CERN

My husband Jean-Marc was offered a six-year staff position at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. So just a year after moving to France (and then spending part of this time at Columbia), I moved once again. We drove across France from Paris in separate deux chevaux, with baby Alain parked in the back seat of mine. Again relying on my husband's connections, I got a basement office where there were up to five residents at a time. I shared it variously with such luminaries as J. M. Jauch and E. C. G. Stückelberg (and his dog), as well as other young hangers-on like myself: Cecilia Jarlskog, Jacques Soffer and his wife, and maybe others that I don't remember. I also got the chance to work with Antonio Stanghellini, an extremely nice Italian theorist who was teaching me about resonances; these are strongly interacting particles that rapidly decay into lighter hadrons; “hadron” — from the Greek word for thick or heavy — is the name for strongly interacting particles like the proton, neutron and pion, and their strange counterparts. Unfortunately, Stanghellini died three months after I started working under his tutelage. Since I was nominally enrolled as a student in Orsay, Bernard d'Espagnat, a professor there who was on leave at CERN, agreed to take me on as his thesis student. This was perhaps a fortunate turn of events, because it got me into weak interactions, the area where I first made a mild mark…