30 November 2024 marks the end of a five-year agreement between the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Russian Federation, as well as a 70-year history of close cooperation between Soviet and then Russian physicists with the largest high-energy physics laboratory in the world. T-invariant recalls how dramatically CERN and Russia severed their relationship over the past 2.5 years, and publishes an interview with a witness to these events – a scientist from St Petersburg, Andrei Seryakov. The physicist and activist, whose contract was not renewed by the Physics Department of St. Petersburg State University in 2024 because of his anti-war stance, talks about his 10 years at CERN, the results of Vladimir Putin’s “science diplomacy”, Mikhail Kovalchuk’s “science diplomacy” and how on his last working day he showed the Large Hadron Collider to blogger Katerina Gordeeva.
Why CERN and Russia curtailed co-operation for 2.5 years
The decision to exclude Russia (as well as Belarus) from CERN was a long time in the making. The organisation promptly reacted to the big war that the Kremlin had unleashed. Already in early March 2022, it became known that the CERN Council sharply condemned the actions of Russian troops in Ukraine, decided to freeze Russia’s status in the organisation for an indefinite period of time and forbade the start of any new projects with the Russian government and Russian institutions.
At the same time, hundreds of Russian physicists working in collaboration with CERN signed an open letter. In the letter, they protested against the actions of the Russian leadership and solidarised with the large open letter of scientists against the war (over 8,500 signatures), which is published in the world’s major languages on the T-invariant website.
The main news about the life of scientists during the war, videos and infographics – in T-invariant ‘s Telegram channel. Subscribe so you don’t miss out.
The CERN Council in its resolution in March 2022 promised to promote initiatives aimed at supporting Ukrainian researchers and Ukrainian projects in the field of high-energy physics and to respect the regime of international sanctions imposed on Russia. At the same time, the organisation’s leadership expressed support for representatives of the Russian scientific community who protested against the war.
Two weeks later, at the end of March, CERN issued a new statement in which it tightened the rules of work with Russia and Belarus. It also announced the complete termination of cooperation with an intergovernmental organisation, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna near Moscow (established in 1959, it was called “the Soviet CERN”).
Scientists of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research were forbidden to join all scientific councils and committees of JINR and vice versa; all conferences and seminars organised by JINR and CERN were cancelled. In addition, JINR lost its observer status in CERN, and the organisation cancelled its observer status in JINR.
Once again, the CERN Council met to announce the change of status from “freeze” to a full stop of co-operation with Russia in June 2022.
Thus, scientists, engineers and IT specialists who already had passes to CERN at the time of spring-summer 2022 could continue to work until 30 November 2024, and new passes were no longer issued to physicists from Russian and Belarusian institutes and universities, students and postgraduates.
The final vote of the CERN Council on the “Russian” issue took place on 15 December 2023. The participating countries voted in favour of excluding Russia from the list of CERN partners and for the end of work at the Large Hadron Collider of scientists with affiliation in Russian research institutes and universities. Three days later, the Russians received a letter (a copy of which is at T-invariant’s disposal) that said, in part:
…We realise that the impact of this decision on some of you as employees and members of your families may be significant. The user office is still available to you for support. <…> We would like to inform you of the administrative consequences of this decision: if your cooperation agreement with CERN expires after 30 November 2024, it will be automatically terminated on that date.
The results of the vote at the CERN Council are never disclosed, but according to THE GENEVA Observer, at least representatives from Hungary, Israel, Italy, Serbia, Slovakia, Switzerland and Hungary abstained. Many prominent physicists from around the world have been active in preserving the participation of Russian physicists and have even created the Science4Peace community (T-invariant has previously published a detailed text about this).
Both supporters and opponents of severing relations (both among scientists and politicians) began active public and non-public actions in 2024. First of all, because the intrigue persisted as to whether it would be possible to leave Russian and Belarusian physicists a “window to Europe” in the form of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research.
How the “loophole” to CERN was formed and what role Putin, Kovalchuk, and Ukrainian physicists played in it
on 20 June 2024, the CERN Council very unexpectedly voted to extend the agreement between JINR and CERN (it had been frozen since 2022).
As T-invariant managed to find out, on 20 June 2024, 13 out of 23 countries voted for the termination of the JINR-CERN agreement, while a decision of 2/3 of the participating countries was necessary for the decision to be taken.
This was the second vote on this issue, and at the previous one, in March 2024, the required number of votes was not collected either; according to T-invariant, the decisive factor was that Germany abstained from voting.
The final decision was preceded, on the one hand, by active speeches of scientists from Ukraine in the media and inside CERN, and on the other hand, by even more active words and actions of Russian President Putin and President of SIC “Kurchatov Institute” Mikhail Kovalchuk Mikhail Kovalchuk.
Thus, on 5 June 2024, the Times published a large article Nuclear research body is backdoor for Russian spies, says Ukraine, in which Ukrainian material scientist Boris Hrynyov, a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, said that the participation of Russian specialists in the work of CERN “fuels the Russian war machine” and that thanks to cooperation with JINR, “Russian spies” continue to “infiltrate CERN”. Hrynyov, who is Ukraine’s representative to CERN and was the Ukrainian government’s plenipotentiary representative to JINR (from 1997 to 2022, with a short break), urged fellow physicists to vote against the extension of the Dubna agreement.
In response, the Centre’s press service limited itself to a neat statement that CERN is a peaceful and open organisation. But on 13 June, Putin unexpectedly gave a more vivid response. He travelled to Dubna, where a double PR action was played out. He “launched the technological start-up of the NICA collider”, which has been under construction at JINR for many years (although it was a routine check of circuits and magnets in the accelerator), and in addition he organised a large meeting with megagrant scientists (arare example of a large and successful international project in Russian science).
“We don’t close anything, we don’t hide anything, we don’t lock it up. We are open for co-operation… Russia is open for the results of the work of Russian scientists to be used in other countries,” TASSreports Putin as saying.
“Putin has once again marked the territory,” the scientists T-invariant spoke to are sure. It was a signal that although formally JINR is an intergovernmental scientific centre with 13 states among its founders, here is the territory of “sovereign physics.”
Ukrainian scientists reacted immediately to Putin’s visit to JINR. Ukrainian physicist Tatiana Berger-Greenova, head of one of the groups in the ATLAS experiment, sent a detailed letter to a wide range of recipients in the CERN mailing list, quoting statements made in Dubna by Putin, Deputy Prime Minister Chernyshenko and JINR head Grigory Trubnikov – all with links to kremlin.ru. At the end of the letter (available to T-invariant) the following conclusion is made: “This visit well demonstrates the position of JINR as an organisation working in the interests of the Russian military complex, just a few days before the CERN Council took a decision on CERN’s cooperation with JINR”.
It was Mikhail Kovalchuk, who is considered to be the closest “man of science” to Putin, who organised the PR show in Dubna, according to T-invariant’s interlocutors.
“Kovalchuk had been setting Putin and other officials up for isolation for several years, and everyone realised that he was against Dubna as a loophole to CERN. His actions influenced the fact that in the end the agreement with JINR came out so neutered,” believes the head of one of the scientific groups at the ATLAS particle detector (part of the Large Hadron Collider), who has worked regularly at CERN for more than 30 years.
Kovalchuk vs. Russian physicists at CERN
The hopes of physicists around the world that the “Soviet CERN” in Dubna would become a place with a neutral affiliation for Russian scientists have not been fulfilled. Only JINR staff members who were already registered at the time of the outbreak of the war and the first sanctions will be able to work at the collider. New passes will not be issued.
“An important item on the Council’s June agenda was the Agreement with the intergovernmental organisation based in Dubna, Russia, with which CERN has been cooperating since 1957. Since the Council decided not to terminate the agreement, JINR’s participation in CERN activities continues. However, the JINR measures adopted by the Council in March 2022 remain in force,” was the message sent to all staff by CERN Director Fabiola Gianotti (available at T-invariant).
Mikhail Kovalchuk and Vladimir Putin
On the other hand, Mikhail Kovalchuk forbade all employees of SIC Kurchatov Institute, as well as employees of subordinate or affiliated research institutes and universities (most of which employ scientists specialising in CERN topics) to look for “loopholes” in CERN orobtain affiliation in JINR . We are talking not only about specialised institutions in St. Petersburg and Protvino, but also about institutes of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In addition, Kovalchuk, besides fulfilling his other duties of state importance (for example, he is president of the Polytechnic Museum), also heads the Department of Physics at St. Petersburg State University (SPbSU). The existence of such bans has been confirmed to T-invariant by a number of scientists.
However, Putin’s court physicist, who has taken over all fundamental physics in the Russian Federation, does not hide his motives. on 20 March 2024, he called the break with CERN “a gift for Russia”.
“The lion’s share of Russian specialists from CERN are employees of the Kurchatov Institute, they are our employees. In fact, the return of these people, trained by us, raised by us, ours ideologically and scientifically, is a gift for us,” he told TASS at the time. on 20 September, at a meeting with Putin, he told him that because of their “return to Russia,” the country would experience a “technological breakthrough” and “the scientific infrastructure will become the best in the world.” And already in November, in an interview with RIA Novosti, he offered his interpretation of how JINR was being used to create a “neutral affiliation” for physicists from Russia.
“The West has come up with a veiled scheme for the return of Russian scientists to CERN…The idea is for Russian staff to return to their home institutes in Russia, enrol themselves in the intergovernmental JINR in Dubna near Moscow, and then, having received the status of a member of an international organisation, continue working at CERN as if nothing had happened…However, Russia categorically refuses to cooperate with the West according to such a scheme,” Kovalchuk explained.
Synopsis
Highest-ranking (pseudo)scientist
Mikhail Kovalchuk is the brother of Yuri Kovalchuk, the owner of Rossiya Bank and a friend of Vladimir Putin. Kovalchuk is known for broadcasting all sorts of pseudo-scientific ideas to Putin, Russian officials and senators. He believes that “the West, in violation of all norms of morality and law, is conducting in psychiatric hospitals in Ukraine and Georgia the most dangerous experiments on the creation of biological and new chemical weapons” (the Russian authorities fear that they are aimed specifically at Russians). Kovalchuk also tells us that the United States is breeding a new “sub-species of service people”.
“Kovalchuk suggests that our scientists become a dish on the table of the ogre”
Kovalchuk is broadcasting “alternative history for his own self-interest,” the head of a CERN science group who has worked on the ATLAS experiment for more than 30 years told T-invariant.
“It is useless to logically comment on and interpret Kovalchuk’s words, when I read his statements I only remember Boris Zakhoder’s nursery rhyme:
Once upon a time there were two neighbours,
Two ogre-neighbours.
The ogre, the ogre
Invites him to dinner.
The ogre said, “No!
I won’t go to your place, neighbour.
“It’s not a bad thing to go to dinner,
“But not in the form of a dish!”
“So Kovalchuk proposes that our scientists become a dish on the ogre’s table. There’s nothing behind his words but an attempt to please the Tsar. There’s no place to brand him. This is a pure Lysenko type. Everyone is aware of his work, his role in the breakdown of relations is big. Whatever the decision on war or peace talks in the coming years, there will be no more normal trusting relations with CERN, this is a rupture for several generations to come,” explains the T-invariant’s interlocutor.
Big problems, according to the interviewed physicists, await young people: students, postgraduates. “All these couple of years we tried to persuade the management of CERN to give the opportunity to connect new users at least from the youth, but it did not work. After 30 November for a short time will extend remote access to CERN data only to those Russians who have the status of PhD, so that they could finish their dissertations. We, who have been working for many years here, will find some positions in Europe, such people will be a hundred, but there are no prospects for young people in advanced experimental physics”, – regrets the scientist.
Historical background
CERN: the world’s largest laboratory for high-energy physics.
Established: 29 September 1954.
Location: neighbourhood of Geneva, on the border of Switzerland and France.
The first agreement was signed by 12 European countries: Among them, Germany and Italy stand out in terms of the number of physicists employed. Now there are 23 states in the CERN Council (with voting rights).
The Council does not include observer countries: Israel, India, Russia, USA, Turkey, Japan, Israel, and organisations: European Commission, UNESCO.The Large Hadron Collider has become the world’s largest proton beam accelerator. The LHC has four main detectors: ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb. CMS and ATLAS are designed to detect the Higgs boson, search for evidence of supersymmetry and deviations from the Standard Model.
A brief chronicle of CERN
1957 – the first accelerator was launched (operated until 1990)
1959 – the first official delegation of the USSR arrived
1967 – the first agreement with the USSR was signed
1991 – the Soviet Union was granted observer status at CERN (1 November 1991)
1996 – protocol on the participation of the Russian Federation in the creation of the LHC was signed
2008 – launch of the LHC (the collider ring is larger than the Moscow metro ring line; the length of the ring is more than 26 kilometres)
2012 – Higgs boson discovery announced
2012 – Russia applied for associate membership
2018 – Withdrawal of application for the sake of applying for permanent membership
2019 – Last official Russian delegation to CERN (led by Dmitry Medvedev), instead of discussing the application for permanent membership, a 5-year agreement was concluded (which ended on 30 November 2024)
2021 – the last visit of the head of CERN to Moscow.What are the differences in statuses
Observer status meant that the Russian Federation did not pay contributions to the organisation’s budget, could not vote in the CERN Council, but could participate in direct scientific work on detectors with money and equipment.
Russian scientists and engineers made a significant contribution to the design and construction of the LHC (people, money, equipment).
Associate membership – this status gave the opportunity to attend Council meetings without a casting vote, the right to participate in tenders for equipment, but it was necessary to pay dues – about ten million euros a year. In 2019, the cost of the issue of the status of a permanent member of CERN was called – 115 million dollars. But the decision was never made.
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“The Large Hadron Collider is a modern wonder of the world. Isn’t that enough?”
For more than a decade Andrei Seryakov worked in the laboratory of ultra-high energy physics at SPbSU, studied the matter formed after the Big Bang, and travelled to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN as part of the SPbSU scientific team. In January 2024 his contract ended and he was not offered new positions due to his anti-war stance and political activism. Andrew is also well versed in the history of CERN, as he ran the popular science publick “Cernach” for many years. “Physicist, populariser, guide at the Collider, event organiser of the St. Petersburg project “Home Conference”. Tangero, nerd, polyamorous, multipotential”, – this is how Andrei Seriakov describes himself in his Telegram channel “Sex, Collider, Rock and Roll”.
T-invariant: Andrei, you left CERN just a few weeks ago; in general, the end of your co-operation was not a one-step process, but lasted for 2.5 years. Why was that? And how was it for you?
Andrei Seriakov: It was. For example, Germany decided on 5 March 2022 that it was breaking off all collaborations with Russia. They were building the Fair particle accelerator in Darmstadt – everyone was thrown out there, people were left with nothing, although they had invested decades of their scientific labour in the project, and there was a lot of Russian equipment. And we realised that CERN was next in line. And CERN imposed the first sanctions in the spring of 2022, but postponed the issue until the summer. And in the summer, we got together and postponed it for another two years. To be honest, I was relieved at the time: many people thought (and so did I) that everything would be over in two years, either the Padishah would die or the donkey would die. But in the end, everything took so long.
Yes, two years ago it was decided that we couldn’t have new collaborations or bring in new people or students. But all the previous ones were prolonged until the end of the agreement. That is, first of all, these sanctions hit students and postgraduates – and they hit them at once.
T-i: And when did you realise that it was the end, that 70 years of history were coming to an end?
AS: I realised it in 2023. When it became clear that the war in Ukraine was continuing and there was no visible end in sight. Scientists understood this, were preparing for a rupture. At the same time, despite the sanctions of 2022, the Germans in the same year began to renegotiate contracts with Dubna. Because it turned out that they could not build their collider without our technologies: everything there was designed with magnets produced in Dubna.
T-i: Working at CERN, do you feel as a researcher that you are engaged in a small part of your work – like in a laboratory? Or do you feel the whole rhythm of a big facility, a big production of scientific knowledge?
AS: CERN is the largest international scientific laboratory. CERN is the infrastructure. CERN is a large number of accelerators, including the Large Hadron Collider. And it is an international organisation that allows institutes, physicists from different countries to do their research on the basis of this infrastructure. These physicists (about 13,000 of them) are users, users of the CERN infrastructure. Plus another couple of thousand employees who ensure that this infrastructure works. And it is the users who do the research.
T-i: How did the co-operation begin in general? From the establishment of the Centre in 1954 to the first official big agreement in the late 1960s? All those years of thawing.
AS: In those years there was a mutual interest in sharing knowledge, skills, technology on the planet. In the 1960s, the first contacts started to appear. First three physicists came, then more. Then the world’s most powerful accelerator was launched in the Soviet town of Protvino near Moscow, and then people from CERN began to come to us. And already CERN supplied Protvino with equipment, in particular they supplied a semi-secret computer, which was actually forbidden to be supplied to the USSR, but they somehow agreed – for the sake of science. By the early 1980s, there were only two collaborations in which the USSR participated. And by the end of the 1980s, Soviet physicists were there, as they say, on every corner.
The USSR’s most memorable contribution to CERN
The first delegation from the USSR appeared at CERN in 1959. The members of the delegation made a number of interesting proposals. However, two facts were most memorable to colleagues from CERN: the silent “expert”, who accompanied the Soviet scientists everywhere, and the banquet organised by the delegation at the Metropol Hotel. The amount of caviar and vodka was recalled even at the 50th anniversary of CERN. Ivan Chuvilo, a member of the delegation, one of the founders and later Director of the High Energy Laboratory at JINR in Dubna, was responsible for the delivery of the viands. He had to make a lot of effort to convince the Swiss customs of the diplomatic status of his luggage so that it could be let through without inspection.
T-i: Yes, there is much more information about working together. But there is one unclear question. From 2014 to 2018, it was discussed whether Russia would be an associate member or a permanent member at CERN. And in 2019, at a large meeting of official delegations in Geneva, they discussed the question of Russia becoming a permanent member (even had Dmitry Medvedev at this meeting in Geneva). What prevented it then?
AS: Money. Russia was investing in the infrastructure of CERN with equipment. And member countries invest with money, and this money then goes back to these countries to implement some projects. And if Russia were a participant, it would have a big contribution – and then some big orders would have to be sent to Russia. To find a niche, to say: “Now Russia is doing this. But this is impossible: everything has already been divided among the other major economies in Europe. CERN had no orders for Russia for that amount of money. And it will turn out that this money will not go back into the Russian economy – unlike in other countries. Therefore, membership in CERN was not really advantageous for Russia. Therefore, it was decided to continue the co-operation agreement: not to fulfil orders from CERN, but to produce its own equipment and supply it. The United States also co-operates with CERN under the same scheme. In other words, the lack of associate or permanent membership status in CERN was not in itself a big problem.
T-i: After CERN’s decision, was there any way to replace Russian scientists and Russian supplies?
AS: Partially. The upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider is not going to happen soon. Russia was supposed to supply magnets there. Now new suppliers are needed, and they have been found. But there are also consequences, which I don’t think CERN realises yet. But CERN has taken some measures. Some scientists were offered rates. The choice was: if you want to continue working with us, move to another country, get an affiliation. Not everyone received such offers, about 100 people found a place. Here we should also mention JINR in Dubna. About 400 people from Dubna stay because it is an international organisation. But 800 physicists do not. No one in the world will open so many positions, it is impossible.
T-i: At the same time, it is surprising that Dubna and CERN have kept the agreement. Will this vent to Europe work?
AS: In Dubna you can not take new students. The original idea was this: let Dubna sign co-operation agreements with various institutes in Russia. The staff of these universities will use the JINR infrastructure, just as we do at CERN. And since Dubna co-operates with CERN, it is as if through such a layer we will be able to continue working, and some more physicists from Russia will be able to continue working with CERN. So far, this is not a working scheme. And let us note at once: all these 800 physicists cannot even theoretically be taken to Dubna. Because JINR has no new budget, no new rates for these people.
T-i: Is Russia interested in creating these rates? Even if not even 800, but at least a hundred?
AS: Have you seen the budget for 2025? Do you understand what Russia is interested in now? I think it’s clear: no. Our gerontocracy is not very interested in this.
We have had a separate authoritarian process since the early 2000s. For example, Mikhail Kovalchuk. A physicist, graduated from my department. Well, I don’t know how much of a physicist he is. You can watch his speeches and see for yourself to what extent he now adheres to the scientific point of view. But the important thing is that he has raked up a huge part of Russian fundamental physics under himself (namely, under the Kurchatov Institute, which he runs). And the Kurchatov Institute now runs, for example, Protvino, which once had the most powerful accelerator on the planet. Kovalchuk is the dean of the Physics Department of St. Petersburg State University (where I did not have my contract renewed this year and was clearly told that there were no new positions for me) – and that too is dancing to his tune. And Kovalchuk, like a true patriot, said: if you’re kicking us out, no more co-operation, we’ll be better off without you. No “white flag” speeches to physicists, no neutral affiliations. If you conclude such a thing with Dubna, we will fire you.
T-i: In September, Kovalchuk told Putin that Russian physicists would now return home to their native Kurchatnik. And as a result, the scientific infrastructure in Russia will be the best in the world. There are no analogues, in general.
AS: Physicists are not returning to Russia. The physicists with whom CERN stops co-operating are physicists working in Russia, in our universities and institutes. It is very important to understand this. Some of the people who are really sitting at CERN are those who are tied up in the equipment, who monitor the detectors. They really sat there 365 days a year – but they are few, maybe dozens. His story to Putin has nothing to do with facts.
T-i: On the other side – publications in the Western press that Russian physicists at CERN are spies stealing technology for Putin’s war machine, there are stories about drones of some kind.
AS: Yes, there are twists on both sides. People also often don’t understand what physicists do at CERN. It was created as an anti-war, I would even say super-anti-war structure. And it was originally about research with only peaceful applications. Yes, you can’t say there are no dual-use technologies. You could invent anything. Any chip could be a dual-use technology. But the physicists who work there are constantly making sure that there is no military use of the technology.
T-i: Putin gives reason for this talk. He came to Dubna for the technical launch of the NICA accelerator. Is that how he marked the territory? CERN seems to have concluded that JINR is an international organisation, but completely Putin’s.
AS: I don’t think anyone had any doubts about this. After all, JINR is located inside the Russian Federation, and a huge part of its funding comes from the Russian budget. So, to be honest, I didn’t hear any special conversations at that time. Everyone understands the situation with Dubna perfectly well.
T-i: Speaking of NICA. The technical launch is a demonstrative procedure, but when will the real launch take place?
AS: According to the most optimistic plans, it will be the end of next year. But more likely it will be in 2026. I’m holding my fingers that they will launch it after all, because they have been building it for the second decade. Because they have their own problems because of the sanctions and so on. Without the war, the accelerator would have started up by now. I mean, I know about the problems that are now preventing the launch. They’re related to the war. But it’s not just Russia that has problems. We’re talking about CERN. The next upgrade is being pushed back, and I have a suspicion that this is due to the Russians leaving. Because of the war, the whole world’s basic science is now slowing down.
What’s the difference, look. At CERN, the Russians, these 800 people, were doing a huge amount of all the work, a spectrum of all kinds of different physics. There are physicists who have worked at the Large Hadron Collider, at other facilities – there are a huge number of different facilities. It’s just that the LHC is the most popular and the biggest, it’s the most rumoured one.
If we are talking about the LHC, there is nowhere to replace it. For those who worked on it and can no longer – that’s the end of their work. Here, for example, the Higgs boson is the most famous story. If you research the Higgs boson today, you can only research it at the LHC experimentally. Nowhere else, that’s it. If you stay in Russia, in your field we don’t have it, you can’t research the Higgs boson in Russia anymore. This applies to many other processes, there, I don’t know, the search for supersymmetry.
You can move to Dubna from my field. I deal with quark-gluon plasma. Heavy ion collision physics. I think that about 15% of the physicists from the LHC who do experimental analysis can retrain to Dubna. It’s a small percentage.
There are areas, for example, antimatter research, that are only possible at CERN – everything. For example, antimatter, there is such a factory for the production of antimatter.
T-i: The suspended physicists will still have their accounts in the CERN computer system? Will they at least be able to access the data?
AS: Only PhDs who are finishing their theses. And for a short period of time.
T-i: So the data that CERN receives is not open data?
AS: The data from scientific experiments are not open anywhere. They belong to the scientists who worked on them. Every physics collaboration has a charter by which they operate. And in this charter there is an algorithm: what happens to access to the data after a person leaves the experiment. But now the situation is different: not we leave, but we are “left”. And we lose not just access, but authorship in these data. There will be decades of scientific articles published on the basis of these data, but we will no longer be authors there, although we are. Personally, I see this as a copyright problem. And I think we should think about going to the European Court of Justice.
T-i: The cost of the Large Hadron Collider is estimated at $10 billion. It sounds very solid. But in reality, it is one nuclear power plant, and not the biggest.
AS: I prefer to compare it with the Sochi Olympics. As far as I remember, the price of the Sochi Olympics was about 50-60 billion dollars. So we get about five Large Hadron Colliders.
CERN and the basics of the World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, working as a programmer at CERN, proposed to build on its basis to build shared access to scientific data in a distributed computer network. Soon the first versions of HTML language and HTTP protocol were ready. In just a few years, the project became global, and Berners-Lee himself founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which develops standards for the Internet.
T-i: Many people don’t want to remember the Olympics. With CERN it’s different, a lot of things are left for people to remember. If we think of all the great big physical theories, we can always think of specific applications. But does, say, the Higgs boson have any? Will the Large Hadron Collider have any?
AS: I don’t know why people have a fetish for applications of anything and everything. What are the applications of art? We’re doing research on the universe. What’s the application of black holes? It’s a basic human need to learn how the world around us works. You don’t have to think every time you’re interested in something, whether it has an application or not. It’s the same story with the internet. It wasn’t discovered because it was specifically sought after. And the touchscreen was invented at CERN simply because it was interesting to make such technology. And there are many, many examples like that. But we seem to be too focused on applied things. The Large Hadron Collider is a modern wonder of the world. Isn’t that enough? I told Katerina Gordeeva about it, we talked about it on my last day at CERN, it was symbolic, take a look.
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Editors 29.11.2024