PR, scientist, blogger… I am and have been many things. Occasionally I am also a DJ, and I like to collect geeky interesting images to use as mix CD covers. Scary old diagrams are the best, so imagine my delight on a trip to Greenwich Market in 2004, where I scored a whole year’s worth of the now-defunct Science Journal for a quid. Back in 1967 the twelve issues would have set me back a whole sixty shillings…

At the end of 2008 I needed a sinister cover image for a mix, so I reached for my nasty faux-leather Science Journal binder and had a flick through. My eyes settled on the July 1967 issue:

It had been mere weeks since the Large Hadron Collider switch-on, and I felt a strange sense of deja vu- or perhaps some kind of reverse deja vu, what with the article having been published forty-one years ago. Anyway, the third headline down refers to CERN’s 300 GeV accelerator, now better known as the LHC’s proton injector. Opening the magazine and reading on, I noticed the 300 Gev had been subjected to pretty much the same  objections as the LHC. This made me wonder if much had changed in forty years, though to be fair the 1967 CERN special focuses on the actual science, with no scare stories and nobody begging to be called a twat.

I could use this post to make a point about the similarities between the 1967 and 2008 CERN coverage: about how both questioned the value of building accelerators, suggested that the money would be better spent on medical research, mentioned the idea of Europe “beating the Yanks” to a number of important discoveries, and raised questions about “esoteric” research and its value to wider society… but this post is really just an excuse for me to post some lovely scary old diagrams. Enjoy: