Golden Jubilee photos

Events, activities and celebrations are being organised in all the Member States as CERN prepares for its fiftieth anniversary next year. A detailed programme of the festivities will be available in early 2004. In the meantime, the Weekly Bulletin and the special Fiftieth Anniversary Website are launching a series of photographs recounting the Laboratory's fifty-year history. A different event will be commemorated each week. The series begins with one of the first Council sessions.

The origins of CERN
Dress code has evolved somewhat since this third session of the provisional CERN Council in October 1952, and Niels Bohr's pipe would no longer be permitted; but the spirit that drives the Member State delegates, namely promoting leading-edge basic science in Europe, will be much the same as ever when the 126th Council session takes place at the end of this week.

While CERN was officially created on 29th September 1954 following the ratification of its Convention by France and Germany, its origins go back to the end of the Second World War. European and American physicists, whose ranks had been depleted by the brain drain to the United States, set out to rebuild European basic science, which had been decimated by the war. The combined efforts of a few visionary scientists to establish collaboration between the leading European physicists culminated in 1951 in an agreement establishing the Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire (from which the abbreviation CERN derives), which was followed by the drawing-up of the CERN Convention in 1953. This photo shows some of CERN's founding fathers, in particular (in the middle row, from back to front), Pierre Auger, Niels Bohr and Lew Kowarski.