The Institut Laue-Langevin: A Crucible of European Sciences

In the first minute of my first Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution I broke two house rules: I started by greeting the audience, and I began to address them in what I hoped was at least an approximation to a foreign tongue. I hope they excused the first misdemeanour since a greeting was in order on such an occasion. The second had a more mundane and practical purpose: to give a brief flavour of the way that I had been required to communicate from time to time in public in my years as Director of the Institut Laue-Langevin, and to indicate that not all communication in Europe proceeds in English. There is a cohesive Europe already in science, long pre-dating Maastricht, Nice and other Treaties enlarging and re-ordering the European Union, and the United Kingdom is indissolubly part of it. My purpose here is to explain how this cohesion was built up in one field of research (neutron scattering) and how, from its early beginnings in an apparently esoteric technique, it expanded to embrace nearly all the sciences, and an extremely large number of participants. To understand the present, we need to go back somewhat into the past, to indulge in what the green Michelin Guides to the French regions call ‘un peu d'histoire’. After our time travel, we can then take a short tour through Europe, down to Dauphine, in the Rhone-Alpes region of France…