Herwig Schopper - Scientist and Diplomat in a Rapidly Changing World

This open access book is both a memoir and a biography. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1924, Herwig Schopper is one of the few people able to bear witness to 100 years of European history. His career has taken him from research to management to diplomacy, with a major part devoted to, and inspired by, CERN.

Herwig enjoyed a rich childhood, spending his summers at his grandparent’s hotel on the Adriatic coast. It is there that he developed an interest in physics though eavesdropping on holidaying professors from Budapest and Belgrade who conversed in German. His youthful idyll was shattered by the annexation of the Sudetenland, which lead to him serving in the Luftwaffe signals corps. Working as a translator for the British administration in Hamburg after the war, he also enrolled at the University and was soon granted leave to travel outside Germany for his research. So began a long string of professional relationships with leading scientists of the day: Lise Meitner, Otto Frisch, Bob Wilson, Chien Shiung Wu, Masatoshi Koshiba and Sam Ting to name but a few. Herwig came to consider them all as friends.

Through his long career, Herwig has played a leading role in institutions from Erlangen to Karlsruhe, and from DESY, where he was director from 1973 to 1980, to CERN, where he served as Director-General from 1981 to 1988. Since its foundation CERN has had two major missions: to conduct first-class scientific research and to foster peaceful relations between nations. Following this example Herwig has played a key role in pioneering the deployment of science for peace, notably through the SESAME laboratory in the Middle East. This book gives a full account of Herwig’s rich and varied life and concludes with his reflections on the challenges that society faces today.

Herwig Franz Schopper received a doctorate from the University of Hamburg before holding positions at Erlangen, Mainz and Karlsruhe before moving to CERN in 1970 as leader of the Nuclear Physics Division. In 1973, he returned to Hamburg, where he chaired the DESY directorate until becoming Director General of CERN in 1981, overseeing major organisational changes at the Laboratory, as well as the construction of a new flagship research facility, the Large Electron Positron collider, LEP. Following his retirement in 1989, Professor Schopper embarked on a second career as a science diplomat, working largely with UNESCO. During this time, he served at the first President of the SESAME Council.

James Gillies began his career as a research physicist at CERN before moving into science communication. He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford. Leaving research in 1992 to take up the position of Head of Science at the British Council in Paris, he returned to CERN as a science writer in 1995, going on to head the Laboratory’s communicaitons group from 2003 to 2015.