With the last transit of Venus of the 21st century weeks away, authors trace how this rare event sparked international scientific collaboration in 1761
AT THE Large Hadron Collider, where subatomic-particle collisions at unimaginable energies lay bare the fundamental structure of matter, more than 3000 physicists from about 40 countries work shoulder to shoulder. Large-scale international collaborations are such a part of modern “big science” that few people ever wonder when and how they began. The answer is 1761 when, for a moment, the warring European powers put aside their differences to work together on the LHC project of their…
