This photo shows one of the 4,500 visitors at CERN’s Open Day on 15 September 1984. The festivities, which marked the Organization’s 30^th anniversary, also included a concert and a formal ceremony on 21 September.  CERN’s team of historians put together an exhibition of archival documents, and a history seminar traced over three decades of achievement. Read all about the events in the November 1984 CERN Courier, or browse through the exhibition catalogue and official speeches here.

The Journal of Jocular Physics, published by the Institute of Theoretical Physics (now the Niels Bohr Institute), was a spoof journal produced in honour of Niels Bohr or his 50^th 60^th and 70^th birthdays. The 1955 edition included a new version of Kipling’s Elephant’s Child, the Geneva Conference “Alcohol for Peace,” The Atom that Bohr Built, and much more.  

On page 10, a memo addressed to all members of CERN gave advice on the standardization of papers. Rules and a template were provided to reduce the work of writing and editing articles; helpful suggestions included starting all papers about field theory with the phrase “According to Schwinger.”

The 1935 edition is available here.

On 4 December 1930, Wolfgang Pauli wrote his famous letter to the ‘Dear radioactive ladies and gentlemen’ postulating a neutral particle to solve the puzzle of missing energy during beta decay. This letter forms the basis of a new work by ART@CREATIONS, Liebe Radioaktive Damen und Herren, featuring music composed by Petros Stergiopoulos and Oded Ben-Horin.

Pauli had to wait nearly 26 years for experimental confirmation of the neutrino. As he wrote to its discoverers, Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan, ‘Everything comes to him who knows how to wait.’

A new group set up at CERN in the 1970s had rather different objectives to those of the rest of the laboratory. Their main task was to build a 3.6 metre telescope to be sent to Chile, following signature of a collaboration agreement between the ESO and CERN on 16 September 1970.

The first meeting of the coordinating committee two years later reviewed progress and confirmed that ESO’s Sky Atlas Laboratory was also welcome to continue their work of mapping the southern sky at CERN. The groups relocated to the ESO’s new premises at Garching, Germany, in 1980. See the committee report, read the press release and Professor Blaauw’s article in the August 1970 CERN Courier, or enjoy some more photos of the teams at work.

‘It is a pleasure to introduce our long expected internal bulletin,’ wrote Director-General Cornelis Jan Bakker, ‘I hope it will benefit not only from your attention but also from the many suggestions which will certainly arise in CERN's fertile minds.’

The first CERN Courier featured visiting  VIPs, a forthcoming trip to Russia, feedback on the 13^th CERN Council Session and a round-up of news at CERN and abroad (Other Peoples' Atoms). Behind the scenes, an introductory report from the editor discussed the objectives and format of the proposed journal, and also how to finance it. Disagreement about whether it would be ethically acceptable to include advertisements rumbled on for quite some time.

On 7 may 1977 Europe inaugurated the world’s largest accelerator – the Super Proton Synchrotron; you can read all about it in the CERN Courier.

But what was happening behind the scenes? Did you know that organising secretary, Miss Steel, set up a massive card index to keep track of the guests, entering all the details on 6,000 colour-coded cards? She also insisted on sending reply cards to the VIPs, even though treating them like ordinary mortals was considered infra dig; she said the higher you go in a hierarchy, the less legible signatures become, and she wanted to know who the replies came from. Logistics were further complicated by differing conceptions between the different countries as to what constituted an “official delegate”. Her unofficial report makes interesting reading too.

Demand for CERN’s Mercury computer had increased rapidly since its arrival in 1958, and by 1960 it was time to impose some sort of order on the users: “The present informal arrangement where every programmer may contact any operator makes it impossible for the operators to work efficiently.” A Users’ Committee was set up (see the minutes of the first meeting here), a reception desk was established and some rules laid down.

“Programmers have always the strong tendency to ask the operator to perform various emergency actions as soon as their programmes fail. If the operator follows such directions computer time is usually lost unnecessarily. If she refuses (as she is supposed to do), experience shows that people tend to argue. Consequently every effort will be made to have no programmer in the computer room outside normal working hours.” Any questions were to be directed to the Office of the Programming King, Mr Lake. 

CERN has the privilege of housing the scientific archive of 1945 Nobel-prizewinning physicist Wolfgang Pauli. This small but historically valuable collection was donated by Pauli’s widow who, with the help of friends, tracked down originals or copies of his numerous letters. This correspondence, with Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein and others, provides an invaluable resource on the development of 20^th century science.

Franca Pauli can be seen here with two of CERN’s founding fathers, Francis Perrin and François de Rose, at the inauguration of CERN’s Pauli Memorial Room (Salle Pauli) on 14 June 1960 (press release, in French). The Archive also includes photographs, manuscripts, notes, and a rare audio recording of Pauli lecturing in 1958. Many items have been digitized and are available online; more information is available here.

The 8th Annual International Conference on High Energy Physics – known as the Rochester Conference, from the name of its first venue – was held at the Physics Institute of the University of Geneva. The format for this meeting, which was also the 2^nd CERN Conference on High Energy Nuclear Physics, differed slightly from previous years. To maximise use of time, rapporteurs were chosen summarise the developments in their field. You can read the proceedings here or look at some of the deliberations of the planning committee here.

Even if rapporteurs helped make the content clearer for participants, CERN’s Public Information Office pointed out that it ‘will probably be too hard to digest for the average reporter and reader, even if cleverly "popularized". Thus the main stress should be placed on personalities and the spirit of international cooperation.’ (See memo.) There were plenty of high profile physicists to choose from, including Nobel Prize winner Wolfgang Pauli; a rare recording of him speaking at the conference is online here.   

What is a computer? Why does CERN need the new ‘number crunchers’ anyway? These are some of the questions Lew Kowarski tries to answer in a special issue of the CERN Courier devoted to computing at CERN in 1972.

In his introduction he explains that high-energy physics is not just about hunting down and photographing strange particles, as though they were so many rare animals. Other articles give details of electronics experiments, bubble chamber experiments, data acquisition and analysis, mathematical computing applications in theoretical studies and more. But it is perhaps the advertisements that really capture the state of the art nearly half a century ago.