United for Atoms

The world's most powerful atom smasher is in neither the U.S. nor in Russia; it is in Switzerland. In the rolling countryside three miles northwest of Geneva, the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) has built a great new proton synchrotron designed to produce 25 billion electron volts. Half buried in a hillside, it is a huge doughnut of magnet steel, 656 ft. in outside diameter. Last week British Physicist John B. Adams, chief of CERN's Proton Synchrotron Division, ordered slight corrections in the magnetic field, watched as the protons sped faster and faster around their circular track inside the doughnut, triumphantly saw the oscillograph's curve reach 29 Bev, putting CERN's machine far ahead of the ten-Bev Russian accelerator at Dubna.

CERN will rule the roost in high-energy physics until the 30-Bev machine at Brookhaven National Laboratory goes into operation next year. It may be tops even then; Dutch-born Professor Cornelius Bakker, CERN's director, thinks that his machine can be revved up to Brookhaven's energy of 30 Bev.

Aware that modern nuclear research is too expensive for any but the world's giant powers, twelve of Europe's nations* launched CERN in 1954 as a scientific venture in international cooperation. CERN's most ambitious project so far is the big accelerator. It cost $35 million, took four years to build, ran into many obstacles. Perhaps the toughest was the discovery that the ground near Geneva trembles measurably every month or so. "It was found," says CERN's Canadian-born Jack MacCabe, "that these tremors were caused by Atlantic storm waves pounding on the beaches of France." To insulate the accelerator from French surf, the massive (3,800 tons) apparatus had to be mounted on a suspension system.

Other difficulties were politico-economic; the businessmen of CERN's participating nations jockeyed for bigger shares of the fat engineering contracts. But the scientists, including Communist Yugoslavs, worked in amity. At CERN there were no weapons projects and no problems of national security. "Any scientist can work here, help himself to our blueprints, take pictures of any damn thing around here," says MacCabe. "Nothing is secret."

*Belgium, Denmark, France, West Germany, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Britain, Yugoslavia.

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