Abstract
It was snowing heavily when, at the beginning of 1960, I passed through the CERN entrance gate, which was then always open and practically unattended, for the first time. The road – which ran from Geneva to the village of Meyrin, where the research centre is located – was then quite narrow with little traffic. The laboratories and offices, constructed in the architectural style of the day, were neat, with aromas of wood and coffee.
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Notes
- 1.
The positive electrode (anode) of the tube used by Röntgen – lent by the great physicist Philipp Lenard – was special because made of platinum. This fact increased the production rate of the new radiation and contributed to the discovery.
- 2.
1 eV (electron-volt) is the energy which an electron acquires when it is accelerated by a voltage of 1 V.
- 3.
At Rutherford's time the decay products of radium were called A, B, C, etc... Later it became clear that they were different chemical elements; radium C is bismuth 214Bi.
- 4.
1021 is a very large number equal to a 1 followed by 21 zeros. To express very small numbers, instead, negative powers are used: 10−13 equals 1 divided by 1 followed by 13 zeros.
- 5.
Physicists call ‘reduced Planck constant’ the quantity h appearing in this equation.
- 6.
A cloud chamber contains water vapour in a special unstable state called ‘supersaturated’. If a charged particle crosses it, the ionised atoms become condensation centres for miniscule drops of water, causing ‘vapour trails’ which make the particle trajectories visible.
- 7.
The concept of ‘mass in motion’ is a subtle one because the particle mass does not change during the acceleration. However, in a given magnetic field, the curvature of the trajectory increases as if the mass were to grow as the total energy: what is growing with the total energy is not the mass, but the inertia of the particle.
- 8.
Similarly a surfer has to be on the decreasing part of an ocean wave to be transported towards the shore.
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Amaldi, U. (2015). The First Fifty Years. In: Particle Accelerators: From Big Bang Physics to Hadron Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08870-9_1
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