The contribution of bubble chambers to European scientific collaboration

We tend to take the organization of bubble chamber experiments for granted today. Yet the schemes put in practice in the early 1960s were innovative at the time. They required breaking with existing habits of mind which were dominated by the so-called truck team system for doing experiments. They required the formulation of new procedures for both the definition and the implementation of an experimental programme, procedures which were to serve as a ''model'' for the organization of experimental work at CERN with other techniques. And they stimulated an impressive growth of physics activities in universities and national institutes in the CERN member states. In short, bubble chamber physics was the avenue through which multinational, multi-institutional collaborative work was initiated at CERN, the means whereby the laboratory fulfilled its mission to rebuild physics on a European scale. If the bubble chamber physicists achieved these objectives it is not simply because they had already developed a tradition of collaboration. It was also because their technique imposed certain forms of organization on them. It was this combination of historical, technical and political factors which ensured that bubble chamber physics played the key role that it did in the early history of CERN and indeed of European high-energy physics as a whole. (orig./HB)