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U.S. PARTICIPATION AT CERN 135 



Thus, an elitist institution can also afford to attract some of the most 

 fertile brains in instrumentation and engineering physics. The 

 laboratory has derived immense benefit from the presence on its staff of 

 such inventive people as Simon van der Meer, developer of stochastic 

 cooling and of the neutrino "horn of plenty" (without which high- 

 energy neutrino experimentation would be unthinkable)— whom Vic- 

 tor Weisskopf, director-general during the 1960s, gratefully calls the 

 "Maxwell Daemon of the 20th century"; as Georges Charpak, the yard- 

 stick of detector specialists; as Kjell Johnson and Wolfgang Schnell, 

 builders of accelerators that so far surpassed their specifications as to 

 permit their use for projects far beyond their original mission; and many 

 others, whose ingenuity, in the United States, would likely have found 

 proper recognition only in industry. 



CERN: A LABORATORY WITH U.S. ROOTS 



Historically, Western European and U.S. science are so tightly inter- 

 woven that it would be wiser to speak of roots common to all than of 

 specific national godfatherhood to a great scientific enterprise. Still, it is 

 not just for the present argument's sake that we recognize typically 

 American features— features that would not follow from European 

 traditions— in the structure as well as the practices of CERN. 



The roots of CERN science may have little that's American in them, 

 but the great exodus of top European scientists during the Nazi and 

 postwar eras exposed these people to a spirit of pioneering attitudes, of 

 speculative approaches to the problems of the classical sciences, of a lack 

 of respect for passed-down structures of academic life that were to be 

 seminal to European science at the postwar stage. In this sense, it was not 

 only the official UNESCO appeal (influenced in no small measure by the 

 insightful suggestions of I. I. Rabi, the noted Columbia University 

 physicist) that led to the original CERN convention and, by shaking 

 European nations out of national patterns of academic activity, brought 

 a transatlantic breeze into action; but also the attitudes acquired by 

 formerly European scientists who now came back to help establish the 

 new research complex that put a decisively American brand onto a wide 

 range of CERN features. The laboratory may, in its infancy, not have 

 had much of a personality of its own, when Felix Bloch— bom in 

 Switzerland, later at Stanford— became its first director-general. The 

 truly formative years of CERN were those when the first important ex- 

 periments were done— and there again American influence is con- 

 siderable: The Ford Foundation had provided a generous grant to help 

 CERN attract visiting talent, and American researchers were more than 



