Big Science

Why did England join CERN? That is an interesting case because CERN was the beginning of big science outside the United States (and maybe everywhere). Since many countries are involved in CERN, there is a bureaucratic paper trail that is much more detailed than anything in the US projects.

CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. For many years, it and the US Federal labs were the only places building BIG accelerators, and hence the centers of research on elementary particles. CERN funds not only the experiments, but most of the theoreticians as well, and organizes many of the international conferences. For a long time, if you had anything to do with elementary particles in Europe, you worked for CERN. At its inception, it wasn't yet clear whether CERN would do big science, or be a research and coordinating center for more traditional laboratory science. In 1949, the head of the French atomic energy agency got an international cultural organization to pass a resolution exploring setting up a European institute for nuclear science. The initial idea was to build an accelerator bigger than anything the Americans were planning.

England was approached, and was not interested for several reasons: Chadwick and his eminent friends, all in their 60s or older, had doubts about the need for big accelerators, since all their discoveries were made in the laboratory. They were worried that a big accelerator would dry up research funds for other purposes. England was in the process of building some accelerators, though nothing on the scale proposed by CERN, and those projects were using all the available scientists. Also, the English scientists were ahead of the scientists on the Continent, and weren't likely to learn much from them. Finally, the accelerator proposed was so big that it seemed to be hare-brained scheme. To be friendly, they agreed to consult with CERN, but had no interest in joining (or paying).

Within Europe, some agreed that the project was hare-brained. The most eminent was Nils Bohr, the father of quantum mechanics. There was an internal dispute. One side wanted the accelerator, and the other side wanted to block it, turning CERN into a consortium of smaller research projects. Chadwick happened to be at a meeting where Bohr was raising doubts. Chadwick and Thomson allied themselves with Bohr: they agreed to give CERN access to the Liverpool cyclotron if the headquarter of CERN were established in Copenhagen (that is, if CERN was organized around Bohr). That meant partnering with CERN in a substantial way. Why? If the proposal worked, it would establish an alliance with Bohr. It would make Liverpool the center of accelerator research. It would mean that CERN would not require substantial funds, since Bohr didn't want it to build anything expensive, and so participating in CERN would drain neither scientists nor money from England.

The result was a meeting at which it was agreed, in principle, that CERN would be headquartered in Copenhagen, that England would be a member, that CERN would have access to the Liverpool cyclotron, and a study group would be formed to design accelerators. The British government refused to sign off on the agreement, because the compromise "study group" meant that Britain could wind up committed to helping to pay for a big European accelerator, that they didn't want, and that might be very expensive. There was an unsuccessful appeal.

Meanwhile, the Harwell group---the young (average age 35), comparatively unknown British physicists who were designing accelerators, decided they needed to start working on a big accelerator. They knew it would be very expensive, and there were two possibilities: building one in England, or joining forces with CERN. Meanwhile, the accelerator physicists in the US have thought of something called strong focusing, which is a technique to build high-energy accelerators less expensively, and _they have told the Europeans (but not the British scientists) about it. That did it. The Harwell group wanted in. They lobbied the old guard and the government, and joined CERN. How could they persuade the old guard? For one thing, there was the technological advance that provided a clearer path to building such a big accelerator, but for another, the old guard had already committed itself to CERN and lost a political battle in England. It was now in their political interest to get England into CERN. In addition, there was now the worry about falling behind if they didn't get in on strong focusing.

Some of the considerations are political, and the decision gets made in important part because of accidental factors of timing (who was against, then for, a big reactor). Timing counts in addition to scientific factors, but the scientific factors dominate. They include internationalism, rivalry, considerations of likely scientific value, and issues of who had what to learn from collaboration. Even when the English scientists thought they were clearly ahead, they offered the use of the Liverpool cyclotron to CERN.

This is all related to the impossible question of how to allocate resources in science. Openness is clearly critical, so is the desire not to get cut out of the development of new techniques and theories. On the other hand, the desire for control and to maintain resources also plays a role

-- ShaughanLavine - 25 Apr 2006