Following the appointment of Robert Aymar as the new director general of the European particle-physics laboratory CERN (see page 721), the laboratory has a good chance of re-establishing the full confidence of its member states following recent budgetary problems. Aymar is known for taking as much pleasure from the good management of physics as from the physics itself. And good management will be paramount between now and 2007, as the world's next major accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is constructed and launched. Magnets are being tested, the gigantic detectors are being constructed, and the massive computational analysis based on Grid supercomputer networks is being developed. Through all of these projects, it will be essential to maintain confidence in what is, in effect, industrial production of the key LHC components.

The closure of the Large Electron–Positron collider (LEP) in 2000 was the toughest and most controversial decision made by the current director general, Luciano Maiani, given the apparent signatures of the long-sought Higgs boson from the LEP detectors. Subsequent analysis has shown those signatures to be less suggestive than was originally thought. The Large Hadron Collider will probably either reveal the Higgs for what it is or plunge high-energy physics into a conceptual crisis if it can't be found.

Despite the absence of a large accelerator, CERN does not have to wait until 2007 to accomplish strong physics. Its smaller facilities have recently created antihydrogen, definitively measured CP violation — a still mysterious asymmetry in particle decays — and observed a crucial state of nuclear matter in which the quarks and gluons that make up neutrons and protons become 'deconfined'.

To continue these programmes and install the LHC will require tough decisions as obstacles inevitably arise. Aymar will be tested to his limits, but cannot do his job single-handedly. Others in CERN's team will have to earn their laurels not only by excellent experimentation, but also by first-rate project management.