By
A. Hermann
L. Weiss
D. Pestre
U. Mersits
J. Krige, Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques, Paris, France
Description
The first volume of the History of CERN (published in 1987) dealt with the launching of the European Organization for Nuclear Research
covering the period 1949 to 1954. Volume II continues the history through to the mid-1960's, when it was decided to equip the laboratory
with a second generation of accelerators and a new Director-General was nominated. It covers the building and the running of the laboratory
during these dozen years, it studies the construction and exploitation of the 600 MeV Synchro-cyclotron and the 28 GeV Proton Synchrotron,
it considers the setting up of the material and organizational infrastructure which made this possible, and it covers the reigns of four
Director-Generals, Felix Bloch, Cornelis Bakker, John Adams and Victor Weisskopf.
Three considerations are relevant to the treatment
of the material in this volume. Firstly the political dimension, in the broad sense of the term, was no longer omnipresent as during
the process of creation. Alongside it scientific and technical determinations were at work. The second consideration is that the institutional
dimension was also inescapably present. Finally, there was no longer one dominant process in the organisation's life but several and
it was no longer possible to tell just one story. The authors therefore decided to focus attention on various aspects of CERN's life.
Part I attempts to describe the various aspects which together constitute the history of CERN and aims to offer a synchronic panorama
year by year account of CERN's many activities. Part II deals primarily with technological achievements and scientific results and it
includes the most technical chapters in the volume, chapters using as main sources publications in the open literature, internal reports,
and minutes of specialized committees or of divisional meetings. Part III aims to define how the CERN ``system'' functioned, how this
science-based organization worked, how it chose, planned and concretely realized its experimental programme on the shop-floor and how
it identified the equipment it would need in the long term and organized its relations with the outside world, notably the political
world. The concluding Part IV aims to bring out the specificity of CERN, to identify the ways in which it differed from other big science
laboratories in the 1950's and 1960's, and to try to understand where its uniqueness and originality lay.
