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136 SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL COOPERATION 



happy to respond to the beckoning from the Alps, for sabbaticals or 

 leaves from their normal duties. The justly famed series of experiments 

 that measured, to ever greater precision, the magnetic moment of the 

 muon, and thereby provided an ever more impressive confirmation of 

 the theory of quantum electrodynamics, had people like Garwin, Leder- 

 man, and Telegdi among its initial contributors. On a technical basis, 

 too, U.S. influence was seminal: Courant and his colleagues from the 

 Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) suggested to the CERN 

 engineers the adoption of the strong-focusing technique for accelerator 

 construction. 



Maybe the most formative period was that of Victor Weisskopf's term 

 as director-general (1961-65), during which CERN became a full com- 

 petitor to its then U.S. equivalent, BNL. Weisskopf brought to his task 

 an inimitable mix of Old Vienna charm, of the prestige associated with 

 his pioneering work on quantum mechanics with Pauli and others, and 

 of the teamwork know-how he had acquired during his service in war- 

 time Los Alamos. A man of deep culture, he personified the best of both 

 the European and the U.S. traditions: The first made him universally ac- 

 cepted among European colleagues as well as government represen- 

 tatives; the second gave him both the confidence and the know-how to 

 assemble and direct a large team of scientists in such a way as to make the 

 physics result the principal issue. He adopted— consciously or sub- 

 consciously — the charismatic leadership style that had been so effec- 

 tively developed at Los Alamos by Oppenheimer. But unlike the lat- 

 ter, he did not have to live to question the fruit of his labors: To this 

 day, Weisskopf is a popular lecturer and valued counsel around 

 CERN, just as his voice was heard and respected for many years as the 

 chairman of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP), an ad- 

 visory panel of the U.S. government, upon his return to the United 

 States. 



Weisskopf's activities included attracting top U.S. scientists with 

 European backgrounds to CERN; by inviting Giuseppe Cocconi and 

 Jack Steinberger to join the new laboratory, he again imported U.S. 

 know-how and U.S. attitudes, albeit in European skins. Into his period 

 fall two other important developments, one positive and one less suc- 

 cessful: On the positive side, CERN developed a neutrino beamline that 

 was to compete with the U.S.'s Brookhaven Alternative Gradient Syn- 

 chrotron (AGS) neutrino facility head-on, to find out whether specula- 

 tions for two separate lepton families were correct or not. CERN lost the 

 race, but its resulting commitments to neutrino physics were to lead to 

 the first great CERN discovery: During the subsequent tenure of Ber- 

 nard Gregory as director-general (1966-1970), the large bubble chamber 



