Podcast with Sijbrand de Jong on CERN and particle physics

What does it take to make a thousand full professors, each king of their own empire, work together as equals? Sijbrand de Jong, former president of the CERN Council, reveals how the world's largest scientific collaborations actually function, why formal rules of procedure matter more than goodwill, and what particle physics can teach every organization about scaling cooperation. Subscribe for more episodes on collaboration at scale. Sijbrand de Jong's career is a masterclass in escalating collaborative complexity: from 60-person experiments as a master's student, through hundreds-strong collaborations at CERN's OPAL experiment, to presiding over the CERN Council , the governing body that approves billion-euro accelerator projects requiring decades of commitment from member states. Along the way, he founded research institutes, directed a pre-university science college, and served in university governance at Radboud University. The conversation opens with a linguistic insight that frames everything that follows. In Dutch, "collaboration" means siding with the enemy , a direct reference to World War II occupation. The Dutch use "samenwerking" for constructive joint work. This distinction, shared with Danish, reveals how historical trauma shapes even the vocabulary available for discussing collective action. De Jong describes the internal dynamics of large physics collaborations with unusual candor. When over a thousand principal investigators must work together, nationality becomes a significant variable. Some national cultures produce researchers who accept collaborative hierarchy easily; others generate constant friction. The skill of collaboration leadership is managing these differences without pretending they do not exist. The most revealing segment addresses the CERN Council's rules of procedure , which de Jong personally wrote. He argues that formal rules are not bureaucratic overhead but essential collaborative infrastructure. Rules about who can raise which topics, how far in advance proposals must be submitted, how many discussion cycles are required before decisions , these structures prevent the chaos that destroys large-scale cooperation. He even found that insisting on formal dress changed the atmosphere of meetings, producing more civilized and productive deliberation. On the relationship between competition and collaboration in science, de Jong is nuanced. Large collaborations contain intense internal competition , for resources, recognition, and intellectual priority. The structure must channel this competition productively rather than suppress it. When collaborations fail, it is usually because personal conflicts override shared scientific goals, or because institutional incentives reward individual achievement over collective contribution. The discussion connects particle physics governance to broader questions about democratic decision-making. The CERN Council operates as a quasi-diplomatic body where half the representatives are professional diplomats and decisions commit countries to decades of financial obligation. The parallels to international climate negotiations and EU governance are direct. De Jong's perspective on what makes collaboration sustainable is structural rather than psychological: have clear rules, enforce them consistently, document everything, and ensure that the process for raising and resolving disagreements is transparent and predictable. Human nature does not need to change; the architecture of interaction does. Part of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum series on Collaboration, produced with the Convergent Science Network.