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130 SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL COOPERATION 



• The ever-increasing size and cost of elementary particle experimen- 

 tation has forced a sharing of resources and of responsibilities. When 

 CERN was founded, national accelerator laboratories flourished in 

 France, England, and Italy; Germany was starting her own. Today in 

 Western Europe, only Germany maintains a vigorous national facility 

 of her own, and even that is attempting to widen its appeal to all in- 

 terested parties from Europe, Asia, and the Americas. 



• Through all the vagaries of the Cold War and the economic straits 

 of the past 30 years, scientific contacts among particle physicists from all 

 nations involved in this pursuit have been unbroken. This has been true 

 despite the most trying aspects of strategic, economic, and civil rights 

 disputes. 



All of these points may indicate why elementary particle physics is a 

 special field that profits from the most unrestricted international 

 collaboration — and has done so traditionally. It may not be a coin- 

 cidence that, even in a historical context, an arch-internationalist nation 

 like Italy, spreading its people over the globe, has done extremely well in 

 particle physics— uzWe Fermi, Segre, Amaldi, Piccioni, Wick, Cabibbo, 

 Regge, and many others, disproportionately so when compared with 

 other, more chauvinistic nations that tend to try and go it alone, albeit 

 with much superior means. 



It may not be too astonishing then that the team of scientists that dis- 

 covered the W - and the Z° bosons at CERN contains 150 scientists from 

 a score of nations, headed by an Italian who also holds a professorship at 

 Harvard, and that the apparatus it used was financed by a dozen Euro- 

 pean governments. 



CERN: FEATURES OF A LABORATORY 



CERN owes its origins to a confluence of efforts by various in- 

 dividuals and institutions whose original aim was the establishment of a 

 "Centre Europeen de la Culture" including specialized institutes. ^ For- 

 mally, it took a UNESCO initiative that encouraged European govern- 

 ments to pool their resources for the purpose of doing nuclear research 

 on a level that would permit smaller, less pecunious nations to par- 

 ticipate in these activities. The structure that has grown from the 1952 

 convocation is a most impressive one, as we will see below. Its true 

 measure of success may be most apparent when compared with the fate 

 of its much more official, much better financed sister organization 

 EURATOM; this latter one, established in parallel with the European 

 Common Market for the purpose of furthering cooperation toward the 



