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The Iron Lady and the boson

I enjoyed seeing the confidential letter from CERN Director General Herwig Schopper to UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the Jan/Feb 08 issue of symmetry. It reminded me of a related letter.

 

The Iron Lady and the boson

I enjoyed seeing the confidential letter from CERN Director General Herwig Schopper to UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the Jan/Feb 08 issue of symmetry. It reminded me of a related letter.

I was one of the people who showed Mrs. Thatcher round the UA1 experiment when she visited CERN in August 1982. It was a private visit, and we were not told who was coming, merely that it was a senior UK person and "she was very important," so we should take the visit seriously. Indeed we did, and before the visit I spent some time crawling through the apparatus checking that no bomb had been hidden there.

Alan Astbury, the leader of the Rutherford Lab group and co-spokesperson of UA1, gave a short presentation of our experiment. He ended on a cautiously optimistic note: "If we are lucky, and there is a Father Christmas, we will see the W by the end of this year." "Right," said the Iron Lady, pointing her finger at Alan. "I will phone you in January to see whether you have found it." She did not say what would happen to our funding if we did not discover the W.

The discovery of the W was announced at a CERN press conference on 25 January 1983. I remember the date well: It was my 50th birthday, and I gave a talk about the discovery to a packed audience in London. After publication of the results, I received a letter of congratulation from Mrs. Thatcher. Coming from our Prime Minister it was perhaps understandable that it was a bit nationalistic in its tone, emphasizing the British participation. The UA1 and UA2 experiments were of course international, and I did not have the heart to tell Mrs. Thatcher that even in the Queen Mary College group from London, the eight participants included two American physicists, one Canadian physicist, one Italian graduate student and another with a Greek mother, and that I was born in Czechoslovakia.
Peter Kalmus was the leader of the Queen Mary College group in UA1

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