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In 1954, twelve European states created the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). As a cooperative organisation, CERN aimed to equip the physicists of war-torn European countries with a particle accelerator comparable to those found in United States laboratories, and which no country could, or would, willingly support by itself. This would in turn help rebuild European science and prevent a brain drain across the Atlantic. But what was really European about CERN? How did Europe variably manifest in a scientific organisation? And how should we think of the role of science in the postwar and Cold War contexts which also facilitated the creation of other European institutions? In this presentation, I go over the main findings of my dissertation in which I analyse CERN’s European dimension and its impact on the development of the organisation from the 1950s into the 1970s.

The most consequential results in general relativity rely on some type of energy condition. Yet the epistemic status of these conditions remains unclear. Curiel (2017) has argued that while their fundamental status seems undeniable, the fact that there are known violations of every energy condition prevents them from being neatly understood as laws. However, recent developments in physics that relate the energy conditions to other bodies of knowledge, including derivations from more fundamental theories and principles, call for reexamination of this tension. In this talk, I make a start on this reexamination by analyzing the considerations that motivate imposing the energy conditions on a spacetime system, taking these new developments into account. I argue that these considerations show that the epistemic status of the energy conditions aligns better with understanding them as guiding principles, than as laws.

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