On March 3, a week after the start of the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops, Brazil signed the agreement for access to an associate member of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
The signing of this agreement was an old demand of the Brazilian scientists and technicians who work in that laboratory, covering more than a hundred people distributed in several universities and research institutes in our country.
CERN, for this community of scientists, not only represents access to the best working conditions in the area, but also the Mecca of particle physics. A free place, where scientific research is the greatest value, a place where theoretical and experimental physicists from all over the world meet to discuss new theories, experimental results, new accelerator proposals, new particle detection mechanisms.
In short, it consists —so we thought— in an agora of modern science, where everyone had a space for participation and where we could always influence the destinies and orientation of particle physics and associated scientific and technological areas.
This scientific leadership was conquered in the almost 70 years of its history and, since then, it has shown itself to live up to what we could expect from this institution: scientific knowledge, civilization and culture.
Soon after the tragedy of the Second World War, several scientific cooperation initiatives were taken between the countries that until recently were at war with each other.
In this movement, which had as one of its drivers the British physicist Cecil Powell (1903-1969), Nobel Prize in physics and discoverer of the pi meson together with César Lattes (1924-2005), the first major experimental collaboration related to the study of cosmic rays. There were 36 physicists from ten different European institutions.
The creation of CERN, in 1954, the first large transnational laboratory, in a joint effort of 12 countries, was a direct consequence of the internationalism that guided the scientific community at the time. This culture had important practical results: Eastern European countries participated without any kind of discrimination during the Cold War, working side by side with Western Europeans.
It is important to say that the USA also shared this internationalist ideal, through its large laboratory for nuclear and high energy research – Fermilab. Ali also had important Soviet participation in his experiments.
These collaborations resisted the various invasions of other countries by both the USSR and the USA, within the logic of the Cold War. It is also important to point out that scientists suffered — and resisted — great pressure to limit this type of collaboration between the two then dominant blocs at the time.
This experiment, both scientific and sociological, was a great success, celebrated by Powell in a speech where he famously delivered: “In the course of this work, my colleagues and I have been deeply impressed by the powerful constructive forces that are unleashed when representatives of many national traditions work together in harmony for a common purpose”.
Scientific internationalism as an ideal implied cooperation between different cultures, and formed the basis for the emergence of major international scientific collaborations, an ideal that lasted until a few days ago.
Unfortunately, nowadays, in this era of enormous economic collaboration between countries, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia generated a collective hysteria, which ended up calling into question this fruitful culture of international collaboration between scientists.
The decision of CERN’s general council not to allow new scientific collaborations with the participation of Russian researchers, despite seeming innocuous from a practical point of view, has the potential to trigger a destructive process with uncontrollable consequences.
The Kurchatov Institute, with several laboratories within Russia and responsible for coordinating that country’s scientists in large-scale scientific collaboration projects, including the work at CERN, published a manifesto supporting the invasion and calling for the scientific community to unite around the president. Russian.
On the other hand, Germany and Poland, CERN member states, have decided to zero any scientific collaboration with Russia. This decision will probably soon be presented to the CERN board, with a high probability of being approved, since in this board, in addition to scientists, there are also politicians responsible for funding the institution.
Signs of this nefarious and possible direction have already appeared, even within the scientific body. It was decided by the four coordinators of the experiments using the LHC accelerator, in which several Brazilian scientists participate, a proposal according to which no article from these collaborations should be sent for publication in international scientific journals, until the situation of the war is defined.
It is important to remember that the political opinions of scientists never interfered in these cooperations. Letting politics determine the direction of scientific activities is a disaster for the cooperation and development of science. And, even more serious, it links scientific culture to politics.
