With the Large Hadron Collider set to start experiments this fall, “now is possibly the best time in the history of CERN to be a member,” said the lab’s director general, Rolf Heuer. Yet on 7 May, Austria’s minister of science and research, Johannes Hahn, proposed that his country withdraw from the organization.
A squeezed budget and a need to renew “competitiveness and sparkle in the fields of science and research” were the reasons Hahn gave in a letter published on 14 May in many Austrian dailies. “Seventy percent of [our] funding for international cooperations in natural sciences goes to CERN,” said Nikola Donig, a ministry spokesman. The ministry intended to redirect the €16 million (roughly $22 million) it currently contributes to CERN (about 2% of CERN’s budget) to fund research grants and membership in five smaller international natural and social science projects: the European Southern Observatory and participation in...
