Before the days when marketing departments dictated that acronyms should be engineered to sound like real words, a group of Europeans got together in Paris to consider whether their countries should pool their expertise on matters sub-atomic. It was 1953 ― less than a decade after Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Enrico Fermi had given America the means to destroy entire cities with a single bomb. Though the talk then was of the peaceful use of nuclear power-unlimited clean electricity from first fission, and then fusion ― the subtext of subatomic physics was military. But for those with more lofty goals, the particle accelerators that had descended from Lawrence's pre-war cyclotrons brought with them the promise of understanding the fabric of the universe at its smallest level. This combination of terror, hope and curiosity meant that physics in the 1950S was sexy in a way that modern physicists can only envy.
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