Herwig Schopper was Chairman of the DESY Board of Directors in the 1970s. Image: DESY
A life marked by scientific milestones, major decisions, ever larger accelerators and a great deal of scientific diplomacy: Herwig Schopper will be 100 years old on 28 February and will be honoured at a festive symposium at CERN on 1 March. DESY, which he headed as Chairman of the Directorate from 1972 to 1980, also has a lot to thank him for. Congratulations from DESY on completing a century!
Schopper has shaped the physics landscape in Europe and beyond like no other: first as a professor in Karlsruhe, then as Director General at DESY and immediately afterwards at CERN, and finally as a pioneer and Chairman of the Board of Directors of SESAME, the first synchrotron radiation source in the Middle East. Herwig Schopper has always been committed to cross-national scientific cooperation, always with the intention of fostering international understanding.
"On behalf of the DESY Board of Directors and all DESY employees, I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to Herwig Schopper on his 100th birthday and wish him continued good health for many years to come," says the current Chairman of the DESY Board of Directors, Helmut Dosch. "I am always particularly impressed by his razor-sharp mind, which he has retained into old age, and his outstanding commitment to promoting peace-building research projects. He is an outstanding figure in international science."
Born in Landskron in Czechoslovakia in 1924, Schopper came to Hamburg as a student and also met his wife here. After several professorships in Mainz, Cornell and Karlsruhe, he was recruited to DESY as the successor to Willibald Jentschke, who had moved to CERN as Director General. "Schopper had made a name for himself through his work in the field of weak interactions and through experiments at DESY and CERN. He also demonstrated great talent as a scientific administrator with considerable diplomatic skills," the DESY chroniclers Erich Lohrmann and Paul Söding explain in their book "Von schnellen Teilchen und hellem Licht".
Many of the new things that Herwig Schopper pioneered during his time at DESY are now common practice in major international projects, for example the way in which foreign groups contribute to DESY accelerators and detectors. Schopper's term of office saw the commissioning of the DORIS accelerator, the application, approval, construction and commissioning of the PETRA ring including the groundbreaking discovery of the gluon, the beginning of Photon Science at DESY with the founding of HASYLAB and the preparations for DESY's largest accelerator to date, HERA.
"Thanks to Herwig, DESY has developed from a national to an international laboratory of world renown," Albrecht Wagner, Chairman of the DESY Directorate from 1999 to 2009, summarises. "His scientific and administrative foresight, coupled with his optimism, creativity and often a large portion of audacity, is enviable. I, too, congratulate him from the bottom of my heart and wish him much joy and good health for many years to come."
After his time at DESY, Schopper transferred to CERN to take up the post of Director-General from 1981 to 1988. Here, too, he was at the centre of scientific and sometimes even global political events. The proposal to build the Large Electron-Positron Collider LEP was made under Schopper’s leadership. He also introduced new organisational and financing methods here that are the established form today for major experiments in particle physics. Thanks to a ploy suggested by Schopper, the tunnel for LEP had already been built in a way that enabled the installation of today's Large Hadron Collider LHC.
After his retirement, Schopper embarked on a new career: that of science diplomat. In this capacity, he played a leading role in the founding of the SESAME laboratory in Jordan, a synchrotron light source built for the Middle East and neighbouring regions. Today, he continues to advocate for the freedom of science and scientific collaboration without political restrictions, not least at the DESY dialogue event "Freedom of Science at Risk" in 2019.
In the course of his remarkable career, Herwig Schopper has not only received letters from former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, met Pope John Paul II, Queen Beatrix, the Dalai Lama and many other public figures, but above all has worked with many great physicists who have gone on to become friends. Not many people were as close to the great physics revolutions of the 20th century as he was. DESY wishes him all the best!
A festive symposium in honour of Herwig Schopper will be held on 6 March as part of the spring conference of the German Physical Society (DPG) Particle Physics Division. He will be awarded an honorary doctorate from the KIT for his extraordinary services to particle physics and the Karlsruhe site. The laudatory speech will be held by Albrecht Wagner from DESY and the Universität Hamburg. Beate Heinemann, Director of Particle Physics at DESY, will give an overview of the breakthroughs in the field of research over the past hundred years and present Herwig Schopper's contributions.
