The LEP Experiments – Institutions in Themselves

A remark concerning the nomenclature may seem appropriate. Very often one speaks of ‘experiments’ at the large accelerators. However, the detectors to observe the collision events are extremely complicated facilities which have lifetimes of more than 10 years, cost on the order of EUR 100 million and are constructed and exploited by international collaborations which change with time. They have an internal organization with a certain hierarchy, committees and their own financial resources. The cooperations to design, build and use these detectors can be considered as a realization of ‘distributed’ international institutes. In other fields the creation of such distributed functional entities has and is being discussed. In elementary particle physics they were so badly needed that all organizational or social problems had to be surmounted. The study of the history of these large collaborations could be useful for other fields. For LEP the situation was particularly vital since the participating scientists were spread all over the world and for the functioning of such ‘institutes’ new ways had to be explored. Communication was an essential item and theWorldWideWeb was invented and developed originally for this purpose.