PS vodka bottle
The PS vodka bottle refers to a famous photo of John Adams holding an empty vodka bottle in 1959, a symbolic gift from Soviet scientists in Dubna, Russia.[1]
The story goes as following: The PS reached its full design energy of 24 GeV (later increased to 28 GeV) during the night of 24 November 1959, and the next morning project leader John Adams announced the achievement to staff in CERN’s main auditorium. In the famous photo he holds a vodka bottle that he had been given during a trip to the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna with instructions that the contents should be drunk when CERN passed the Russian Synchrophasotron’s world-record energy of 10 GeV. The bottle in his hand contains a photo of the 24 GeV pulse ready to be sent back to the Soviet Union, marking a moment of scientific competition and camaraderie.