Hadron colliders in perspective
From visionary engineer Rolf Widerøe’s 1943 patent for colliding beams, to the high-luminosity LHC and its possible successor, the 14 October symposium “50 Years of Hadron Colliders at CERN” offered a feast of physics and history to mark the 50th anniversary of the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR). Negotiating the ISR’s steep learning curve in the 1970s, the ingenious conversion of the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) into a proton–antiproton collider (SppS) in the 1980s, and the dramatic approval and switch-on of the LHC in the 1990s and 2000s chart a scientific and technological adventure story, told by its central characters in CERN’s main auditorium.