Category: Archve
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…59 years ago
A historic moment passed almost unnoticed on 17 May 1954, as the first excavation work started in the Meyrin countryside and construction of CERN began. Future events of this kind were celebrated with speeches, press coverage and parties, but this was a quiet and purely unofficial ceremony. Geneva had been chosen as the site for
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…81 years ago
Among the scientific documents in CERN’s Wolfgang Pauli Archive is a rather unusual item – a copy of the script parodying Goethe’s Faust performed at the Niels Bohr Institute conference, 3-13 April 1932. Written mostly by Max Delbrück, and decorated with caricatures of the protagonists, the skit features Pauli (Mephistopheles) trying to sell the idea
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…48 years ago
The tradition of holding a Christmas party for CERN children began in the first year of CERN’s existence and still continues. In the early 1960s it was decided to hold two parties, so there would be room to invite non-CERN children from the neighbouring districts as well. In 1964 (on 6 December for those with
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…42 years ago
The scene is the control room of the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) on 27 January 1971. Kjell Johnsen, leader of the ISR construction team, has just announced successful recording of the first ever interactions from colliding proton beams. It was a triumphant moment, not least because the ISR had been an ambitious and highly controversial
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…61 years ago
“We have just signed the Agreement which constitutes the official birth of the project you fathered at Florence. Mother and child are doing well, and the doctors send you their greetings.” This was the message sent to Isidor Rabi on 15 Feb 1952 by the signatories of an agreement establishing the provisional European Council for
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…24 years ago
Tim Berners-Lee made a first proposal for information management at CERN in March 1989. A later version was written in 1990, but this early document is particularly interesting because it includes annotations by his boss, Mike Sendall, whose general comment was ‘Vague but exciting…’! The project eventually grew to become the World Wide Web. In
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… 67 years ago
Wolfgang Pauli was awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize for Physics for his Exclusion Principle. When he received the telegram from Arne Westgren (15 November 1945) Pauli was working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, having left Europe for the USA during World War 2. Pauli was the first resident member of the Institute
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… 55 years ago
A log book entry written by Wolfgang Gentner, the head of SC Division, and signed by various colleagues, tells us that ‘a short celebration’ was held on the 1st of August 1957 following the successful appearance of the first circulating beam. The 600 MeV Synchrocyclotron (SC) was CERN’s first accelerator and provided beams for its
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… 56 years ago
The 6th meeting of Nobel Prize laureates, held in Lindau from 25 to 29 June 1956, was devoted to physics. In attendance were 23 Nobel laureates and 124 young researchers. The Lindau meetings began in 1951, and provide a unique platform for dialogue between different scientific generations. This year’s meeting (1 to 6 July 2012)
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… 59 years ago
Even before the official creation of CERN in 1954, staff began to settle into temporary offices around Geneva. On 5 October 1953 part of the PS (Proton Synchrotron) Group, including Frank Goward, John Adams, Mervyn Hine, John and Hildred Blewett, Kjell Johnsen and Edouard Regenstreif, arrived to start work in offices that had been made