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the French governmeut. CERX became truly iuteruatioiial. The frontier runs right 

 across the site but people, machinery and particle beams cross it all the time 



The final approval of the construction of the large SOOGeV accelerator at a cost 

 of 1000 Mil francs (roughly 500 Mil dollars) at the end of 1971 and construction was 

 finished in 1976. This facility is similar to the first accelerator at Fermilab which 

 was ready for research one to two years earlier. The CERN machine was built more 

 expensively, with more margin for additions. This is why it was possible to e.xploit it 

 somewhat more efficiently. Toward the end of the seventies the European scientists 

 and the CERN staff had reached the necessary maturity and experience to perform 

 research on an equal level with the U.S. The relatively generous budget (reaching 

 700 Mill francs annually in the eighties, about 300 Mill $) gave them opportunities 

 to do outstanding work, sometimes better and faster than the U.S. laboratories who 

 suffered from decreasing support. 



Examples of important CERX discoveries are the observation of so called "neu- 

 tral currents'' in radioactivity, that supported the new theories of these processes 

 and, lately, the discovery of the "W- and Z- particles", the quanta of weak inter- 

 actions. They are the carriers of the force that produces radioactivity. The latter 

 discoverj- was made possible by transforming the large accelerator into an effective 

 proton-antiproton beam collider. This technological feat was made by an ingenious 

 device for producing an intense antiproton beam, invented by one of the leading 

 engineers at CERN, Dr. Van der Meer. This accomplishment brought a Nobel 

 award to Van der Meer and Carlo Rubbia, the leader of the team. These results, 

 together with a long list of other achievements are the proof that today CERN 



