CERN honours Georges Charpak

CERN pays tribute to the work of Georges Charpak at a colloquium in honour of his 85th birthday.

On 9 March CERN’s Main Auditorium was the venue for a fascinating and moving celebration marking the 85th birthday of Georges Charpak, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1992 for his invention of the multi-wire proportional chamber. "This is also an opportunity to celebrate Georges Charpak’s 50 years of service at CERN", said CERN’s Director-General, Rolf Heuer, in his introductory speech, paying an emphatic tribute to Charpak’s work in the field of education. Georges Charpak then gave a twenty-minute speech by videoconference. "Dear friends. Thank you for this unusual celebration. This is the first time my birthday has been officially celebrated on the correct day", he said. For although his birthday was officially recorded as 1st August 1924, he was actually born on 8 March. He went on to speak about his life, including his birth in a village now in the Ukraine, his emigration to France at the age of seven, his service in the resistance, his imprisonment in a concentration camp, his enthusiastic discovery of physics and his arrival at CERN. "CERN was a wonderful place. I was able to conduct science in total liberty over several decades", he said. He also spoke about his contribution to developments in the field of detectors for medical imaging and his involvement in education initiatives, the most well-known of which is "La Main à la Pâte", which helps schoolchildren to learn about science through simple experiments. His talk was followed by a presentation of his work by former colleague Ioanis Giomataris of CEA-Saclay.

The webcast of the entire colloquium can be seen on the CDS website, at this address.