Category: Archve

By 1 April 1969, John Adams was ready to take up his new role, as Director of CERN’s 300 GeV project, full-time. This photo shows him presenting plans for the new accelerator a few months earlier – you can read the minutes of the 16 January 1969 Committee of Council meeting, largely devoted to discussion

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The first informal contacts between Soviet and CERN scientists probably took place at the Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva in September 1955. Exchange visits between scientists from CERN and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) were suggested in 1957, but there was little progress until N. Bogolubov of JINR raised the subject again

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On 21 February 1989, CERN inaugurated its new monorail, suspended from the ceiling of the 27-kilometre Large Electron-Positron Collider tunnel. The trains, all named after local villages, travelled at around 12 kilometres per hour and came in three different designs to handle different cargoes. LEP was in the second phase of construction, and sixty thousand

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In January 1957, CERN’s newly created Scientific Information Service (SIS) was planning for the year’s big challenge – moving the Library into new premises. Three of the staff are shown here at the old premises in July. Until the end of 1956, CERN’s Library, translation team and public relations office all formed part of a

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On 4 December 1930, Wolfgang Pauli wrote his famous letter to the ‘Dear radioactive ladies and gentlemen’ postulating a neutral particle to solve the puzzle of missing energy during beta decay. This letter forms the basis of a new work by ART(at)CREATIONS, Liebe Radioaktive Damen und Herren, featuring music composed by Petros Stergiopoulos and Oded

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Setting up CERN’s new technical training courses raised important questions. How far was it CERN’s job to provide this sort of education? Could anyone be persuaded to teach classes when they were already too busy with own work? Would they be any good at it, since most were more used to presenting conference papers and

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The traditional Festschrift was abandoned for Niels Bohr’s 50th birthday, lest he should ‘feel it as his duty to read the contents and even try to learn something.’ Instead, he received the Journal of Jocular Physics. Future Director-General of CERN, Viki Weisskopf, was a major contributor. His ‘Komplementäre Philosophie des Witzes’ (Complementary Philosophy of Jokes)

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“The formation of the European Physical Society with such a wide membership is a further demonstration of the determination of scientists to collaborate as closely as possible in order to make their positive contribution to the strength of European cultural unity.” So said Gilberto Bernardini in his inaugural address on 26 September 1968. But it

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During the summer of 1962, the CERN Photo Club and Public Information Department organized a photographic competition on the theme, ‘How a visitor sees CERN’. E. Fischer scooped a prize with an excellent colour print of the tall, white Administration building standing out against a clear blue sky. Marinus van Gulik took another approach, and

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At CERN, in July 1962, 60 hours of feverish preparation culminated in 60 seconds of history-making television. On the evening of 23 July, some two hundred million viewers in Europe and North America had a short glimpse of CERN at work during the first direct transmission relaying electromagnetic waves from Europe to the USA via

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