"It is TRITE to see the vast dome taking shape on a lonely desert peak as a temple. But it is also unavoidable. How else to understand so much effort devoted to something truly otherworldly? When its mirrored eye opens to the universe in 2028, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) currently under construction in Chile's Atacama Desert will be by far the most capable such instrument ever built—quite possibly the most ambitious telescope that will ever grace the surface of the Earth. It will be a great and ennobling human achievement. It will also be a peculiarly European one.
Europe is frequently sidelined as old and timid, unwilling to pull its weight, self-absorbed, incapable of decisions and much worse. In some arenas this is undoubtedly true. But when it comes to the creation of great instruments of knowledge the countries of Europe have a singular gift, one that comes from pooling and integrating the ambitions of its scientists over generations.
The most celebrated of these achievements is CERN, the particle-physics laboratory which straddles the French-Swiss border. It was founded in 1954 to serve an area of "big science" which required resources beyond those of any but the largest European countries. But it was not merely a pragmatic pooling of costs. As a common endeavour, it spoke both to Europe's past cultural pre-eminence and to its future as a family of nations. By the 1980s, the laboratory thus formed was leading the world. Since the 1990s, when Congress cancelled America's Superconducting Supercollider, it has been peerless.
In the same year that CERN was founded, European astronomers expressed an interest in something similar of their own, but with a twist. All large telescopes at that time were at sites in the northern hemisphere; Europe should join forces to build one in the southern hemisphere, the better to see, among other things, the heart of the Milky Way. By 1966 the European Southern Observatory's first telescope had been installed in Chile. In the late 1990s ESO opened its world-class "Very Large Telescope". Now the yet more remarkable ELT is coming to life on another mountain 22km away.
This sort of big science is not everything. Creating wonders like the ELT or CERN's Large Hadron Collider requires remarkable engineering. It does not spur the sort of research to which one should look for breakthrough technologies and new industries [1]. And scale does not suit all sciences equally well. But fundamental physical inquiries matter, and the conventions and councils Europe has built up to serve them—mostly specific to particular fields, and not part of the EU institutions—do so admirably. They shield their endeavours both from the unsustainable exuberance that sets up "moonshots" (but only rarely completes them) and from the propensity of one government to cancel a previous one's pet project. Their continuity provides just the sort of stable institutional mountain you need if you are to create marvels on its peak.
There is no magic model here for others to copy. The institutions of CERN and ESO, of the European Space Agency, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting and more come from a particular post-war period in which scientists and statesmen learned to make common cause in order to further what they saw as common culture. But there is bounty to share. For all that CERN is a European success, it is also a world lab serving researchers from America, China, Japan and beyond. What is seen through the ELT will be seen for all. If Galileo's continent can see it with particular satisfaction, all the better.” [2]
1. That is not true. "The World Wide Web was invented by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN. He was motivated by the problem of storing, updating, and finding documents and data files in that large and constantly changing organization, as well as distributing them to collaborators outside CERN.
The World Wide Web has been central to the development of the Information Age and is the primary tool billions of people use to interact on the Internet." So, it did "spur the sort of research to which one should look for breakthrough technologies and new industries."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
· · · 2. "Why Europe is particularly good at big science." The Economist, 8 Dec. 2023, p. NA.
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