1089 



us. PARTICIPATION AT CERN 143 



seminars become hard to organize, student and shop supervision are 

 more problematic, teaching schedules must be carefully arranged 

 against experimental shifts; but still by and large, the problems are 

 manageable. 



For intercontinental collaborations, practical problems of this nature 

 can severely affect the cohesiveness of university or laboratory environ- 

 ments. If a U.S. group has an important involvement at CERN, a senior 

 professor and three or four more junior people may have to spend most 

 of their time in Europe. With this long-term absence of a major fraction 

 of a high-energy physics group, the cohesiveness at the university level 

 may be seriously disrupted. Inside the United States, daily telephone 

 communication on leased lines can make up for some of this; but 

 intercontinental interaction becomes difficult and costly. As a result, 

 important aspects of group activities can seriously suffer: Normal 

 teaching becomes impossible for long stretches; the vital interaction 

 among senior physicists that shape the future program and present 

 quality of the group suffers; graduate student, laboratory, and shop 

 supervision become impossible. If a U.S. group contracts to furnish a 

 certain fraction of equipment for a CERN experiment, it may not be 

 reasonable to build it at the home institution and ship it to CERN. The 

 home shop size may have to be reduced (and thereby suffer in quality 

 and flexibility) to accommodate purchases abroad. Frequently, ISR 

 participants from the United States have hired and fired research fellows 

 (with U.S. funds, obviously) who never came to visit the home insti- 

 tution. Group identity becomes compromised— it might be just as well 

 to directly fund foreign activities without going through a U.S. univer- 

 sity (and thereby inflate the cost by the university overhead expenses). 

 In the same spirit, maintaining a group abroad is disproportionately 

 expensive. Separation payment, travel expenses, and communication 

 costs can eat up large fractions of a group's budget. 



There may, on a purely financial level, also be the problem of creating 

 a two-tiered pay scale. People working abroad pay no taxes. Young 

 postdoctoral scientists on tax-free CERN fellowships may be 

 remunerated as well as some U.S. professors after taxes and will 

 therefore be bitterly disappointed when they come home to a meager 

 U.S. postdoc stipend. CERN-based and FNAL-based researchers from 

 the same U.S. institution may feel they belong to different societies. 



To revert to the previously cited comparison with CalTech Synchro- 

 tron operations in 1965, it was easy to have a healthy, fruitful university 

 atmosphere conducive to the education of young scientists when all 

 were locally present day and night; it is not obvious how much of a 

 university atmosphere and character can remain intact with intercon- 



