faced fierce questioning on why the short-distance structure of QCD should survive the hadronization process. My reply was that hadronization was expected to be a soft process involving small exchanges of momenta and that two-jet events had already been seen at SPEAR. At the suggestion of Bjørn Wiik, I also went to Günter Wolf’s office to present the three-jet idea: he listened much more politely than the theorists.
The second paper on three-jet events was published in 1977 by Tom Degrand, Jack Ng and Henry Tye, who contrasted the QCD prediction with that of the constituent-interchange model. Then, in 1978, George Sterman and Steve Weinberg published an influential paper showing how jet cross-sections could be defined rigorously in QCD with a careful treatment of infrared and collinear singularities. In our 1976 paper we had contented ourselves with showing that these were unimportant in the three-jet kinematic region of interest to us. Sterman and Weinberg opened the way to a systematic study of variables describing jet broadening and multi-jet events, which generated an avalanche of subsequent theoretical papers. In particular, Alvaro De Rújula, Emmanuel Floratos, Mary Gaillard and I wrote a paper showing how “antenna patterns” of gluon radiation could be calculated in QCD and used to extract statistical evidence for gluon radiation, even if individual three-jet events could not be distinguished.
Meanwhile, the PETRA collider was being readied for high-energy data-taking with its four detectors, TASSO, JADE, PLUTO and Mark J. I maintained regular contact with Bjørn Wiik, one of the leaders of the TASSO collaboration, as he came frequently to CERN around that time for various committee meetings. I was working with him to advocate the physics of electron–proton colliders. He told me that Sau Lan Wu had joined the TASSO experiment and that he had proposed that she prepare a three-jet analysis for the collaboration. She and Gus Zobernig wrote a paper describing an algorithm for distinguishing three-jet events, which appeared in early 1979.
Proof at last
During the second half of 1978 and the first half of 1979, the machine crews at DESY were systematically increasing the collision energy of PETRA. The first three-jet news came in June 1979 at the time of a neutrino conference in Bergen. The weekend before that meeting I was staying with Bjørn Wiik at his father’s house beside a fjord, when Sau Lan Wu arrived over the hills bearing printouts of the first three-jet event. Bjørn included the event in his talk at the conference and I also mentioned it in mine. I remember Don Perkins asking me whether one event was enough to prove the existence of the gluon: my tongue-in-cheek response was that it was difficult to believe in eight gluons on the strength of a single event!
The next outing for three-jet events was at the European Physical Society conference in Geneva in July. Three members of the TASSO collaboration, Roger Cashmore, Paul Söding and Günter Wolf, spoke at the meeting and presented several clear three-jet events. The hunt for gluons was looking good!
The public announcement of the gluon discovery came at the Lepton/Photon Symposium held at Fermilab in August 1979. All four PETRA experiments showed evidence: Sam Ting’s Mark J collaboration presented an analysis of antenna patterns; while JADE and PLUTO followed TASSO in presenting evidence for jet broadening and three-jet events. One three-jet event was presented at a press conference and a journalist asked which jet was the gluon. He was told that the smart money was on the left-hand one (or was it the right?). Refereed publications by the four collaborations soon appeared and the gluon finally joined the Pantheon of established particles as the first gauge boson to be discovered after the photon.
An important question remained: was the gluon a vector particle, as predicted by QCD, or was it a scalar boson? In 1978 my friend Inga Karliner and I wrote a paper that proposed a method for distinguishing the two possibilities, based on our intuition about the nature of gluon bremsstrahlung. This was used in 1980 by the TASSO collaboration to prove that the gluon was indeed a vector particle, a result that was confirmed by the other experiments at PETRA in various ways.
Gluon-jet studies have developed into a precision technique for testing QCD. One-loop corrections to three-jet cross-sections were calculated by Keith Ellis, Douglas Ross and Tony Terrano in 1980 and used, particularly by the LEP collaborations, to measure the strong coupling and its running with energy. The latter also used four-jet events to verify the QCD predictions for the three-gluon coupling, a crucial consequence of the non-Abelian nature of QCD.
In the words of Mary Hopkin’s song in 1968, “those were the days, my friends”. A small group of theoretical friends saw how to discover the gluon and promptly shared the idea with some experimental friends, who then seized the opportunity and the rest – as the saying goes – is history. To my mind, it is a textbook example of how theorists and experimentalists, working together, can advance knowledge. The LHC experiments will be a less intimate environment but let us hope that strong interactions between theorists and experimentalists will again lead to discoveries for the textbooks!
In 1938 Giuseppe Cocconi published his first paper, “On the spectrum of cosmic radiation”. His last unpublished note of December 2005 bore the title “Arguments in favour of a personal interpretation of extra galactic cosmic rays”. No better indication could be given of his deep interest in astronomy and astrophysics, which lasted until he died in November 2008 aged 94.
The fields that he pioneered are now witnessing exciting new developments. Over the past six months they have reminded us of his many contributions to physics; his simple, direct way to conceive and perform experiments; and his unique way of presenting the subjects that he loved. In this article we describe some of these events and recall what Giuseppe contributed to the various fields.
Giuseppe’s interest in the cosmos began when he was in his teens. He would design sundials for friends’ villas around his home town of Como, observe the sky and read as much about it as he could. Late one evening, he happened to observe the fall of some Perseid meteors at an unexpected time. Noting quickly their number and time he transmitted the information to a fellow astronomer – probably the first of his observations to be “published”.
He entered the cosmic-ray scene in February 1938 when he was invited to Rome for six months by Edoardo Amaldi and started working with Enrico Fermi on the construction of a cloud chamber to study cosmic radiation. When Giuseppe returned to Milan he continued to pursue his new interest in cosmic rays, in particular extensive air showers, using Geiger counters to detect them. This was to be the focus of his research for the next 22 years.
At the time, Pierre Auger had just begun his intensive investigations of air showers. Today this work is honoured in the name of the Pierre Auger Observatory, which is taking the study of the highest-energy cosmic rays to new levels through the detection of very widespread showers. In 1938, electromagnetic showers were understood; mesotrons (muons) were known, but not their interactions; and pions were yet to be discovered. The existence of multiple-particle showers, spread over many square metres, was known – nothing, however, of their origins and little about their composition.
Giuseppe’s work concentrated on the study of the composition of such showers – as a function of their lateral extent, zenith angle, and altitude – in experiments both at sea level and at 2200 m above sea level, at Passo Sella in the Dolomites. Many of these experiments were conducted with Vanna Tongiorgi, who became his wife in 1945. The couple moved to Cornell in 1947 and continued their experiments (some in collaboration with Kenneth Greisen) at Echo Lake on Mt Evans, Colorado, as well as at sea level and at 1600 m water equivalent underground. This vast range of experiments, from 1939 to 1958, contributed considerably to the understanding of cosmic-ray showers: they are produced by the interaction of high-energy nuclei – chiefly protons – with the nuclei of the upper atmosphere.
Even before the discovery of the feature called the “ankle” in the energy spectrum of the primaries in 1960s, Giuseppe realized clearly that the charged primaries with an energy in excess of 1019 eV must come from extragalactic sources because their radius of curvature in the galactic magnetic field is of the same order as the size of our galaxy. In a talk at the 5th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC) in Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1955, he said: “These particles are cosmic, indeed, because even the galaxy seems too small to contain them.”
Giuseppe maintained his great interest in the physics of cosmic rays throughout his life. When he was informed that the Pierre Auger Observatory had started to operate in 2002 and had detected high-energy showers, he replied by writing “Mi ringiovanisci di cinquant’anni rinfrescando i miei primi amori (You make me 50 years younger by reminding me of my first love)”. His first love was, of course, the physics of cosmic rays. Jim Cronin, founder and first spokesperson of the observatory, recalls receiving “a wonderful congratulatory letter following our publication on 28 November 2007”, when the collaboration announced the discovery that active galactic nuclei are the most likely candidates for the source of the ultra-high-energy cosmic rays arriving on Earth. The discovery confirmed Giuseppe’s hypothesis from 50 years earlier that the highest-energy component in cosmic rays is of extragalactic origin. The Pierre Auger Observatory was inaugurated a year later, on 14 November 2008, only a few days after he passed away. One of us (GM), a long-time collaborator of Giuseppe, gave a speech as the current spokesperson of the collaboration.
The vast majority of cosmic-ray showers originate with charged primary particles, mainly protons and nuclei not heavier than iron, but a small fraction arise from the interaction of high-energy gamma rays in the atmosphere. At the 1959 ICRC in Moscow, while on leave at CERN from Cornell, Giuseppe suggested the possibility of detecting cosmic sources of high-energy photons using coincidence techniques to separate unidirectional photons from the isotropic background. He proposed that the Crab Nebula might be a strong source of gamma-rays in the tera-electron-volt range. The paper motivated Aleksandr Chudakov of the Lebedev Institute to build a pioneering gamma-ray telescope in the Crimea, designed to detect the short bursts of Cherenkov light generated in the atmosphere by extensive air showers, which had been first observed by Bill Galbraith and John Jelley at Harwell in the UK in 1953. Finally, in 1989, the Whipple air-Cherenkov telescope in the US detected the Crab Nebula as, indeed, a source of tera-electron-volt gamma rays.
Second-generation imaging air-Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs) – HESS, MAGIC and VERITAS – now cover the northern and southern hemispheres, detecting point-like and extended sources with a typical angular resolution of an arcminute. This means that galactic sources, such as supernova remnants (SNRs), can be imaged with a resolution smaller than their angular extension. A recent result from the HESS telescopes in Namibia on the emission from the nearest active galactic nucleus, Centaurus A, could explain the small cluster of a few events of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays that the Pierre Auger Observatory has observed in this direction.
Giuseppe enjoyed the discovery last year by MAGIC of very high-energy gamma rays from the active nucleus of the 3C279 galaxy. This quasar is at a distance of roughly half the radius of the universe, which is more than twice the distance of objects previously observed in gamma rays. The MAGIC Collaboration thus concludes that the universe appears more transparent at cosmological distances than previously believed, precluding significant contributions from light other than from sources observed by current optical and infrared telescopes.
The new IACTs are now complementing observations by gamma-ray telescopes in space. Giuseppe was interested in the results from two recent missions: AGILE, launched on 23 April 2007; and Fermi, launched on 11 June 2008. These missions are collecting important data on galactic and extragalactic sources in the energy range 100 MeV–100 GeV and should provide a wealth of information for understanding the sources of particle acceleration. These include gamma-rays bursts (GRBs), which are the highest-energy phenomena occurring in the universe since the Big Bang. It is no surprise that Giuseppe developed a recent interest in GRBs, reinforced by frequent discussions on the subject with Alvaro de Rújula at CERN. In 2008 the Fermi mission detected the most energetic GRB so far observed, GRB 080916C, at a distance of 12.2 thousand million light-years.
It was his interest in gamma rays that sparked the work for which Giuseppe became most widely known outside particle and astrophysics, after he and Philip Morrison (visiting CERN from Cornell) published a two-page article in Nature on “Searching for interstellar communications”. Morrison recalled that: “One spring day in 1959, my ingenious friend Giuseppe Cocconi came into my office and posed an unlikely question: would not gamma rays, he asked, be the very medium of communication between stars?” Morrison agreed but suggested that they should consider the entire electromagnetic spectrum. In the resulting paper they argued for searching around the emission frequency at 1420 MHz, corresponding to the 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen. Giuseppe contacted Sir Bernard Lovell at Jodrell Bank in the UK, which had the largest radio telescope at the time, but Lovell was sceptical, and nothing came of the proposal to devote some time towards searching for an extraterrestrial signal. The first radio search for an alien signal was left to others, initially to the Ozma project, which was started independently by Frank Drake in 1959. Later, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) became a serious research topic, capturing the public’s imagination. Now, anyone with a computer can contribute to the search through SETI@home.
Rising cross-sections
The letter quoted above written to one of us (GM) in 2002 ends as follows: “We do not yet know from where the local cosmic rays are coming. Will I live long enough to know? Move fast and keep me informed … Meanwhile cross-sections and scatterings continue their quiet life, following the new machine with the square of the logarithm.” The last sentence refers, of course, to the LHC and to the proton–proton total cross-section experiments planned by the TOTEM Collaboration. Giuseppe’s second main physics interest, after cosmic rays, was proton–proton scattering. This began at CERN at the PS in 1961, continuing at Brookhaven with measurements at the highest momentum transfer so far and, from 1971, at the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR).
In 1965 Giuseppe proposed with Bert Diddens and Alan Wetherell the use of the first extracted proton beam from the PS to measure elastic and inelastic cross-sections. The first experiment was on proton–proton scattering with large momentum-transfer. A few years earlier the same group had measured the shrinking of the forward elastic peak. This discovery gave an enormous boost to the phenomenology of Regge poles, which was fashionable at the time. The ensuing interpretation of the energy dependence of the total hadron–hadron cross-sections in terms of Pomeron exchange predicted an almost constant value of the cross-section with energy – a high-energy regime called “asymptopia”, which seemed to be round the corner and would be characterized by increasing interaction radii and decreasing central opacity.
In 1970 Giuseppe’s group joined the Rome ISS group of two of us (UA and GM), who had proposed to the ISR Committee the measurement of elastic-scattering events through the detection of protons scattered only a few millimetres from a circulating-proton current of many amperes. The movable parts that contained the detectors were soon called “Roman pots”. Giuseppe very much enjoyed such a small and delicate experiment. He would spend long hours gluing together thin scintillators and measuring the position of the counters in the ISR reference frame with theodolites.
By applying the optical theorem, the CERN–Rome group found that the proton–proton cross-section rises with energy. The results were published together with a paper by the Pisa–Stony Brook collaboration, who had detected the same phenomenon by measuring the total interaction rate. In parallel, the movable pots were used to measure the interference between the Coulomb amplitude and the nuclear amplitude, which was discovered to be positive and rising with energy; a consequence – through dispersion relations – of the fact that the total cross-section continues to rise at collision energies that were not directly attainable at the ISR.
The ISR best-fit gave a total proton–proton cross-section that rose as the square of the logarithm of the energy, behaviour that was confirmed by later experiments with Roman pots at the SPS and the Tevatron. It was to this that Giuseppe was referring when he wrote of cross-sections “continuing their quiet life” while waiting for TOTEM. He may have been disappointed that most physicists did not seem to realize the importance of this discovery. In the 1960s, asymptopia dominated; essentially, nobody thought that the cross-sections could rise with energy. Even Vladimir Gribov made the hypothesis that they might be slowly decreasing, despite the observation at Serpukhov that the kaon–proton cross-section was increasing slightly. Some theoreticians – such as Marcel Froissart and André Martin, Nick Khuri and Tom Kinoshita – envisaged, from a purely mathematical point of view, that there could be a rising cross-section and tried to see the consequences. The only serious model was the one proposed by H Cheng and T T Wu in 1968.
Giuseppe was very interested in seeing what would be found in the new energy range and one of his last topics of conversation was the incident on 19 September that brought the commissioning of the LHC to a halt. He was clearly disappointed because he hoped to see proton–proton collisions at really high energies.
Unity in physics
Whenever he could Giuseppe would use accelerator data to illuminate an open problem in cosmic-ray physics, and vice versa. A typical example is the paper published with one of us (GB) in Nature in 1987 in which a relevant limit is put on the neutrino electric charge by calculating the dispersion of the time of flight of the neutrinos produced by SN1987a and detected by Kamiokande. He later applied a similar method to the photon pulses emitted by the millisecond pulsar PSR 1937+21 to get a limit on the photon’s electric charge.
His view of a basic unity in physical science, from galaxies to elementary particles, was clear in a series of lectures that he delivered at CERN more than 20 years ago. Following an invitation from André Martin, who at the time was chairperson of the Academic Training Committee, Giuseppe gave a course on “Correlations between high-energy physics and cosmology” in 1980. In these lectures he illustrated what he believed, at the time, were the important problems that could strengthen the relations between particle physics and cosmology – the field now known as astroparticle physics. The main themes of the past 20 years were all present: from the analysis of extragalactic emissions (with particular attention to the cosmic microwave background radiation) to the measurements of the deceleration parameter of the cosmic expansion. The series was so successful that the committee invited him to lecture again in 1984, this time on “A new branch of research: Astronomy of the most energetic gamma rays”. It, too, was a great success.
In a paper written to celebrate Edoardo Amaldi’s 60th birthday, Giuseppe expressed his continuing vision of science: “A common aim of people interested in science is that of improving the comprehension of phenomena that can be observed in the world.” Throughout his long life in science he made many contributions to improving this comprehension, through his particular approach to research. Many years after his retirement, he continued to impress younger colleagues at CERN, some of whom would hand him their recent papers for comments and advice, as Massimo Giovannini recalls. “His comments were always sharp and precise … for Giuseppe one aspect of research was the art of phrasing the complications of a phenomenon in simple numerical terms.” This was perhaps best summarized by Nobel laureate Sam Ting in his Nobel prize speech in 1976: “…I went to CERN as a Ford Foundation Fellow. There I had the good fortune to work with Giuseppe Cocconi at the Proton Synchrotron, and I learned a lot of physics from him. He always had a simple way of viewing a complicated problem, did experiments with great care and impressed me deeply.”
• The authors are grateful to Jack Steinberger and André Martin for contributions on Cocconi’s cosmic-ray experiments and on the meaning of the discovery of the rising proton–proton cross-section.
The story of CERN Courier all began about a year earlier when an advertisement in the Belgian press mentioned that a international research organization based in Geneva was going to start its own periodical. It was intended to be an internal public-relations gesture meant to inform its staff of what was going on within its premises. The organization’s acronym, CERN, meant little, to say nothing, to the average reader – this writer included. Nevertheless, some months later he found himself the new member of the organization’s diminutive Public Information Office. Here he was endowed with the task of initiating a publication that reflected the high motivation of a staff dedicated towards building and operating a couple of large “atom-smashing” accelerators.
The job was a typical public-relations venture aimed at fewer than 900 souls, which may nowadays seem mild and benign compared with the complexity of today’s communication assignments. Still, the task featured several aspects that had to be addressed by a newcomer in a foreign environment. This was to be carried out within an organization that, for all its culture of openness, was far from familiar with disseminating its doings in simple terms.
Questions first
Among the challenges to be resolved, the most prominent was: what support could be expected from management? Fortunately, this proved to be just an academic question because the project was the brainchild of Cornelis Bakker. As director-general, his ideas on the subject were not challenged by his administration.
Then, among the practical problems, one had to secure a budget, which meant coaxing the finance office (FO) into allocating the odd sum. In fact, the amount was small enough that it could not be found recently in the FO’s archives. Fortunately the princely figure of SFr 7200 a year has surfaced out of this writer’s notes from the time. No need then, to wonder why the inclusion of paying advertisements in an international house publication was also first invented at CERN. This “invention”, although not quite as resounding as that of Tim Berners-Lee 30 years later, certainly helped in the survival of the infant CERN Courier. It must be said, however, that the scheme did not prove easy to manage, leading to some controversies about what contents could or could not be accepted. Still, the proof of the idea’s soundness was in its longevity and that the model was soon borrowed by other organizations.
The format was a major topic that covered several questions such as title, contents and illustration, language, size, paper weight, periodicity and distribution. Considerations on the publication’s title led to some hesitation. The name CERN Reporter was initially suggested but finally our one-man, self-appointed committee stumbled on CERN Courier, a “nom de guerre” that was accepted by the powers that were. It has stuck so far.
Deciding what the contents would include was perhaps the easier part of the production chain to tackle. Indeed, the development phase of CERN, with its two large (for the time) contraptions called accelerators – a 600 MeV synchrocyclotron and the 25 GeV (initially 24.3 GeV at 12 kG) proton synchrotron – was ripe with a myriad of possible stories that were both scientific and mundane. Editorial content that involved policies was routinely submitted to the director-general, who was always readily available for advising or checking. The approval of “reported” articles was, of course, always obtained from the interviewees themselves. As for illustrations, financial considerations (restricted to between 25% and 30% of the budget) and printing state-of-the-art limited them to black and white.
Another question concerned which language (or languages) to use but the answer was obvious, because English and French were the two official languages of the organization – and still are. Initially, and for many years, two separate editions came out – Courrier CERN and CERN Courier. A decision by the CERN management in 2005 reduced the French edition of the current Courier to an embryo-sized state, thus jeopardizing the interest of a large segment of non-English-speaking staff and workers. Perhaps a bilingual formula could have been chosen to alleviate production costs.
Deciding what format, frequency and circulation should be adopted for the publication proved to be tricky questions, with answers that were, of course, set by costs. However, another factor soon came to light: the time available for editorial production. Indeed, the choice of a monthly versus weekly periodical suddenly became self-evident when, in view of his superior’s untimely death, the budding editor found himself responsible not only for his newborn publication but also for most of CERN’s other public relations involvements such as visits – be they general or by VIPs – and press contacts. The initial print run of 1000 copies allowed for a distribution to staff, who numbered 886 at the end of 1959. However, the interest generated from outside circles – the press, individuals and other organizations and labs – warranted that circulation quickly rose to 2000 copies by March 1960.
Meanwhile, the choice of a printer had arisen. Who could supply an 8-page, A4-size product printed on machine-finish paper? Three quotes were obtained from local printers and Chérix & Filanosa Cy in Nyon was selected. For distribution it was decided to have the publication sent through external post, primarily to the homes of staff members – with the hope of involving and interesting their respective families, whose influence on staff morale could not be underestimated.
With all of those items mastered, the first issue appeared in mid-August 1959. It was a modest 8-page endeavour but even so it was well received by the “Cernois/Cernites” (yes, we coined the name that early!). Even outsiders responded favourably as witnessed among others by Albert Picot, a Geneva statesman doubling as an inveterate autodidact, and by a British member of CERN Council, H L Verry, who found it “excellent”.
Over the years, the advent of the Weekly Bulletin in 1965 allowed the CERN Courier to switch from being the house publication to a scientific journal. The Courier thus became the ambassador of CERN and particle physics to a large community of knowledgeable specialists and inquisitive people. Indeed, the trend had been set when, soon after its inception, a special issue of the Courier was devoted entirely to the PS, coming out in time for the machine’s inauguration on 5 February 1960.
Today, reflecting on the perspective of the CERN Courier after 50 years, it is rewarding to see that the once-straightforward attempt at promoting subnuclear research survived the vagaries of time. Personally, the privilege of having worked at CERN half a century ago makes one proud to have been associated – albeit in a small way – in the building and strengthening of what was, as the then president of council, François de Rose, said, “the greatest venture in international co-operation ever undertaken in the world of science”.
The most important event that has yet happened at CERN is the subject of the press release issued on 25 November. This news, which came just as the first proofs of this issue were coming off the press, was important enough to warrant rearranging the lay-out.
On July 27th the 100 units forming the magnet of the proton synchrotron were energized for the first time … On 13 October, after the radio frequency accelerating system had come into operation, events moved fast. On the 15th, an accelerated beam was observed during a few milliseconds. On 22 October the energy reached 400 MeV.
It was 7.40 p.m. on 24 November when the beam was accelerated to approximately 24 GeV, twenty-four thousand million electronvolt, i.e. the maximum energy under normal operating conditions. The acceleration was steady; moreover, 90% of the proton beam trapped by the synchrotron reached maximum energy. According to the physicists, this proportion is surprisingly high.
On the morning of 25 November all of the members of the Proton Synchrotron Division gathered in the main auditorium. John B Adams, under whose leadership CERN’s gigantic project has been successfully carried out, gave an account of the operations of the last few days. Expressing his gratitude to all those who, at CERN, had played a part in constructing and bringing the accelerator into operation, he announced: “Nuclear physicists will soon be able to use the machine.”
Next, Professor C J Bakker, director-general of CERN, said: “Of course, such a machine could only be the result of team work. But the team could not have worked at full pitch without the impetus of a leader: this leadership was provided by J B Adams. It is with the greatest of pleasure that I convey to him and his division the warmest congratulations of the president of the Council.”
• November 1959 pp1, 6–7 (extract)
Quarks and aces come to CERN
In February, a number of events combined to provide the kind of excitement for the physicists that more than makes up for the long periods of monotony and to make the rest of the staff somewhat more aware than usual that interesting things were happening.
The clues to part of the excitement had, in fact, been available in the library for a week or two, in the form of “preprints” of two theoretical papers, one by M Gell-Mann, of the California Institute of Technology, US, and the other by G Zweig, of the same Institute but at present a visiting scientist at CERN. Gell-Mann’s paper was published in Physics Letters on 1 February; Zweig’s, the more detailed of the two, is expected to appear later in Physical Review. Produced independently, both papers put forward a possible new way of looking at the theory of “unitary symmetry” known as SU3…
…The new ideas had a basic simplicity that was very appealing, and difficulties that had to be explained away in the former versions of the theory did not seem to arise this time, yet the idea of fractionally charged particles seemed quite preposterous. Even those who had suggested it seemed to share the doubts; Gell-Mann called his new particles “quarks”, bringing together literature and science with a reference to Finnegans Wake! Zweig turned to the field of card games for inspiration, and called his particles “aces”, with their combinations “deuces” and “treys”.
• March 1964 pp26–27 (extract).
Inauguration of the PS
Prof. J Robert Oppenheimer, director, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, speaking on behalf of the American Physical Society and of the National Academy of Sciences: “We wish you a future of new discovery, of increased understanding of nature, as a bright example of that co-operation which is required of us, for our survival and for the flourishing of high culture.
…We salute the vision and devotion of those who have made possible the proton synchrotron. We recognize not only that it marks a technical achievement of high significance, but also that it is a symbol of the common enterprise of people from many nations to give to all mankind new understanding of the forces that shape our physical environment.
…May those that work at CERN in the years to come find there, in steadily growing knowledge of the wondrous order of nature and of nature’s laws, ever renewed challenge for the questing mind and ever deepening satisfaction for the questing spirit.”
The issue for April 1962 featured the g-2 experiment, with a photo of the 6 m magnet appearing on the cover. The magnet was the heart of the first g-2 experiment, the aim of which was to measure accurately the anomalous magnetic moment, or g-factor, of the muon. This experiment was one of CERN’s outstanding contributions to physics and for many years was unique to the laboratory. Indeed, three generations of the experiment were performed at CERN during its first 25 years.
This August, the CERN Courier is 50 years old. That’s a good excuse to take stock of what’s changed and what’s stayed the same, so I found myself a copy of issue number 1 (reprinted in the following pages). With the Courier, it’s remarkable to see the ambition contained in that first edition, and to see how much the magazine has remained faithful to its founder Cornelis Bakker’s original vision.
Visually the CERN Courier has changed beyond recognition, as has the laboratory itself. The audience has changed too. Originally conceived as an internal newsletter, the Courier today addresses a global readership of more than 25,000. One thing that has stayed the same, however, is the magazine’s openness to the world. Issue number 1 reported not only on progress towards starting up the PS, but also carried news of the City of Hamburg’s purchase of a 40 MeV linac for a new lab known as the Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron. Back then, the Courier felt the need to spell out the DESY acronym. There was also news from the US, including bold ambitions for linear accelerator developments at Stanford University. CERN’s mission of bringing nations together for peaceful collaboration is witnessed by a report from a trip to the USSR, precursor to a long and fruitful collaboration with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research at Dubna.
The introduction on the first page of that first issue asks the question “what will the CERN Courier be?” It goes on to explain that it is there to “maintain the ideal of European co-operation and the team spirit which are essential to the achievement of our final aim: scientific research on an international scale”. Fifty years on, the world has changed immeasurably, but those words still ring true. Let’s look forward to the next 50 years!
Rolf Heuer, director-general.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the CERN Courier, in this issue we have reproduced the original edition in its entirety. Since then the magazine has covered numerous dramatic discoveries and breakthroughs at CERN and elsewhere. On pages 25–28 we give just a small selection of highlights.
It is 400 years since Galileo Galilei looked at the heavens through a telescope and changed our view of the universe for ever. In celebration and to stimulate worldwide interest in astronomy and science, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and UNESCO have initiated the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009).
Particle and nuclear physics may deal with the smallest components of matter, but both have strong links with astronomy – the news story above is just one example. This issue of CERN Courier celebrates IYA2009 with this and several longer articles. Nobel laureate George Smoot considers the exciting times in modern cosmology (Cosmology’s golden age), while features on Borexino and MAGIC (Borexino homes in on neutrino oscillations and A MAGIC touch brings astronomical delights) look at two of the many experiments in the new field of astroparticle physics. Lastly, Viewpoint (Big Science, bigger outreach) considers a valuable message these “big” sciences offer to the public at large.
In 1609 Galileo Galilei made the first recorded telescope observations of the night sky – an event that is being celebrated all through 2009 in the International Year of Astronomy. He soon ran into trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities, partly because he used Italian instead of Latin in many of his letters and books, which gave people access to his new scientific interpretation of the world. Fortunately things have changed since then and today the scientific community and the relevant authorities on scientific policies share a general consensus on the importance of conveying to society the main results and general consequences of research.
Take high-energy physics as an example: over the past few years, dedicated working groups and projects have been set up to develop outreach activities. A good example of an annual activity of this kind, aimed at young students in physics and high-school teachers, is the EPPOG Masterclasses, which involves the participation of some 80 research institutes and universities across Europe. Recently several African and American institutes joined the project.
Permanent or travelling exhibitions are another interesting means for the “large-scale” dissemination of high-energy physics information, showing the public the still-unresolved mysteries of the universe and the gigantic equipment needed in particle accelerators (such as the LHC), detectors and computing systems (such as the Grid).
These valuable initiatives have been unquestionably successful but their real reach to society is limited because of the relatively reduced number of participants and the competition from other fields (scientific or not) already on the market, such as websites, video games and so on. We can think of taking advantage of these more loosely related activities such as the film adaptation of Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, Angels & Demons, currently in cinemas around the world. While artists should be allowed creative freedom and their view on science should not be rejected, they sometimes risk being somewhat misleading. I am not particularly enthusiastic about spreading the idea that a bomb made of antimatter stolen from CERN could destroy the Vatican (or any other city). Nonetheless, the association of physics (and more generally, science) with other social and cultural manifestations should be mutually beneficial and deserves closer attention.
Despite the universality of its principles, methodology and objectivity of results, the advancement of scientific knowledge has proved to be socially dependent, from the golden age of Pericles and the “invention” of democracy to the Renaissance and the rise of humanism together with the birth of modern science. Society itself may fuel scientific advancement in a particular direction: thermodynamics was driven by the need for building more efficient heat engines at the beginning of Industrial Revolution, thereby decisively contributing to the foundations of classical physics in the 19th century.
As an example from particle physics, CERN was created as a free forum for nuclear science in a Europe devastated by the Second World War “to encourage the formation of research laboratories in order to increase international scientific collaboration&ellip;” (as stated at the Fifth UNESCO Conference in Florence, 1950). The CERN convention was gradually ratified during 1953–54 by the 12 founding member states, while the Treaty of Rome that founded the European Union was signed in 1957. Science often goes ahead of society.
In this regard the Web – born at CERN – has represented a dramatic democratization of knowledge, teaching and information. Virtually free for everybody on the planet (wherever electricity is available), it was an almost direct consequence of the free circulation of scientific data among researchers. More generally, big scientific collaborations are genuine examples of worldwide co-operation between different scientists and technicians regardless of their age, gender, religious beliefs or nationality.
Social needs, in turn, continuously demand technological achievements that ultimately stem from fundamental research. Nuclear and particle physics, for instance, have provided crucial tools for medical diagnosis, from the discovery of X-rays to modern medical-imaging techniques.
Undoubtedly outreach must convey to society the excitement of scientific discovery and the importance of technological returns. However, in my opinion, the message from science should not stop there. Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (Sidereal Messenger) was heralding in 1610 not only the existence of mountains on the Moon or satellites around Jupiter, but also the dawn of a new epoch. Indeed, the social impact and controversy turned out to be much greater than with De revolutionibus by Nicolaus Copernicus (1543) or Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia nova (1609) – because it was easier to read.
We are currently witnessing crucial developments of society globally, from a more just economy to extended human rights, environmental protection and nature conservation. While keeping the possible misuse of scientific and technological applications in mind as a warning, we should ensure that the virtues that are traditionally associated with “Big Science”, historically entangled in the social progress of humanity, are praised as an example to counteract ignorance, obscurantism and fanaticism.
In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist at CERN, handed a document entitled “Information management: a proposal” to his group leader Mike Sendall. “Vague, but exciting”, were the words that Sendall wrote on the proposal, allowing Berners-Lee to continue with the project. Both were unaware that it would evolve into one of the most important communication tools ever created.
Berners-Lee returned to CERN on 13 March this year to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the birth of the World Wide Web. He was joined by several web pioneers, including Robert Cailliau and Jean-François Groff, who worked with Berners-Lee in the early days of the project, and Ben Segal, the person who brought the internet to CERN. In between reminiscing about life at CERN and the early years of the web, the four gave a demonstration of the first ever web browser running on the very same NeXT computer on which Berners-Lee wrote the original browser and server software.
The event was not only about the history of the web; it also included a short keynote speech from Berners-Lee, which was followed by a panel discussion on the future of the web. The panel members were contemporary experts who Berners-Lee believes are currently working with the web in an exciting way.
Berners-Lee’s original 1989 proposal showed how information could easily be transferred over the internet by using hypertext, the now familiar point-and-click system of navigating through information pages. The following year, Cailliau, a systems engineer, joined the project and soon became its number-one advocate.
The birth of the web
Berners-Lee’s idea was to bring together hypertext with the internet and personal computers, thereby having a single information network to help CERN physicists to share all of the computer-stored information not only at the laboratory but around the world. Hypertext would enable users to browse easily between documents on web pages that use links. Berners-Lee went on to produce a browser-editor with the goal of developing a tool to make a creative space to share and edit information and build a common hypertext. What should they call this new browser? “The Mine of Information”? “The Information Mesh”? When they settled on a name in May 1990 – before even the first piece of code had been written – it was Tim who suggested “the World Wide Web”, or “WWW”.
Development work began in earnest using NeXT computers delivered to CERN in September 1990. Info.cern.ch was the address of the world’s first web site and web server, which was running on one NeXT computer by Christmas of 1990. The first web-page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which gave information about the WWW project. Visitors to the pages could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own web page and an explanation on how to search the web for information.
Although the web began as a tool to aid particle physicists, today it is used in countless ways by the global community
To allow the web to extend, Berners-Lee’s team needed to distribute server and browser software. The NeXT systems, however, were far more advanced than the computers that many other people had at their disposal, so they set to work on a far less sophisticated piece of software for distribution. By the spring of 1991, testing was under way on a universal line-mode browser, created by Nicola Pellow, a technical student. The browser was designed to run on any computer or terminal and worked using a simple menu with numbers to provide the links. There was no mouse and no graphics, just plain text, but it allowed anyone with an internet connection to access the information on the web.
Servers began to appear in other institutions across Europe throughout 1991 and by December the first server outside the continent was installed in the US at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). By November 1992 there were 26 servers in the world and by October 1993 the number had increased to more than 200 known web servers. In February 1993 the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign released the first version of Mosaic, which made the web easily available to ordinary PC and Macintosh computers.
The rest, as they say, is history. Although the web began as a tool to aid particle physicists, today it is used in countless ways by the global community. Today the primary purpose of household computers is not to compute but “to go on the web”.
Berners-Lee left CERN in 1994 to run the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and help to develop guidelines to ensure long-term growth of the web. So what predictions do Berners-Lee and the W3C have for the future of the web? What might it look like at the age of 30?
In his talk at the WWW@20 celebrations Berners-Lee outlined his hopes and expectations for the future: “There are currently roughly the same number of web pages as there are neurons in the human brain”. The difference, he went on to say, is that the number of web pages increases as the web grows older.
One important future development is the “Semantic Web” – a place where machines can do all of the tedious work. The concept is to create a web where machines can interpret pages like humans. It will be a “move from using a search engine to an answer engine,” explains Christian Bizer of the web-based system groups at Freie Universität Berlin. “When I search the web I don’t want to find documents, I want to find answers to my questions!” he says. If a search engine can understand a web page then it can pick out the exact answer to a question, rather than simply presenting you with a list of web pages.
As Berners-Lee put it: “The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is a lot of data that we all use every day, and it’s not part of the web. For example, I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar, but can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank-statement lines in a calendar? Why not? Because we don’t have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself.”
“Device independence” is a move towards a greater variety of equipment that can connect to the web. Only a few years ago, virtually the only way to access the web was through a PC or workstation. Now, mobile handsets, smart phones, PDAs, interactive television systems, voice-response systems, kiosks and even some domestic appliances can access the web.
The mobile web is one of the fastest-developing areas of web use. Already, more global web browsing is done on hand-held devices, like mobile phones, than on laptops. It is especially important in developing countries, where landlines and broadband are still rare. For example, African fishermen are using the web on old mobile phones to check the market price of fish to make sure that they arrive at the best port to sell their daily catch. The W3C is trying to create standards for browsing the web on phones and to encourage people to make the web more accessible to everyone in the world.
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