Just to put your arse on fire more, Pakistan is an associate member of CERN
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan and CERN signed a Co-operation Agreement in 1994. The signature of several protocols followed this agreement, and Pakistan contributed to building the CMS and ATLAS experiments. Pakistan contributes today to the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb experiments and operates a Tier-2 computing centre in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid that helps to process and analyse the massive amounts of data the experiments generate. Pakistan is also involved in accelerator developments, making it an important partner for CERN.
The Associate Membership of Pakistan will open a new era of cooperation that will strengthen the long-term partnership between CERN and the Pakistani scientific community. Associate Membership will allow Pakistan to participate in the governance of CERN, through attending the meetings of the CERN Council. Moreover, it will allow Pakistani scientists to become members of the CERN staff, and to participate in CERN’s training and career-development programmes. Finally, it will allow Pakistani industry to bid for CERN contracts, thus opening up opportunities for industrial collaboration in areas of advanced technology.
http://press.web.cern.ch/press-rele...pakistan-become-associate-member-state-cern-0
Few days back, there was a thread about top paper publishing countries in the world.
Pakistan was not even among top 25 papers publishing countries in the world. So if a country like Pakistan can become an "associate member" at CERN, certainly India can. India was ranked in 9th position in top paper publishing nations.
What is the qualification required to become a member of the CERN by the way? WHY did CERN include Pakistan as associate member?
All that the Pakistanis know is that a Pakistani minister went to Europe, came back and said "mubarak ho", and all Pakistanis assumed it was some "big achievement" to be associate member of CERN.
The devil lies in the detail........may be someone here can take the trouble of digging up the agreement details, clauses and scope for a nation to become a member of CERN. The whole picture will emerge.
My belief is that anyone who wants to become a associate member of CERN, will have to sign agreement declaring that the concerned nation will not carry out any such similar experimental research work of that of CERN within its country. Because the Europeans have spent billions of dollars on the project, if any associate member, figures out the nature of the work, gets the idea or steals some data from Europeans and start conducting the research work within its own country, then the Europeans are at loss. They want the best minds to be in Europe, they want the research to be European, after all, this is how they will dominate the world.
Now coming to Pakistan, since it is abundantly clear that Pakistan doesn't have the capability of building such sophisticated infrastructure nor it can carry out similar fundamental research work, nor it has the money to do so, they jumped the plane, went to Europe, signed the agreement, came back and said "mubarak ho". This is the smartest thing the Pakistanis could do and they did that. (I know that Pakistan supplied few equipment to CERN, and that is all that it could do.
If we were to talk about "bright scientists and engineers", then Pakistan stands nowhere even in Asia when compared to the likes of Japan, China, south Korea, Singapore, Russia.
Wonder why these countries are not member of CERN yet? I mean, CERN would love to have Japanese, south Korean, Singaporean, Brazilian, Australian, Chinese, Russian scientists who can make significant contributions.
Russia is building its own collider, on much smaller scale and intended to study different aspects of fundamental particles. All the top technological countries have there own research activity going on. If being a member of CERN would have helped there institutional and university research activities, they would have certainly signed the contract and would have been members by now. But why are they still not member of it? as i said earlier, the devil lies in the detail. Probably, the agreement is such that anyone becoming a member will be restricted from building any sort of collider of any scale or carry out similar research activities within their country. And also that the research should happen within Europe. And in return, the Europeans will let the associate members to to work at CERN, who infact will be working under the supervision of an European professor/researcher/scientist, and also allow them to attend meetings.