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“I believed it then and now I believe these contacts are very important,” he said in an email. “But what Putin and the Russian military have done on behalf of the Russian Federation is so appalling that I strongly support the CERN Council’s decision.”

It’s unclear what all this means for scientists at CERN. Dr. In a note to the lab, Gianotti insisted that no one was sent home and that ongoing collaborations were maintained, at least for the time being.

Joseph Incandela, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who led one of the teams that discovered the Higgs boson, detailed the issue. “Those who are here can come to the lab and continue doing their work,” he said. “People from Russia can come here via slightly more detours, if allowed by the Russian authorities. They are not forbidden to enter CERN.”

But Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard, noted in an email: “Given there are no flights and likely no equipment transfers, I am unsure of the results of the continued collaboration.”

So far, CERN’s plans to restart the Large Hadron Collider in April after three years of repairs and improvements have been going well so far. Mike Lamont, CERN’s director of accelerators and technology,

Thus the promise of a narrow communication bridge survives. Michael Turner, physicist at the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles and former president of the American Physical Society, stressed the value of these informal working relationships in an email. “Scientists are often very influential members of their societies,” he said, and their interactions “remind the humanity of all individuals, even those in countries whose leaders do disgraceful things.”

Regarding Russia’s actions, he added, “I think the whole world is trying to figure out what to do.”