CERN

Hello! We are the European Organization for Nuclear Research, but most people know us by our acronym, CERN. Our story began in 1954, not long after a difficult time in history called World War II. After the war, many people wanted to find new ways to bring countries together to work for peace. A group of scientists and leaders decided that one of the best ways to do this was through science. They imagined a special place where scientists from all over Europe could collaborate, share their knowledge, and make amazing discoveries together. That idea became us. We built our main laboratory right on the border between France and Switzerland, near the city of Geneva, as a symbol of countries working together without borders.

Our main purpose is to explore the very smallest things that make up everything in the universe. We call these tiny building blocks “particles.” You can think of them as the ingredients that form atoms, which then form molecules, which then form everything you can see and touch—from your shoes to the stars in the sky. To study something so incredibly small, we need to build some of the largest and most complicated machines ever made. These powerful tools are called particle accelerators. They are designed to give these tiny particles a huge boost of energy so we can study them more closely.

Our most famous and powerful machine is called the Large Hadron Collider, or the LHC. It’s not something you can see just by walking by, because it is buried deep underground in a huge circular tunnel. This tunnel is 17 miles (or 27 kilometers) long, which is big enough to circle a small city! Inside this tunnel, we use powerful magnets to guide beams of tiny particles, like protons, in opposite directions. We make these particles travel faster and faster until they are moving at nearly the speed of light. That is the fastest speed possible in the universe!

Once the particles are moving at top speed, our real experiments begin. We carefully steer the beams so that the particles crash into each other head-on. This is why our machine is called a “collider.” When these particles collide with so much energy, they break apart. For a tiny fraction of a second, the collision creates a shower of even smaller, more mysterious particles. It’s like smashing two clocks together to see the gears and springs inside. To see what happens, we have built enormous detectors around the points where the collisions occur. These detectors act like gigantic, super-fast cameras, taking millions of pictures every second to capture every detail of what is created during the crash.

Using these powerful tools, our scientists have made incredible discoveries. One of our most important achievements happened in 2012. After years of experiments and carefully studying the data from countless particle collisions, scientists working with us announced they had found evidence of a brand-new particle. They called it the Higgs boson. This particle was very special because it was the missing piece of a big puzzle in physics. Scientists had a theory for how other fundamental particles get their mass, which is what gives them weight. The Higgs boson was the particle that made this theory work, and finding it helped prove that our understanding of the universe was on the right track.

While our main job is physics research, sometimes our work leads to inventions that change the world in other ways. Back in 1989, a computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee was working with us. He was trying to solve a problem: how could the thousands of scientists working at CERN from all over the world easily share their data and findings with each other? His solution was to invent a new system for sharing information. He called it the World Wide Web. This invention made it possible to link documents together and access them from any computer. We believed this was such an important tool that we made the technology available for everyone in the world to use for free, and it has changed how we all learn, work, and communicate.

Today, our work continues. We are a global center for science, with researchers from over 100 countries coming here to conduct their experiments. We are still using the Large Hadron Collider to explore some of the biggest unanswered questions in science. For example, we are searching for something called dark matter, which scientists believe makes up a huge part of the universe but is completely invisible. Our mission remains the same as it was in 1954: to push the boundaries of human knowledge, invent new technologies, and bring people from all nations together to work peacefully on our shared goal of understanding the universe.