Additional contributions by Sheldon Lee Glashow, Donald H. Perkins, and Antonino Pullia

Abstract

I welcome this opportunity to celebrate the marvellous accomplishments of CERN, which is arguably the most successful of all international organizations and a showpiece of world-wide cooperation. I have been a visitor here on so many occasions: first as an NSF fellow in 1959–60, then as a paid visitor for a semester, as a frequent summer drop-in, conference participant, and member (now “old-boy”) of the Science Policy Committee. These experiences have been central to the evolution of my own career in theoretical physics. Many of the experimental discoveries underlying our Standard Model have taken place here, among them the discoveries of neutral currents, weak intermediaries, and the many precision tests of the electroweak model carried out at LEP. But of equal importance is the fact that so many crucial developments in fundamental theory were either initiated, nurtured or perfected at CERN, by both its resident and visiting theorists. This is certainly so for me, as I am certain it is for many of my distinguished theoretical colleagues. CERN has always been, and must continue to be, the place where the action is, the Grand Central Station of particle physics, the crossroads of thousands of individual physicists’ lives.