Article by Kyriaki Papageorgiou: “It is tempting to think of CERN only as a triumph of scale and engineering: a vast complex of accelerators, detectors, and tunnels built to probe the fundamental structure of matter. This image often stands in for “Big Science” more generally, reinforcing the idea that CERN’s primary lesson lies in technical ambition or concentrated resources. But this reading misses what has made CERN historically distinctive and politically durable. From its founding in 1954, in the aftermath of the Second World War, CERN was conceived not simply as a laboratory, but as a political infrastructure for rebuilding European science (and Europe) through cooperation. It was designed to pool resources and research capacity across the borders of its original 12 member states after decades of fragmentation and scientific brain drain. Its founding convention embedded a public, nonmilitary ethos from the outset, explicitly committing the organization to “have no concern with work for military requirements.”
CERN’s governance was treaty-based and intergovernmental, tying scientific collaboration to the shared funding commitments and collective decisionmaking of the CERN Council, through which member states vote to decide on scientific and administrative issues. Precisely because CERN made large-scale collaboration functional, productive, and credible, it has also become one of the most closely studied scientific infrastructures, offering unusually rich accounts of how trust is built in practice…(More)”.
