CERN celebrates 100 years of science and diplomacy
Since his birth in Bohemia in 1924, Herwig Schopper has been a prisoner of war, an experimentalist with pioneering contributions in nuclear, accelerator and detector physics, director general (DG) of DESY and then CERN during a golden age for particle physics, and a celebrated science diplomat. Shortly after his centenary, his colleagues, family and friends gathered on 1 March to celebrate the life of the first DG in either institution to reach 100.
“He is a restless person,” noted Albrecht Wagner (DESY), who presented a whistlestop tour of Schopper’s 35 years working in Germany, following his childhood in Bohemia. Whether in Hamburg, Erlangen, Mainz or Karlsruhe, he never missed out on an opportunity to see new places – though always maintaining the Austrian diet to which his children attribute his longevity. On one occasion, Schopper took a sabbatical to work with Lise Meitner in Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology. At the time, the great physicist was performing the first nuclear-physics studies in the keV range, said Wagner, and directed Schopper to measure the absorption rate of beta-decay electrons in various materials using radioactive sources and a Geiger–Müller counter. Schopper is one of the last surviving physicists to have worked with her, observed Wagner.
Schopper’s scientific contributions have included playing a major part in the world’s first polarised proton source, Europe’s first R&D programme for superconducting accelerators and the development of hadronic calorimeters as precision instruments, explained Christian Fabjan (TU Vienna/HEPHY). Schopper dubbed the latter the sampling total absorption calorimeter, or STAC, playing on the detector’s stacked design, but the name didn’t stick. In recognition of his contributions, hadronic calorimeters might now be renamed Schopper total absorption calorimeters, joked Fabjan.
