GENEVA, Sept. 14 (Xinhua) -- The head of the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) hailed on Saturday China's contribution to CERN over the years, which has been a crucial part of the decades-long multi-national cooperation in fundamental science and research.
China has made a very important contribution to the CERN program over the years, and has been contributing to the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project, including the upgrades of the accelerator itself in particular, by producing some important magnets, CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti said during an interview with Xinhua on Saturday.
Gianotti's remarks came as the organization opens its doors to the public on Saturday and Sunday. Visitors are benefiting from free admission to discover CERN facilities, both underground and on the surface, as well as debates, film screenings, experimental workshops and dozens of visit points all over the site.
Fabiola noted that China has been involved in many CERN projects, including the present and most challenging one, the LHC, and that CERN values very much the intellectual, technological participation of China and its contributions.
In the future, building a next-generation accelerator may become a new territory of cooperation, as Europe, Japan and China are thinking of a high-energy collider, while the U.S. is already starting now, Fabiola said. "So I think this fruitful cooperation will continue."
Citing CERN as a perfect example of multinational cooperation in science, Fabiola said that scientific projects nowadays require not only technologies, objects and instruments of the complexities that no single country or region can build, but also full contributions, both financial and technological, of people from across the world. "That's why open science, inclusive science are the key word for the future."
Science is an important building block of a sustainable society in the future, and the Chinese have been very much involved in high-energy physics with projects in China, the CERN head concluded.
