A story of an exhibit

From Geneva, with love (to science)

In the Soviet Union, they thought that Russian vodka was particularly popular in the West. And they weren't far from the truth. Indeed, what do these barbarians drink? That's why the staff of the European Organization for Nuclear Research that prepared to launch a new accelerator were not surprised when the Soviet physicist S. Ya. Nikitin that visited CERN, handed their director John Adams a bottle of Stolichnaya with the wish that they would drink it when they broke the Dubna record in High Energy Physics.

John Adams. 25 November, 1959. CERN Archive (CERN Document server, Record 39074)

And on 24 November, 1959, an entry was published in their laboratory journal that at 7:23 PM local time, protons were accelerated to a record energy of 24 GeV. The next morning, Adams reported on the success and a bottle with a Polaroid photo sealed in it, a beam of protons presented in it, flew to the USSR, following a telegram to Veksler. The CERN synchrotron surpassed the Dubna synchrophasotron in energy by 2.5 times and in intensity - by 50 times. JINR Director Dmitry Blokhintsev wrote in his diary: "This is a blow which the ball flies into the goal from along with the goalkeeper!"

1959 was coming to an end. Following the established tradition, Dmitry Ivanovich summed up the results and made plans for the future: "Tomorrow is the party conference. They expect a "Dubna satellite" from us." The only hope seems to be the D-particle. But who knows, maybe it's a ghost?" …

To be continued.

A. R.

From the editor.

No matter how many times we asked our employees about the future fate of this "exhibit", we got no answer. Maybe, it's gathering dust in a warehouse or among memorial archives. Write to dnsp@jinr.ru, please if you know the details of this story.