- Person
- Felix Bloch
- Lived
- 1905–1983
- Field
- Physics
- From
- Swiss-American
The story
In 1952 twelve European governments set up a provisional council to plan a shared laboratory for nuclear physics, a project too large for any one of them alone. In its early years the council worked at the University of Copenhagen under the direction of Niels Bohr, and the new laboratory was to be built near Geneva, in Felix Bloch's native Switzerland. The convention establishing CERN was ratified by 12 Western European countries on 29 September 1954. Its founders looked for someone of stature and international prestige to lead the fledgling organisation.
Bloch was by then one of the most respected physicists in the world. Born in Zurich in 1905, he had left Germany in 1933 after Hitler came to power and had built his career at Stanford University, where he shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics for nuclear magnetic resonance. Niels Bohr, who had long influenced him, encouraged him to take on the job.
Bloch had doubts about the world of big accelerators, but he accepted. In 1954 he took leave from Stanford and became CERN's first director-general, at the moment when construction was getting under way on the present Meyrin site and plans for the first machines were being drawn up. He did not abandon his own research. He brought equipment from Stanford to Geneva and, with two colleagues, Jim Arnold and Wes Anderson, carried on nuclear induction experiments there.
As he had predicted, Bloch did not enjoy administrative work, and after a trial period of a year he went back to Stanford. Robert Hofstadter's memoir for the National Academy of Sciences records that he nevertheless left a great and positive influence on the young laboratory. On his return in the autumn of 1955 he joined four colleagues in proposing a two-mile linear accelerator, nicknamed Project M for Monster, which became the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Cautious at first, he remarked that if they were going to build a monster, it should be a good one.
CERN grew into the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, home to the Large Hadron Collider and birthplace of the World Wide Web, with thousands of scientists from more than 80 countries working there. In 2025 Bloch's family donated his Nobel Prize medal to CERN, linking the laboratory once more to its first leader.
Why it matters
CERN grew into the world's leading particle physics laboratory and a model of peaceful scientific cooperation between nations, and Bloch helped launch it.
About Felix Bloch
Swiss-born physicist who laid the quantum foundations of solid-state physics, discovered nuclear magnetic resonance – the basis of MRI – and became CERN’s first director-general.
More about Felix Bloch
- Felix Bloch helped explain how particles slow in matterIn Copenhagen in the early 1930s, Felix Bloch refined Hans Bethe’s theory of how charged particles lose energy in matter, work remembered in the Bethe–Bloch formula.
- Felix Bloch's equations underpin MRIIn 1946 Felix Bloch wrote the Bloch equations for nuclear magnetisation, introducing the T1 and T2 relaxation times that later helped make MRI a powerful medical tool.
- Felix Bloch measured the neutron's magnetismIn 1939, working with Luis Alvarez at the Berkeley cyclotron, Felix Bloch measured the neutron's magnetic moment to about one percent accuracy, a theorist turned experimenter.
- Felix Bloch's method became chemistry's key toolChemical shift experiments in Felix Bloch's own laboratory helped turn nuclear magnetic resonance into the most important spectroscopic tool in chemistry.
- Felix Bloch discovered how to listen to atomic nucleiIn 1946 Felix Bloch, William Hansen and Martin Packard at Stanford developed nuclear induction, one of the two founding methods of nuclear magnetic resonance.
- Felix Bloch described magnetic domain walls and spin wavesFelix Bloch described the boundaries between magnetic domains, now called Bloch walls, and proposed spin waves, partly in a paper written in hospital after a climbing accident.
- Felix Bloch explained how electrons move through metalsIn his 1928 thesis as Werner Heisenberg's first graduate student, Felix Bloch showed how electrons travel as waves through a crystal, founding the quantum theory of solids.
Sources
- Felix Bloch Wikipedia
- Felix Bloch 1905–1983: A Biographical Memoir by Robert Hofstadter National Academy of Sciences
- CERN Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.