Page 18 - merged

Dominigue Pestre
Dominique Pestre has been trained as a physicist and as historian. He
extensively wrote on the history of XXth Century physics, notably in France,
on the history of high-energy physics and CERN, and on the history of the
science-military relation. He is current/y working on an history of operational
research in the United Kingdom during the war, on an history of the building
of the French nuclear deterrence system. He made his whole carrer at the
CNRS, Paris and was elected as Directeur d'Etudes at EHESS (Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) some years ago. He is director fo the
Centre Alexandre Koyré for the history of sciences and technology.

Abstract: New large accelerators in the World in the Forlies and ear/y
Fifties

The decision-making processes for the main particle accelerators built
throughout the world from the 1930s to the 1960s. .
This paper presents half a dozen stories involving protons and physicists,
electron accelerators and high politics. The aims of the study are two-fold.
The first is to offer a series of historical analyses describing how decisions
were arrived at concerning some of the largest accelerators constructed from
the 1930s to the 1970s throughout the world. Accelerators are the basic tools
of what many consider to be the most fundamental physics undertaken during
the last half century, and they are expensive and technically complex
machines.
My second aim is to reflect upon the decision-making processes as they
occur in XXth Century big physics. «8pontaneously», I would say, one might
be tempted to imagine such processes as being of a linear, rational,
«scientific» kind -- the final decision resulting from an exhaustive analysis of
ali possible solutions and of their relevance for the unresolved problems of
physics. My study belies the systematic dominance of such a process an
suggest, on the contrary, the playing out of different logics of a completely

different kind.