James Gillies

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: LiseMeitner, 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.

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: LiseMeitner, 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.

The Higgs boson is the rock star of fundamental particles, catapulting CERN, the laboratory where it was found, into the global spotlight. But what is it, why does it matter, and what exactly is CERN? In the late 1940s, a handful of visionaries were working to steer Europe towards a more peaceful future through science, and CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, was duly born. James Gillies tells the gripping story of particle physics, from the original atomists of ancient Greece, through the people who made the crucial breakthroughs, to CERN itself, one of the most ambitious scientific undertakings of our time, and its eventual confirmation of the Higgs boson. Weaving together the scientific and political stories of CERN's development, the book reveals how particle physics has evolved from being the realm of solitary genius to a global field of human endeavour, with CERN's Large Hadron Collider as its frontier research tool.

Distinguished governance experts offer cures for what ails our boards of directors In light of corporate malfeasance in recent years, the governance of corporations has been receiving great attention from regulators, researchers, shareholders, and directors themselves. Based on Richard Leblanc's in-depth five-year study of 39 boards of directors of both for- and not-for-profit organizations, Building a Better Board goes behind the scenes to reveal the inner workings of boards of directors, including how they make decisions. Recently chosen as one of Canada's "Top 40 Under 40"(TM), Dr Richard Leblanc is an award-winning teacher and researcher, certified management consultant, professional speaker, professor, lawyer and specialist on boards of directors. He can be reached at [email protected]. James Gillies, PhD (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), is Professor Emeritus at the Schulich School of Business, York University, where he serves as Chair of the Canada-Russia Corporate Governance Program.

In 1994 a computer program called the Mosaic browser transformed the Internet from an academic tool into a telecommunications revolution. Now a household name, the World Wide Web is part of the modern communications landscape with tens of thousands of servers providing information to millions of users. Few people, however, realize that the Web was born at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, and that it was invented by an Englishman, Tim Berners-Lee. This new book, published in the Popular Science list in Oxford Paperbacks, tells how the idea for the Web came about at CERN, how it was developed, and how it was eventually handed over for free for the rest of the world to use. This is the first book-length account of the Web's development and it includes interview material with the key players in the story.