science · 12 December 1949 · 75 years ago
In 1949, a recommendation to establish an all-European Institute of Nuclear Physics was adopted by the European Cultural Conference on its closing day. The original proposal was made in a message sent by Louis de Broglie. Raoul Dautry of the French Atomic Energy Commission said that no single European country was large enough to mobilize enough resources to match U.S. standards in atomic research. The four-day meeting was attended by 150 leaders of European thought. UNESCO supported the idea. The present CERN laboratory (Centre Européenne de Recherche Nucléaire) was ratified on 29 Sep 1954, by twelve founding Member States, but official ground-breaking took place earlier, on 17 May 1954.
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