14 DAY TRIAL // According to the latest developments in Austria, the country will remain a part of the massive European physics research initiative CERN, the main operator of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Earlier this month, the nation announced that it would withdraw from the cooperation, in order to invest the money it had caught up in CERN in other scientific initiatives, with more concrete returns, over shorter time-frames. The statements created a large uproar in the national scientific community at the time, with prominent Austrian scientists accusing the government of sabotage and of destroying decades of hard work.
Chancellor Werner Faymann overruled his own minister's decision on Monday, when he said in a statement that Austria would not back out of CERN, an organization the nation joined as far back as 1959, one of the first countries to do so after the initiative was first created. “Austria has been a member of CERN for over 50 years – a whole host of Austrian scientists are linked to CERN and will continue to do so in the future,” social democrat Faymann told his Science Minister Johannes Hahn during a press conference. He added that the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) had just finished constructing the largest particle smasher in the world, and that the country was not about to withdraw from the experiments just six months before the LHC was repaired, Reuters reports.
Conservative minister Hahn announced earlier in May that the country spent as much as 20 million euros ($27 million) with its participation in CERN, and that the sum, which only makes up 2.2 percent of the organization's budget, was too large and the expenses unjustified. He also argued that the cooperation made a big dent in the country's international research budget, and that these were the main reasons for him making this decision. However, the scientific community didn't take these excuses too kindly. Even CERN's Director-General, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, visited the country, in an attempt to talk the minister out of his questionable decision.
“Nobody is happy about the decision. We would have loved to stay in CERN,” Austrian Ministry of Science spokesman Nikola Donig said at the time of the decision, during a press conference. He shared that the funding for science endeavors was tight in that time of financial crisis, and that the government would rather invest the money in other physics, sociology and biotechnology-related research, in hopes that returns on the money spent would come faster than from CERN and the LHC.