CERN

Happy Birthday CERN! The European Organization for Nuclear Research was established on this day in 1954. The idea for the research center originated just after the end of World War II, when prominent European physicists including Pierre Auger and Niels Bohr wanted to raise the profile of science in Europe. Geneva, Switzerland was selected as the site for the facility in 1952, and two years later CERN became official with the endorsement of 12 founding member countries. (CERN is short for the French “Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire,” the provisional name for the lab. In 1954 the name of the organization was changed but the acronym CERN was kept.) Today CERN has 22 member nations and is at the forefront of particle and nuclear physics research. It hosts the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, which uncovered the elusive Higgs boson in 2012. Other instruments at CERN produce and analyze antimatter. CERN also hosted the first website, which you can still visit here: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. (Photo credit: Torkild Retvedt, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Date in History: 29 September 1954