Schopper, Herwig Franz

Born in 1924, Herwig Schopper became a Research Associate at CERN from 1966-1967. 1970-1971 : leader of the Nuclear Physics Division. 1972 : member of the Directorate and responsible for the Co-ordination of the Experimental Programme. 1973-1975 : chairman of the ISR Committee. 1978-1980 : member of the Scientific Policy Committee. 1981-1988 : Director-General. Following Léon Van Hove and John Adams' years as Director-General for Research and Executive Director-General, Schopper's years as CERN's Director-General culminated in the successful construction of LEP (Large Electron-Positron Collider) with the installation and the first successful tests of the four detectors for the LEP experiments (OPAL, DELPHI, ALEPH and L3). In order to make sufficient resources available for the realization of LEP, several facilities had to be closed (notably ISR, BEBC and EHS). Schopper's office included the awarding of two Nobel Prizes for Physics : In 1984 the prize was awarded jointly to Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer for their decisive contributions to the large project which lead to the discovery of the field particles W and Z, communicators of weak interaction. In 1988, Jack Steinberger, continuing his research work at CERN, was a joint recipient of the prize (together with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, USA) for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino. Carlo Rubbia succeeded Herwig Schopper in January 1989. Herwig Schopper had many other activities outside CERN. 1973 : he accepted the chairmanship of the Board of Directors at the DESY Laboratory (Germany). Later he became Director of the Laboratory. 1977 : he visited China and took part in the development of relations to help set up the first international collaboration in physics after the cultural revolution. He was also chairman of SESAME Interim Council (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East) and chairman of Scientific Council of ROSTE (Regional Office of UNESCO for Science and Technology in Europe) In the scientific field, he participated, amongst other things, in an experiment on parity violation in beta-decay and in the development of hadron energy measurement. He was editor of Landoldt-Boernstein Tables.