ABSTRACT
‘It was magnificent. On the very first day I arrived, we ran into three Nobel Prize winners in the hallway!’ Bob van der Zwaan looks back at a special time at cern, in Geneva. There, the particle accelerator propels electrons or protons at astronomical speeds, causing them to collide and release a suite of high-energetic elementary particles. One of these particles is the so-called ‘bottom quark,’ which Bob van der Zwaan studied during his PhD. ‘At cern you contribute to papers with, at the time, as many as five hundred authors. And everyone listed has genuinely, in one way or another, contributed to the research. Everyone is a small cog in the machine. Talk about collaborative science.’
