The latest EU research programme is also funding frontier physics. The European Commission has observer status (but no vote) at CERN meetings and it funds particle physics research – including into the ‘super’ software, known as DataGrid, which will handle the masses of data that will be generated by this collider (equivalent to ten petabytes or 16 million CD-roms each year), and into cost-effective production of the high-energy electron, proton, muon and neutrino beams at the heart of the accelerators. It now has 20 members (including 18 EU countries) and attracts scientists from some 80 countries. Its twelve founding members included perennial EU nay-sayers Switzerland and Norway, and Tito’s Yugoslavia. CERN is not an EU project but both CERN and European economic integration were born out of the same impulses: the desire to pool resources in the aftermath of the Second World War and the fear that Europe would be left trailing the United States.ĬERN was established in 1954 at the prompting of leading physicists such as Louis de Broglie, a Frenchman, and Niels Bohr, a Dane, just four years after the Schuman declaration on coal and steel.
The €6 billion “Large Hadron Collider” project that gets under way on 10 September is led by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Europe’s research centre on particle physics. When they smash into each other, scientists hope to learn what the universe looked like in the moments after the Big Bang. In a 27 kilometre circular tunnel that is colder than space, millions of particles will be fired in opposite directions at near the speed of light.
More than 100 metres below the Franco-Swiss border, the world’s most ambitious physics experiment is about to begin.
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