“In the news here in Ireland this week is a new report from a Committee of the Houses of the Oireachtas making the case for Ireland to join CERN. You can download the report here (PDF) and you’ll find this rather striking graphic …” (more)
[In the Dark, 16 November]
It will be excellent for very many areas of work in Ireland to have
membership of CERN. Also now having Irish membership of ESO, European
Southern Observatory, is excellent.
I wanted Irish membership of ESO, when I was a Senior Scientist of the
European Space Agency, for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) project, in ESO
for twelve years. I was once told that the very early starting of ESO had
been located in CERN, before being established in Garching bei München.
From many domains, for research and for companies and so on, with
collaborations and with implementations, there will be many related benefits
here. One example is how Sir Tim Berners-Lee, when in CERN, his
work developed the World Wide Web (HTML). In ESO, in my group named the
Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility, there was lots of innovative
work for cosmology data and for all of the Data Science, neural networks,
and lots more.
It is a long time now since I was in CERN for discussion on particle physics
work, and there are, however, many linkages with English universities, with
CERN data made available to be worked on. When I was Director in Science
Foundation Ireland, I certainly wanted to have Irish membership of ESO and
of CERN. Now following from ESO membership, it will be excellent in all
domains to have Irish membership of CERN.
From Irish membership of CERN, so much can be and will be outstanding and
beneficial in research, in education and in lots of domains. It will be very
good also to have many perspectives formed that are relating to particle
physics and dark energy and dark matter, and all that is undertaken with data
sources, and of course the generating or obtaining of the data sources.