1072 



126 SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL COOPERATION 



through automobile trunks at the official border post of the Route Na- 

 tionale Lyon-Geneva just outside the laboratory fences. 



The vast laboratory that geographically straddles the Republique de 

 Geneve and the French Departement d' Ain was formally established by 

 an intergovernmental treaty of 11 European nations in early 1952. 

 Dedicated to the pursuit of fundamental research in particle physics, 

 and financed on a level beyond the means attainable by most individual 

 countries, the organizational entity created at that time was given the 

 name Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN). 

 Although the laboratory's mission is better reflected, in today's context, 

 by the nomenclature the present directorate prefers also for political 

 reasons— European Laboratory for Particle Physics— the acronym of 

 the initial organization, CERN, gives the laboratory its name to this 

 day. More importantly, CERN is the single most successful interna- 

 tional organization that has sprung out of the misery of postwar Euro- 

 pean political, social, and cultural conditions. It may be one of the very 

 few international organizations ever created that have fulfilled their 

 mission, almost invariably high-minded, to the expectation of their ini- 

 tiators. 



Geneva is home to a number of organizations whose multifaceted 

 international missions and precariously balanced constitutions permit 

 only limited success; others flounder from crisis to crisis, from bilious in- 

 fighting to sullen compromise. At CERN, on the other hand, preoccupa- 

 tions and highlights concern the successful operation of a major new ac- 

 celerator or beamline, a tantalizing new experimental result, or a splen- 

 did new discovery. The epochal achievements of two large experimental 

 teams that, this year, discovered field quanta akin to the massless 

 photon, but a hundred times more massive than the hydrogen nucleus, 

 had no national origin and found no nationalistic overtone— it was an 

 achievement of the first order produced by teams of scientists from all 

 across Europe, and the entire laboratory appeared to share in the pride 

 the discovery generated. The author list of the scholarly publications 

 followingfromthiswork also contains U.S. scientists, reflecting both in- 

 stitutional participation and individual visitors. 



What makes particle physics a field where international cooperation 

 appears to generate success? 



HIGH-ENERGY PARTICLE PHYSICS: 

 FEATURES OF A DISCIPLINE 



Particle physics is the discipline that deals, by all means accessible, 

 with the physical world at its most fundamental level— that is, with the 



