CERN

By Graham Farmelo 

Faculty and Members at IAS witnessed the announcement of CERN's discovery of a Higgs-like boson in Bloomberg Hall and later celebrated with macerated strawberries, Higgs-denoted cookies, and a Peeps-populated diorama (above) of CERN’s ATLAS particle detector, created by Marilena LoVerde, Member in the School of Natural Sciences, and Laura Newburgh, a physicist at Princeton University

On Wednesday, July 4, shortly after 4 a.m., the Institute’s new Director, Robbert Dijkgraaf, was in Bloomberg Hall, cracking open three bottles of vintage champagne to begin a rather unusual party. He was among the scientists who had been in the Hall’s lecture theater since 3 a.m. to watch a presentation from Geneva on the latest results from the CERN laboratory’s Large Hadron Collider. In the closing moments, after CERN’s Director-General Rolf Heuer cautiously claimed the discovery of a new sub-atomic particle—“I think we have it, yes?”—applause broke out in the CERN auditorium and in the Bloomberg Hall lecture theater. Within minutes, the IAS party was underway.

The new particle shows several signs that it is the Higgs boson, the only missing piece of the Standard Model, which gives an excellent account of nature’s electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions. Although some physicists had come to doubt whether the boson existed, Nima Arkani-Hamed, Professor in the Institute’s School of Natural Sciences, was so confident that in 2007 he bet a year’s salary that it would be detected at the Large Hadron Collider. In the week before the CERN presentation, Arkani-Hamed invited colleagues to the party and organized the catering. Convinced that he had won his bet, he bought three bottles of champagne, including two of Special Cuvée Bollinger.

By Cécile DeWitt-Morette 

Cécile DeWitt-Morette with (from left to right) Isadore Singer, Freeman Dyson, and Raoul Bott at the Institute in the 1950s

In Brief 

It all began with a cable from Oppenheimer that I received on March 10, 1948, in Trondheim, Norway: ON THE RECOMMENDATION OF BOHR AND HEITLER I AM GLAD TO OFFER YOU MEMBERSHIP SCHOOL OF MATHEMATICS FOR THE ACADEMIC YEAR 1948 – 1949 WITH STIPEND OF $3500. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER.

I did not know that this was a great offer. I did not even know where Princeton was, but as a general rule, I would rather say “yes” than “no.” I was then on leave from the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), having been awarded a Rask-Oersted Fellowship for the academic year 1947–48 at the Nordiska Institutet för Teoretisk Fysik in Copenhagen.

In retrospect, I think that in the days of the Marshall plan, Oppie was looking for a couple of European young postdocs who would benefit from a year at the Institute. Did I benefit? More than I could ever have imagined.
During my two-year stay, 1948–50, Bryce DeWitt, a postdoc at the Institute, 1949–50, asked me to marry him, and I conceived the Les Houches Summer School as my self-imposed condition for marrying a “foreigner.” Thanks to Freeman Dyson and Richard Feynman, I learned about functional integration and am still fascinated by it.