History of CERN, II, 2nd Edition

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.