Niels Bohr helped bring CERN into being

Person: Niels Bohr
Lived: 1885–1962
Field: Physics
From: Danish

The story

The Second World War showed that frontier physics now needed money, machines and laboratories on a scale beyond the reach of most nations. European scientists feared that their best young researchers would leave for the great national laboratories of the United States. To prevent that brain drain, twelve European countries decided to pool their resources in a shared laboratory for large-scale research.

In 1952 twelve governments set up a provisional body, the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, which gave CERN its name. Niels Bohr was closely involved. He and his colleague Hans Kramers thought the Copenhagen institute would make an ideal home for the new laboratory, but Pierre Auger, who organised the early discussions, disagreed and feared that Bohr's presence would overshadow everyone else. After a long debate Bohr pledged his support for CERN in February 1952, and Geneva was chosen as the site that October.

Bohr's institute still played a central role. During the early years the provisional council's work took place at the University of Copenhagen under his direction, and the CERN Theory Group was based there until its new accommodation in Geneva was ready in 1957. The convention founding the organisation was signed in Paris in 1953 and ratified by its twelve founding members on 29 September 1954. Its first Director-General was Felix Bloch, one of the refugee scientists Bohr had helped in the 1930s.

Bohr's backing mattered because of his unrivalled standing among European physicists. Victor Weisskopf, who later became CERN's Director-General, said that other people had started and conceived the idea, but that their enthusiasm and ideas would not have been enough without the support of a man of Bohr's stature. Today one of the roads on the CERN site bears his name.

CERN grew into the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, with 25 member states and its Large Hadron Collider on the French and Swiss border. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web there in 1989, and in 1993 CERN made the web free for anyone to use. In 2012 its experiments found the Higgs boson. It remains a model of peaceful international cooperation in science.

Why it matters

CERN showed that rival nations could build and share one great laboratory, and it gave the world both the Higgs boson discovery and the World Wide Web.