Visionaries have the freedom of mind to shape the future when other people’s horizons are obstructed by the present. François de Rose was a visionary. In the aftermath of the Second World War, when Europe was in ruins and everything had to be rebuilt, the diplomat understood the importance of reviving fundamental research and, above all, of co-operation on a continental scale as the driving force of this ambition. In a Europe that was just starting to get back on its feet, it would be no mean feat. Nonetheless, François, alongside the prominent physicists of the time, put his energy into making this vision a reality. They lobbied governments for the creation of a centre that would work towards this goal and winning support, CERN was established in 1954 – an achievement of which François was extremely proud. “The result is even better than its founders hoped for,” he was often heard saying. His pride was even greater knowing that a visionary’s ideas, however strongly he or she believes in them, often take years to become reality and are sometimes never realized at all.
A strategist and a visionary to the end, François de Rose passed away on 23 March 2014 in Paris at the age of 103, having recently published his memoirs, Un diplomate dans le siècle. With his passing CERN has lost the last of its founding fathers, a loyal supporter and a dear friend.
Born in 1910 in Carcassonne in the south of France, he lost his right eye in a childhood accident, which prevented him from following the family tradition of a military career. His father, Charles de Tricornot de Rose, had been the founding father of combat aviation in France, the holder of the first military aviation licence, and had died in action in 1916.
After obtaining his baccalauréat, François embarked on a career as a diplomat and joined the French Embassy in London in 1937. He enjoyed recounting the splendid receptions that he attended at Buckingham Palace in the days when King George VI still ruled the British Empire and the future Queen Elizabeth II was just a child. Many years later, in the early years of the 21st century, it was fascinating to hear him tell anecdotes from his career of days long-passed, rather like reading an animated history book.
Presided by François, the first resolution for the creation of a European Council for Nuclear Research was adopted
During the Second World War, his fluency in English led him to serve as a liaison officer for the British military. However, it was after the conflict that his career took him down the route of European science – an unexpected detour for someone who had been discouraged by his maths teacher from pursuing a career in science. François was sent to the US to serve on the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. There he met several renowned physicists, including the American Robert Oppenheimer, with whom he forged a friendship, and the Frenchmen Pierre Auger, Francis Perrin, Lew Kowarski and Bertrand Goldschmidt. François took up their cause. European physicists and some of their American counterparts were convinced that fundamental research in Europe needed to be brought back to life, and that this could only be achieved if the countries that had just been at war co-operated. The instruments that were needed to further the study of the infinitesimally small were particle accelerators, which were too expensive for any individual European country to build.
François and a handful of physicists embarked on a tour of Europe to appeal for the creation of the first European organization for fundamental research. Their objective was to pool resources for research to provide researchers with the tools that they needed and so curtail the brain drain. Pierre Auger, director of UNESCO’s Natural Sciences Department, organized an intergovernmental conference in Paris in 1951, presided by François, during which the first resolution for the creation of a European Council for Nuclear Research was adopted. The rest is history: CERN was established by 12 European states in 1954.
François became France’s delegate to the CERN Council and later served as president of Council from 1958 to 1960. In this capacity, he gave a speech at the inauguration of the Proton Synchrotron (PS), which for a few months was the most powerful accelerator in the world. His visionary nature was evident in this speech, which he gave in front of an audience of well-known faces and legendary physicists including Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. “The people who will meet here,” he said of CERN, “who will come from the member states and beyond to work together on a wholly peaceful and impartial mission, are united by the same passion for knowledge and subject to the same rules of utmost intellectual integrity.” Today, CERN welcomes researchers from all over the world and its membership has recently been opened to non-European states, but a few years after its founding, such an international future was still a long way off.
During his mandate, François negotiated CERN’s extension into French territory, which was agreed in a treaty signed in 1965. To commemorate his role in this milestone, CERN gave François a piece of rock drilled from the site, engraved with the words: “À François de Rose – La science ne connaît pas de frontières” (“To François de Rose – Science knows no borders”).
François continued to pursue his diplomatic career for many years. Notably, he served as the French ambassador to Portugal from 1964 to 1969 and as the permanent representative of France to the NATO Council from 1970 to 1974. He was well known as a specialist in defence and nuclear matters. For a long time, he was an eminent member of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, whose expertise in international strategy and military matters is world renowned.
The diplomat would remain attached to CERN, which he described as “the most beautiful feather in my ambassador’s cap”. He continued to take an interest in and show his enthusiasm for scientific discoveries, even in his final years. In 2010, when he came to CERN to celebrate his 100th birthday, he promised to return when the Higgs boson was discovered – a promise that he fulfilled last year with a further visit to the laboratory. During this last visit, he expressed with modest sincerity his great admiration for the physicists that he met – a mutual admiration that led to some often comical exchanges of compliments.
François had a strategic vision for science, a vision that drove him to contribute to CERN’s creation in the hope that scientific collaboration between countries that had been at war would play a part in maintaining sustainable peace. A humanist, he always used CERN to counter the arguments of the Eurosceptics. When he met some members of the French parliament during his visit to CERN last year, at the height of the European crisis, he said to them: “When Europeans unite, they can do great things.”
Optimistic and full of energy, he performed some substantial feats even in his later years. To mark his 90th birthday, he played 90 holes of golf in one day, and when he was 96, he travelled around Cape Horn to Patagonia with his two daughters. He regularly had opinion pieces published in major daily newspapers. To those who asked if he had a secret for reaching 100 years of age, he responded that it had simply required “patience, because it took quite some time”. He never failed to display elegance with a touch of humour, which charmed those who spoke to him. During his last visit, he promised to come back for the next big discovery. “But you’ll have to be quick,” he joked, “I won’t be around forever.” Sadly, he was right again.
In March 1989 at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal to develop a radical new way of linking and sharing information over the internet. The document was entitled “Information Management: A Proposal”. And so the web was born. Now, Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the World Wide Web Foundation are launching a series of initiatives to mark the 25th anniversary of the original proposal, and to raise awareness of themes linked to the web, such as freedom, accessibility and privacy.
Twenty-five years to the day after he submitted his proposal, on 12 March Berners-Lee, together with the Web Foundation, launched the “Web We Want” campaign. The aim is to promote a global dialogue and changes in public policy to ensure that the web remains an open, free and accessible medium, so that everyone around the world can participate in the free flow of knowledge, ideas and creativity online.
Berners-Lee announced the campaign at the Palais des Nations in Geneva on 10 December – Human Rights Day 2013 – during a series of conversations on a variety of issues in human rights, which were held in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. There he set out the principles that inspire the movement for a free flow of information, such as affordable access, protection of privacy, freedom of expression, and neutral networks that do not discriminate against content or user.
Fittingly, the campaign is using the web to pass on the message, and it has already seen significant mobilization on social media with half a billion people worldwide hearing Berners-Lee’s call for a digital bill of rights in every country. CERN promoted the launch of the campaign on its website with a series of opinion pieces from early contributors and enthusiasts of the World Wide Web, which are republished here.
The internet created the platform and opportunity for people to communicate, to collaborate and to share at unprecedented scale and speed. The creation of the World Wide Web opened up these possibilities to the world, enabling individuals to participate and play their own creative role in the sharing of all human achievements.
This has enabled interactions between all sorts of people – from all sorts of domains, including business, government and scientific communities – for all manner of activities like never before in human history. The web has evolved from simple information sharing to transacting business through socializing and more recently collaborative problem solving in citizen cyber science. In these ways it harnesses the capabilities of humanity to do what we do best – share, learn, collaborate and innovate.
However, with this capability comes considerable responsibility. Basic human rights – including the right to freedom of expression and the protection of privacy – all need to be balanced and preserved in order that this incredible resource can be a safe and exciting place for creativity, for people of all ages and interests. The accessibility and openness of the internet are crucial to enabling new ideas to flourish and compete with long-standing traditions, and to ensure that the evolution of the web continues to proceed at a pace limited only by our ideas.
This responsibility rests with all of us – whether politicians, lawmakers, scientists or citizens – to ensure that the incredible progress we have made in the last 25 years, starting with the work of a few, and now capturing the innovations of many, can continue in an open, trusted, safe, free and fair way.
• David Foster, Deputy Head of CERN’s IT department.
Reams of material have been written about where, why and when the World Wide Web was born, but what about its conception? Gestation was rather like that of an elephant – difficult to know it had started and taking almost two years to complete. In fact, I think the title of Tim Berners-Lee’s book Weaving the Web, published in 1999 with Tim dubbed the inventor, is a better metaphor. When do a spider’s first few threads become a web? And when, if ever, is the job finished?
In 1984, Tim was recruited by CERN’s Data and Documents (DD) division and he elected to join the Read-Out Architecture (RA) section in the On-Line Computing (OC) group. I was the RA section leader and Tim worked with (and without!) me for the next six years. Mike Sendall, the OC group leader, agreed our work plans and held our purse strings.
At the time, CERN hosted lots of small and medium-sized experiments using a variety of mini-computers, personal computers, operating systems, programming languages and network links. Back at the ranch, the OC group was endeavouring to provide data-acquisition systems, the software used by equipment closely connected to the detectors, for as many experiments as possible. The conundrum, as in other areas, was how to embrace heterogeneity without having squads of workers generating exclusive solutions to intrinsically identical problems for bewildered users. Just the kind of anarchic jumble that Tim found challenging.
Several of us believed that standardization, where apt, reduced waste and frustration. But the s-word was anathema in some corners of CERN, on the grounds that it stifled creativity, and we evangelists incurred the wrath of a few mandarins. Yet conformity seemed to rankle less when it came to electronics. Commercial companies were already competitively producing computer interfacing hardware that conformed to ANSI/IEEE international standards.
Hurrah! If you know the hardware you’re going to get, you can prescribe how to handle it. I had worked with the NIM (US)/ESONE (Europe) group that defined standard software routines for CAMAC interfacing and was on the committee developing hardware and software standards for the speedier FASTBUS system. Tim arrived as we were dotting the Is and crossing the Ts of the FASTBUS routines.
He was obviously a smart young man (smart-clever rather than smart-sartorial!), full of fizz and, as a bonus, entirely likeable. When he presented his ideas in our section meetings, few of us if any could understand what he was talking about. His brain would overtake his voice, and holding up signs saying “Tim, slow down” rarely had the desired effect. We sometimes asked him to put things in writing, which didn’t necessarily help either. One of his erstwhile colleagues recalls “we knew it was probably exciting, maybe even important, but that it could take hours to figure out”. Listening to one of Tim’s presentations today, one can still detect the run-away style, even after his training in public speaking. However, I remember an occasion when his delivery was impeccable, in a play performed by the Geneva English Drama Society!
Tim’s main activity in the RA section was his Remote Procedure Call RPC, whereby a program on one computer could transparently access procedures, routines, on other computers, even if they used different operating systems and programming languages, and whatever the network connecting them. He wasn’t too pleased when I asked him to specify the FORTRAN binding for FASTBUS routines, that is to define precisely the properties of the routines’ parameters as seen from within a FORTRAN program. Only later did he appreciate the value of that unwelcome task, when preparing the standards that would underpin the first two Ws of WWW. He knew that the job, however tedious, had to be done and done well, with the devil lurking in the nit-picking details.
Shortly afterwards I drifted away from ECP, but I will always retain happy memories of the 1980s and the pleasure of having Tim in our section
Come 1990, another CERN reshuffle and Tim stayed behind in the new Computing and Networks (CN) division, while the rest of us went off to Electronics and Computing for Physics (ECP). Shortly afterwards I drifted away from ECP, but I will always retain happy memories of the 1980s and the pleasure of having Tim in our section. He was not the only singular character in that multifaceted team, but with his congenial personality he could work with anyone. At least I don’t recall having to field any complaints, apart from “what on earth is Tim proposing?” Well, now we know.
• Peggie Rimmer, Tim Berners-Lee’s supervisor from 1984 to 1990.
Good old Bitnet, and the rise of the World Wide Web
Although I presented my PhD thesis a mere 17 years ago, the last back-up of my thesis, programs and data was saved on a 7-inch magnetic tape reel. This of course meant that I did my graduate studies at the time when the word “network” was most often used in the plural. Each and every network was endowed with its own set of applications and accessibility for e-mail, document exchange, remote interactivity and even chatting.
Yes, computer-mediated social interaction came long before the World Wide Web. In the late 1980s, connectivity exploded at universities and research laboratories around the world. One noticeable side product was that young academics started dating each other from across the globe!
All of this was a heterogeneous mess, of course. But at the same time, it was pleasurably low level, and it was awesome. You knew what was happening behind the scenes when retrieving data and documents, you knew the hops that your “Relay” instant messaging made on the Bitnet, because you simply had to know. Data, documents, social interaction – it was all there. It was cool and in some ways efficient, but not practical, and it scaled very poorly.
And so the World Wide Web arrived on the internet. With the web came an immediate sense of need: you needed a fancy personal homepage, complete with graphical interface and colour. The personal homepage was quickly perceived as a way of asserting one’s very existence. I was on a text-based, black-on-orange remote terminal, and I still remember putting together my first homepage late at night in early 1993, while one of the graphical stations was free in the research group.
The web was practical and universal, and the other networks quickly withered away in a form of Darwinian selection. The web quickly drove the quest for desktop computer stations with screens with graphics capability. I still opted for size and sharpness, staying with black and white for several years, while all of my colleagues seemed to be rubbing their sandy eyes after only a few hours of 15-inch colour experience.
The web brought a singular revolution that quickly changed every aspect of our screen work: a global, all-topic search possibility
The web brought a singular revolution that quickly changed every aspect of our screen work: a global, all-topic search possibility. Computer code, a formula, a result, a cooking recipe, a person, a phone number – everything was at hand in little more than an instant, with no physical displacement. We immediately started setting up analysis team pages to share progress more efficiently. I was in the DELPHI experiment Team 5, the “Higgs hunters” team. It was mostly pages with some expert documentation and links to plots, programs and data, but we also all invented countless ways to make information on the web dynamic. It took time and pain before it deserved the word interactive.
Today I sometimes have the impression that no development is ever made without constantly interrogating the web for advice, before even thinking through the problem: “Someone will surely have solved the problem in a better way, no?” is an all-too-common approach.
In those early days I rarely discussed my networked profession and life with friends and family – the web was just a new tool of my trade. After another long stay at CERN in 1993–1994, I went back to Stockholm in February 1994. Sitting quietly reading on the subway, it was with an indescribable surprise and awe for what was to come that I discovered an http address on a regular advertisement! Within months, commercial web addresses were all over our billboards in Sweden.
Back then, the good old Bitnet chat had a rule. The Dutch Master Operators insisted that “Relay is a ‘privilege’, NOT a right, and Relay abuse will NOT be tolerated!” I often wish the web had it too, including commercial boundaries under the same heading.
• Richard Jacobsson, senior physicist on the LHCb experiment.
In 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN, I was responsible for the laboratory’s multi-protocol e-mail gateway. I remember discussing with Tim naming conventions for applications, and configuration rules for the first mailing lists that he requested to allow pioneer websites to discuss World Wide Web code.
We attended technical meetings sponsored by the European Commission – myself for e-mail standardization, and Tim for the Information Services Working Group (WG) – where he presented his code, and some Scandinavian universities even showed an interest in installing it.
Tim conceived, wrote and presented the web as an open, distributed, networked medium. He believed that the web should be accessible by everyone, everywhere – embracing from the first web conference at CERN in 1994 development for people with disabilities or a sub-optimal network infrastructure. He presented the web – in his proposal to CERN in March 1989 – as a platform for scientific collaboration, and 20 years later reinforced this commitment, announcing http://webscience.org as a home for scientists online.
And Tim Berners-Lee continues to strive for a free, open web today. Setting up the World Wide Web Foundation was just one of the many steps he took to maintain this ideal. On 12 May last year, at the United Nations in Geneva, Tim announced the Web We Want campaign, which will form the centre of the debate around today’s information-surveillance methods.
Up until 1998, in the Web Office at CERN, we were still able to count all the world’s web servers
As a CERN scientist, I share Tim’s ideas for an open, collaborative web. I believe that CERN’s software development based on web standards should be linked to the relevant working groups in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web.
Up until 1998, in the Web Office at CERN, we were still able to count all the world’s web servers. We still thought we could keep track of the web’s expansion. Apache put an end to this, as starting one’s own web server became so easy. But we were still writing search algorithms of our own, with integrated dictionaries for natural language searches, with help from technical students. We enjoyed, at the time, a certain pluralism, because we had multiple commercial or public-domain products to compare and evaluate, search engines, web calendars and editing tools. We didn’t use “Google” as a synonym for “search”.
The explosion of websites around the turn of the century highlighted the importance of identifying trustworthy information online. At CERN, we understand that presence on the web doesn’t necessarily make information valid – it must be recent and from a trusted source. Sophisticated algorithms are developed to promote web content by devious means, such as clever use of metadata to “arrange” the importance of search results, spread false rumours, manipulate public opinion. Browsing today requires a discerning eye and a knack for research.
Today, CERN software developers write grid middleware, data-management software, collaborative tools, repositories for data-preservation projects and web-based applications. They use, among other standards, the http protocol. A collaboration with relevant W3C working groups would lead to technical benefits in these times when resources are limited and the web has become much more than a document repository.
The web has changed human society more radically than Gutenberg’s printing press. It is a valuable platform for education and free exchange of ideas. But it can also be a tool for propaganda and surveillance.
Now more than ever, we at CERN should keep in touch with the evolution of the web: after all, it changed the world as we know it at the end of the 1980s – it could do so again.
• Maria Dimou, CERN computer scientist and early web contributor.
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 Hiroshima, and the idea of such control had been approved by all the governments. The commission was made up of influential scientists who had the knowledge that was needed to understand the problem fully and of politicians and diplomats representing the governments’ interests. It was in this capacity as a diplomat that I represented France on the commission and was able to establish trusting and friendly relations with many of my countrymen who were scientists, as well as with foreign scientists, first and foremost among whom was Robert Oppenheimer, who was to play a very important role in the creation of CERN.
In the course of the many conversations I had with Oppenheimer in the US, in which we were often joined by other Frenchmen, who were my scientific and technical advisers, he confided his worries about the future development of fundamental physics in Europe. “Almost all we know, we have learnt in Europe” is the substance of what he said. He himself had been a pupil of Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. “But in the future,” he continued, “research is going to require industrial, technical and financial resources that will be beyond the means of individual European countries. You will therefore need to join forces to pool all your resources. It would be fundamentally unhealthy if European scientists were obliged to go to the US or the Soviet Union to conduct their research.”
Early in 1950, convinced by this argument, Francis Perrin, then high commissioner for atomic energy in Paris, and I began to visit the main European research centres that would need to be persuaded. We met with a favourable response from Edoardo Amaldi in Italy, Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, Paul Scherrer in Switzerland and possibly Werner Heisenberg in Germany, if I remember correctly, but we were given a cooler reception in other capitals. Nevertheless, the idea was now on the table and was no doubt starting to take root in people’s minds. Moreover, it came on top of an appeal on similar lines from the European Centre for Culture in Geneva, led by Denis de Rougemont from Switzerland and Raoul Dautry from France. It was then that Isidor Rabi, a Nobel prize winner, made his crucial speech at the UNESCO General Conference in Florence in June 1950. Speaking on behalf of the US, he more or less said the same thing that Oppenheimer had said to us in private.
This speech marked a definite turning point, persuading the majority of European scientists and their governments to adopt a resolution authorizing UNESCO to “assist and encourage the formation and organization of regional centres and laboratories in order to increase and make more fruitful the international collaboration of scientists”. Pierre Auger, UNESCO’s director of natural sciences, took matters in hand and, at the end of 1951, managed to organize a conference of all European scientists and government representatives, which I had the honour to chair and at which it was decided to establish the European Council for Nuclear Research.
It should be realized that, in the wake of Hiroshima, people were afraid of science and of nuclear science in particular
The fundamental ideas, namely the goals that all the pioneers of what was to become CERN set themselves, consisted first of all in promoting European co-operation in this vital area. CERN was thus the first venture on a European scale and I can say that Robert Schuman, who was then French minister of foreign affairs and one of Europe’s founding fathers, was immediately in favour of it. A second goal was to reintroduce complete freedom of communication and the sharing of knowledge into this branch of science.
It should be realized that, in the wake of Hiroshima, people were afraid of science and of nuclear science in particular. “The physicists have known sin” said Oppenheimer, and the consequence of using scientists’ work for military purposes was the imposition of secrecy and the lack of communication between research centres. By immediately taking the opposite approach to fundamental research in its statutes, CERN was following the great tradition of science knowing no boundaries. The ambitions of these pioneers were more than fulfilled, since CERN is today home to scientists from all over the world, including the US, China, Japan and Russia, all working together and in teams on the same research, the results of which are published in full.
Another of my memories concerns the extension of the CERN site into France. After the construction of the 28 GeV Proton Synchrotron, it soon became apparent that, in the time-honoured fashion, this was only a scale model of more powerful machines to come. The area that Switzerland had been able to set aside for CERN could not be extended on the Swiss side. Luckily, the site ran alongside the border with France, and the land in that area was essentially being used for farming. The continuation and development of CERN’s activities were therefore dependent on extending the site into France, thus requiring a parcel of around 500 hectares of French land to be made available to an international organization with its headquarters in Switzerland. I prepared a dossier, which was submitted to the then French president, General de Gaulle, by the minister of foreign affairs, Maurice Couve de Murville. That is how CERN became – and I think remains to this day – the only research centre to straddle the border of two countries.
By Hans Ringström Oxford University Press
Hardback: £80 $125
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This volume in the series of Oxford Mathematical Monographs contains a general introduction to the Cauchy problem for the Einstein–Vlasov system, a proof of future stability spatially of locally homogeneous solutions, and a demonstration that there are models of the universe that are consistent with the observations but have arbitrary compact spatial topology. It includes a general description of results in the area, relevant to mathematicians and physicists with knowledge of general relativity.
Oxford University Press
Hardback: £55 $89.95
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This book is aimed at students making the transition from a first course on general relativity to a specialized subfield. It presents a variety of topics under the general headings of gravitational waves in vacuo and in a cosmological setting, equations of motion, and black holes, all having clear physical relevance and a strong emphasis on space–time geometry. Each chapter could be used as the basis for an early postgraduate project for those who are exploring avenues into research in general relativity, and who have already accumulated the technical knowledge required.
By Alexander Cardona, Iván Contreras and Andrés F Reyes-Lega (eds.) Cambridge University Press
Hardback: £75 $125
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Based on lectures given at the Villa de Leyva Summer School, this book presents modern geometric methods in quantum field theory. Covering areas in geometry, topology, algebra, number-theory methods and their applications to quantum field theory, the book covers topics such as Dirac structures, holomorphic bundles and stability, Feynman integrals, geometric aspects of quantum field theory and the Standard Model, spectral and Riemannian geometry and index theory. It is a valuable guide for graduate students and researchers in physics and mathematics wanting to enter this interesting research field at the border between mathematics and physics.
By Ladislav Šamaj and Zoltán Bajnok Cambridge University Press
Hardback: £80 $130
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Beginning with a treatise of non-relativistic 1D continuum Fermi and Bose quantum gases of identical spinless particles, this book describes the quantum inverse-scattering method and analysis of the related Yang–Baxter equation and integrable quantum Heisenberg models. It also discusses systems within condensed-matter physics, the complete solution of the sine-Gordon model and modern trends in the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz. Each chapter concludes with problems and solutions to help consolidate the reader’s understanding of the theory and its applications.
By Helmut Satz C H Beck
Hardback: €19.95
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Also published as:
Ultimate Horizons: Probing the Limits of the Universe
Springer
Hardback: £44.99 €53.49
E-book: £35.99 €41.65
This book is one of the most interesting introductions to today’s problems and advances in the fields of cosmology, particle and nuclear physics that I have seen. The author’s talent in explaining complex problems with “simple” language is certainly the fruit of his life-long teaching experience at the University of Bielefeld and other places. There are numerous examples where the reader is given easy “visualizations” of scientific findings. For instance, if our eyes were sensitive to photons with a wavelength of about 7 cm, then we would see the sky illuminated even at night, thanks to the cosmic microwave background – the afterglow of the Big Bang. Another example is the Casimir effect – a curious demonstration that “the vacuum is not empty” – while Paul Dirac’s sea is revisited to define empty space as a “sea of unborn particles”.
It is worth emphasizing that this book does not simply present a collection of facts. The author deliberately discusses implications of certain findings and manages to connect ideas and concepts from different branches of physics extremely well. For example, the term “horizon” is transported from general relativity to the field of particle physics, in the context of quark confinement, in introducing the concept of the “colour horizon” – the distance beyond which the quarks no longer interact with each other.
Each of the different topics is introduced properly from a historical perspective, always quoting the originator of the idea carefully, which sometimes goes back to the Ancient Greeks. It is interesting to depict the historical evolution of the concept of elementary particles as the “Matryoshka doll” of physics: atoms, thought at first to be indivisible, are actually composed of electrons and nuclei, the latter being themselves composed of protons and neutrons, which are composed of quarks.
A part of the book is dedicated to the studies of quark–gluon plasma, an area where the author has done pioneering work, including a seminal paper that is currently one of the most cited publications in particle physics. Also of interest is the collection of carefully inserted historical anecdotes. Even writers and poets, such as Michael Ende, Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe and Italo Calvino, find their words in the book.
From reading the book it transpires that, often, formulating a new problem is even more important than solving it. Scientific progress is mostly made through abstract thinking. Helmut is interested in understanding old and new problems of physics and, building on many years of studies and deep reflection, successfully transmits this enthusiasm to the reader. It certainly triggers further thinking.
By Alexander Wu Chao, Karl Hubert Mess, Maury Tigner and Frank Zimmermann (eds.) World Scientific
Hardback: £91
Paperback: £51
E-book: £38
Also available at the CERN bookshop
Edited by internationally recognized authorities in the field, this expanded and updated second edition contains more than 100 new articles. With more than 2000 equations, 300 illustrations and 500 graphs and tables, it is intended as a vade mecum for professional engineers and physicists engaged in the design and operation of modern accelerators. In addition to the common formulae of previous compilations, it includes hard-to-find, specialized formulae, as well as material pooled from the lifetime experience of many of the world’s experts. The eight chapters include both theoretical and practical matters, as well as an extensive glossary of accelerator types. A detailed name and subject index is provided, with reliable references to the literature where the most detailed information available on all of the topics can be found.
By Vakhtang Gogokhia and Gergely Gabor Barnaföldi World Scientific
Hardback: £65
E-book: £49
QCD is the most up-to-date theory of strong interactions. However, standard perturbative procedures fail if applied to low-energy QCD. Even the discovery of a Higgs boson will not solve the problem of masses originating from the non-perturbative behaviour of QCD. This book presents a new method – the introduction of the “mass gap” – first suggested by Arthur Jaffe and Edward Witten at the turn of the millennium. As the energy difference between the lowest order and the vacuum state in Yang–Mills quantum-field theory, the mass gap is – in principle – responsible for the large-scale structure of the QCD ground state, and therefore for its non-perturbative phenomena at low energies. The book also presents the applications and outlook of the mass-gap method and includes problems for students.
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