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Prehistory of CERN: the First Suggestions (1949-Jun 1950)

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Prehistory of CERN: the First Suggestions (1949-Jun 1950) CHS-3 March 1984 STUDIES IN CERN HISTORY Prehistory of CERN : the first suggestions (1949 - June 1950) Dominique Pestre GENEVA 1984 The Study of CERN History is a project financed by Institutions in several CERN Member Countries. This report presents preliminary findings. and is intended for incorporation into a more comprehensive study of CERN's history. It is distributed primarily to historians and scientists to provoke discussion, and no part of it should be cited or reproduced without written permission from the Team Leacier. Comments are welcome and should be sent to: Study Team for CERN History c/oCERN CH-1211 GENEVE23 Switzerland © Copyright Study Team for CERN History, Geneva 1984 CERN-Service d'information scientifique - 300 - mars 1984 PREHISTORY OF CERN THE FIRST SUGGESTIONS (1949 - June 1950) I The years following the war II Two proposals of European collaboration in November 1949 III The European Cultural Conference, Lausanne, December 8-12, 1949 IV Attempts to implement the suggestions a - The European Movement initiative b - The French attempts V The fifth General Conference of UNESCO, Florence, June 1950 PREHISTORY OF CERN: THE FIRST SUGGESTIONS (1949-June 1950) 1 The official date of the foundation of CERN is easily established. The convention setting up CERN, signed on July 1, 1953 was ratified by France and Germany on September 29, 1954. By then nine States had signed, and CERN came officially into being. However, the interest of this date is rather limited. It ended a process initiated several years before and understanding this process is far more interesting than having a date of birth. In this first article, we will look back into the past, to the years 1946-1950. It is not that we think CERN history begins at that moment and we do not have the search for •ancestors• in mind. But a whole series of events which took place in the years following the war were not without influence on the emergence of CERN at the beginning of the 50's. And if we want to understand how this process developed, it is not without interest to know the atmosphere which prevailed in scientific circles in the late 40's, the feelings then spread throughout the scientific administrators and politicians (as far as international scientific collaboration was concerned) and the networks of relations which linked these various groups of people. This is why we will first describe, as introduction, the circles where scientific cooperation was discussed between 1946 and 1950. I. The years following the war. We will begin with the ideas of planning international laboratories which arose, as early as 1946, inside the United Nations Organisation2 . The first proposal about this was submitted by the French Delegation to the U.N. Economic and Social Council on October 2, 1946. The draft resolution invited the •secretary General to consult UNESCO and the 2 other specialized Agencies concerned and to submit to the Economical and Social council if possible during the next session, a general report on the problem of establishing UNITED NATIONS RESEARCH LABORATORIES." 3 Accepted after a long discussion, this resolution led to a "Report of the Secretary General on establishing United Nations Research Laboratories• on January 23, 1948. A wide range of people and organisations had been contacted before writing it. The variety and number of the responses revealed the interest which scientists in many fields of science had in international initiatives at the time, even if some of them did not favour the idea of international laboratories. In the following years, lists of priorities were established and discussed at length but the only clear result was the proposal to establish an International Computation Center. Our interest is not in describing this rather complicated matter, even less in giving the reasons for the failure. But some remarks are in order. The first point to stress is that, immediately after the war, a group of people inside the UN agencies was very keen on international scientific cooperation. But not only on the already wellknown "ordinary• cooperation. As the French resolution said, "it would seem that in the general interest of humanity, something more than mere coordination is needed and it may be asked whether certain fields of scientific research ought not to be taken over by the central organs of the UN or by specialized agencies•. That is to say, there was a desire to build new kinds of international scientific structures. Some of the people who wanted to set up such new forms of •work in common• were passionnate personalities who were prepared to spend a great deal of their time and of their energy to convince the reluctant. Among them, let us name Henri Laugier, a French biologist, assistant Secretary General in the UN Economic and Social Council, Julian Huxley, first Director General of UNESCO (1946-1948), Joseph Needham, first Director of the Natural Sciences Department of UNESCO (1946-1948) and Pierre Auger, second Director of that Department. But of course, it would be fair to mention many other people. 4 What were the motivations of these pioneers? What state of mind was reflected by these projects? The Statement of reasons given by the UN 3 E/147 Draft resolution submitted on October 11, 1946 offers us a good way to answer the questions. First, the setting up of UN research laboratories would help to improve the living conditions of mankind. As the resolution said, •nobody questions today the decisive importance of scientific research in the development of human knowledge, social progress and the improvement of human conditions generally• and "many branches of scientific research connected with the promotion of human knowledge, p~rticularly in the field of public health, would yield considerably more effective results if they were conducted on an international plane" To be as efficient as possible, the French specified that the collaboration must be rationnally organized. To support this idea, they gave the example of astronomy and astrophysics: •it is quite evident that considerable advantage would be gained by replacing haphazard colla­ boration by systematic international action in order to locate well-equipped observatories at those sites of the globe selected as most suitable for the development of research." In other words, there are fields of science •in which research work can only be organized efficiently and in a rational and disinterested way on an international basis 05 These two reasons given in the resolution - helping science to improve the living conditions of mankind and acting as rationally as possible thanks to internationally planned laboratories - are of course well-known. They are related to the rationalistic and positivist spirit inherited from the Enlightment and the XIXth century, and still very much alive among scientists, and perhaps particularly the French. 6 However a more specific motivation also played a role: the resolution wanted to help in the creation of an international spirit. Behind that, we must read the rejection of war, the determination to prevent any new conflict. Of course these feelings were generally part of the rationalistic vision of science. As the resolution stated: "if all scientists and research workers of the United Nations are given an opportunity of establishing close relationships with one another on the working level, and if every scientific victory is really made a joint 4 triumph, scientific research will have acquired its true meaning.• But the closeness of the awful bloodshed revived those hopes and gave them more weight. 7 A last point is to be stressed about the UN initiatives. A very small place is offered to physics - and to nuclear physics in particular - throughout the various lists of priorities established by the UN or UNESCO experts. Let us for example listen to Pierre Auger in August 1949, during the 5th meeting of the Committee of Scientific Experts convened by the UN: "If physics, which was scarcely mentioned in the report, had not been dealt. with at greater length, it was because that science had reasonably good resources at its disposal and had received considerable assistance from Governments and Foundations, so that its immediate needs were less than those of other sciences.• Consequently, he only proposed the field of cosmic rays as one where co-operation would be of great value, though the reporter concluded: "However, Professor Auger did not think it is necessary to give the proposal high priority, any more than in other fields of physics.•8 So, the idea of close intergovernmental collaboration in the scientific field, the idea on which CERN is based, did not appear for the first time in 1950/51 but on the contrary had part of its roots in the long discussions which stemmed from the war. It relied also on the fierce enthusiasm of several people who as early as 1946 spent their time to make it known and to bring it to fruition. However, CERN is devoted to nuclear physics and we have seen that this field was not often mentioned by the United Nations experts. That leads us to turn towards other circles where the problem of international collaboration, specifically in nuclear physics, was raised. The UN Atomic Energy Commission was one such circle. Starting in June 1946 with the aim of bringing atomic weapons under some form of international control, this Commission was run by diplomats though their scientific advisers were present at all meetings. As Kowarski commented, "it was a pleasure to watch the diplomats grapple with the difference between a cyclotron and a plutonium atom; we had to compensate by learning how to tell a subcommittee from a working party, and how - in 5 the heat of a discussion - to address people by their titles rather than names.
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