Sir, – Donal Denham (Letters, November 4th) makes the astounding statement that in the second half of the 1990s, Cern was at a “highly experimental stage of its development” and furthermore, there were doubts whether a particle collider was “a feasible scientific concept or a figment of the imagination”.
At this point, the Large Electron Positron collider (LEP), the precursor to the Large Hadron Collider, had been operating successfully at Cern since 1989, and its predecessor, the SPS, which is still in use, had yielded Nobel Prize-winning discoveries in the 1980s.
There were at the same time numerous well-established particle colliders elsewhere in the world. I wonder who would have thought these were all “a figment of the imagination”.
Cern was indeed at a highly experimental stage, but only in the sense that it is a scientific experiment.
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The impression conveyed by Mr Denham appears more than anything to highlight the serious disconnect between the world of science and that of politics and diplomacy of which he was a part.
– Yours, etc,
JON-IVAR SKULLERUD,
Department of Theoretical Physics,
Maynooth University.
