CERN Courier Mar/Apr 2019
Welcome to the digital edition of the March/April 2019 issue of CERN Courier.
In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, while working at CERN, released his proposal for a new information-management system. Within two years, the web was born. CERN’s subsequent agreement in 1993 to place the underlying software in the public domain (reproduced in this issue) shapes the web’s character to this day. It is part of a culture of sharing and collaboration that was set out in the CERN Convention 40 years earlier, and which is deeply engrained in the software and particle-physics worlds. The features in this issue – from open-source software, to open-access publishing, open data and entirely open analysis procedures – show how far ahead our field is in the growing open-science movement. Our Viewpoint, meanwhile, argues that we have only begun to harness the full potential of the web to benefit humanity.
On other pages of this issue – the second in the Courier’s new format – theorist Nima Arkani-Hamed explains why the world needs a new collider, physicists reflect on 40 years of fixed-target experiments at CERN’s North Area, sterile neutrinos come under increasing pressure from experiment, a survey assesses the impact of working at CERN on your career, supersymmetric lasers demonstrate advanced theoretical physics in action, and more.