A team photo celebrates  the completion of the SPS tunnel in July 1974. The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) was the first of CERN’s giant accelerators. It was also the first cross-border accelerator. Excavation took around two years, and on 31 July 1974 the Robbins tunnel-boring machine returned to its starting point having crossed the Franco-Swiss border and excavated a tunnel with a circumference of 7 kilometres and an average depth of 40 metres below the surface.   The SPS was commissioned in 1976, and a highlight of its career came in 1983 with the announcement of the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of W and Z particles.

The 6th meeting of Nobel Prize laureates, held in Lindau from 25 to 29 June 1956, was devoted to physics.  In attendance were 23 Nobel laureates and 124 young researchers. The Lindau meetings  began in 1951, and provide a unique platform for dialogue between different scientific generations.  This year’s meeting (1 to 6 July 2012) will also be dedicated to physics, with more than 25 Nobel laureates and 550 young scientists from all over the world.

Wolfgang Pauli won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1945 for his Exclusion Principle. His scientific archive is held at CERN.