Science: laboratories and standards

2CERN

CERN grew out of a resolution adopted at a UNESCO meeting in Paris in December 1951. A provisional council followed in 1952, the Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire, and with it the acronym CERN, which the laboratory kept. Twelve states signed the CERN Convention in 1953, subject to ratification, and the organisation came into being in 1954. Its main field is particle physics, which is why it is often called the European Laboratory for Particle Physics.

CERN has two main sites, one in Switzerland and one in France, near the Franco-Swiss border. A tram line runs from Geneva’s main station, Cornavin, to the laboratory.

3How CERN accelerates particles

CERN’s accelerator complex is a chain of machines. Each one boosts the energy of a beam of particles before passing it on to the next. Protons start in a linear accelerator, Linac4, and continue through the Proton Synchrotron Booster, the Proton Synchrotron and the Super Proton Synchrotron.

The last link is the Large Hadron Collider, which first started up on 10 September 2008: a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets cooled to 1.9 K, about −271 °C. Two beams travel in opposite directions in separate pipes kept at ultrahigh vacuum and collide at four points around the ring, where the detectors ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb record what happens.

Not everything happens in the big ring. Several of the smaller accelerators feed their own experimental areas, such as the ISOLDE facility, the Antiproton Decelerator and the n_TOF neutron facility.

4The University of Geneva and its observatory

The University of Geneva’s astronomers announced 51 Pegasi b in 1995, the first planet found around a sun-like star. The discovery opened the systematic search for such planets and earned Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz a share of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics. More in Discoveries.

The discovery came from an institution with a long history. The astronomer Jacques-André Mallet founded the Geneva Observatory in 1772. Its early work was largely chronometry and meteorology – checking the rate of clocks and recording the weather – which ties it to the city’s watchmaking. Since 1966 the observatory has worked at Sauverny, near Versoix, north of the city, and today it is the university’s Department of Astronomy.

Geneva also builds the instruments that find planets. HARPS, a spectrograph built by an international consortium led by the Geneva Observatory, saw first light in February 2003 on the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla in Chile. It measures the motion of stars with a precision of about one metre per second, more than ten times finer than ELODIE in 1995. In space, CHEOPS, a mission of the European Space Agency and Switzerland launched on 18 December 2019 from Kourou in French Guiana, measures the size of already known planets as they pass in front of their stars; combined with their masses, that gives their density, a first clue to what they are made of. The consortium behind the mission is led by the University of Bern, and its Science Operations Centre, which plans the observations and processes the data, is at the University of Geneva.

5From the 1559 academy to the university

The university’s roots go back to 1559, when a humanist and theological school was founded in the city; Jean Calvin played a major role in creating this academy. Mathematics and physics were taught from the early 18th century, when Geneva had a remarkable scientific community, although many of its members worked largely outside the academy.

In 1873 the cantonal parliament decided to create a faculty of medicine and to turn the academy into a university, which opened in 1876.

6Three standards organisations

Technical standards are agreements on how things are made and measured, so that products and networks work together across borders. Three organisations that write them are based in Geneva.

ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, began work on 23 February 1947 with its headquarters in Geneva, after a founding conference in London in 1946. Its members are national standards bodies, one per country.

IEC, the International Electrotechnical Commission, was founded in London in 1906, with the physicist Lord Kelvin as its first president. In 1948 its central office moved to Geneva, sharing a villa with the newly founded ISO.

ITU, today the United Nations agency for digital technologies, is the oldest of the three: it began as the International Telegraph Union, created on 17 May 1865 when twenty countries signed the first International Telegraph Convention in Paris. Its headquarters moved from Berne to Geneva in 1948.

How these three divide the work is explained in our article Who writes the world’s technical standards?

7How an ISO standard is written

An ISO standard is drafted by experts and approved by national bodies, in stages. It starts with a proposal: the participating members of a technical committee vote on whether a new standard is needed, and at least five of them must actively support it and nominate experts. A working group then prepares drafts, which may go through a committee stage until the committee reaches consensus on the technical content.

The draft international standard is then sent to all ISO members for a three-month enquiry. It is approved if two-thirds of the participating members of the committee vote in favour and no more than a quarter of all votes cast are negative. After an optional final vote, ISO’s Central Secretariat in Geneva publishes the standard.

8Weather and climate: WMO and the IPCC

Weather does not stop at borders either, and forecasting has always depended on countries sharing observations. International cooperation in meteorology is usually dated to the first International Meteorological Congress in Vienna in 1873, which led to the International Meteorological Organization. Its successor, the World Meteorological Organization, came into being on 23 March 1950, when its Convention, voted by 31 governments in Washington in 1947, entered into force; in 1951 it became a specialised agency of the United Nations. Its headquarters are in Geneva.

In 1988 WMO and the United Nations Environment Programme set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, whose secretariat is hosted by WMO in Geneva. The IPCC does not carry out its own research. It assesses published scientific literature, in three working groups: the physical science basis; impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and mitigation, with a separate task force on national greenhouse gas inventories. Almost every country in the world is a member.

Its reports are written by scientists, but their short Summaries for Policymakers are approved by governments line by line in a plenary session, together with the authors, who make sure the wording stays faithful to the full report. The full report itself is accepted as a whole, not rewritten by governments. In 2007 the IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for their efforts to build up and spread knowledge about man-made climate change.

9Rules for inventions: WIPO

Science turns into products through inventions, and inventions are protected by patents. The international rules for them also have a Geneva address. The Paris Convention of 1883 on industrial property, which covers patents and trademarks, and the Berne Convention of 1886 on copyright each created an international bureau; in 1893 the two bureaus merged. The World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO, took over from them under a convention signed in Stockholm on 14 July 1967, which entered into force in 1970. In 1974 WIPO became a specialised agency of the United Nations. Its headquarters are in Geneva.

A common misunderstanding is worth clearing up: there is no “world patent”. WIPO runs the Patent Cooperation Treaty, the PCT, under which an inventor can file one application, in one language, at one patent office, with the same effect as filing in every member state. The application receives an international search report, and the inventor gains time to decide where to go further. But a patent can only be granted by each national or regional patent office, under its own law.

10Instruments of the past

Geneva’s scientific past is on show in the Musée d’histoire des sciences, in the Villa Bartholoni by the lake. Its collection of old scientific instruments comes from the cabinets of Geneva scholars of the 17th to the 19th century.