CERN

Hello! We are the European Organization for Nuclear Research, but most people call us by our nickname, CERN. We are a special science laboratory located in Geneva, Switzerland. We began our work a long time ago, in 1954. At that time, many countries wanted to find ways to work together peacefully. So, they decided to create a place where scientists from all over the world could unite. Our purpose was to use science for peace and to learn amazing new things about the universe we all share.

Our main job is to study the smallest things you can possibly imagine. These are called particles, and they are the tiniest building blocks of everything. The stars in the sky, the planet we live on, and even you are all made of these super-small particles. It’s like having a giant box of invisible building blocks that create the whole world. By learning about them, we hope to answer some of the biggest questions ever asked, such as how the universe began and what invisible forces hold it all together.

To see things that are so tiny, we needed a very special tool. So, we built one of the biggest science machines in the world! It is called the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC for short. The LHC is not in a regular building. It’s a huge tunnel, 17 miles long, buried deep under the ground. If you could see its shape, it would look like a giant donut. Inside this tunnel, we make beams of particles zoom around at incredible speeds. Then, we make them crash into each other! When they smash together, they break apart and show us the even smaller pieces hidden inside. This helps us see the universe's tiniest secrets.

All of this hard work has led to some amazing discoveries. In 2012, our scientists found a new particle they had been searching for. It is called the Higgs boson. This was a very important discovery because this special particle helps explain why things have weight. It helps us understand why some things are heavy and others are light. But that’s not the only big idea that started here. In 1989, a scientist working with us named Tim Berners-Lee wanted to make it easier for scientists to share information. He invented something called the World Wide Web, which is what people now use to get on the internet!

Our work is not finished. Today, we are still a busy place with thousands of scientists, engineers, and helpers from many different countries. We continue to use our machines to explore the mysteries of the universe and ask new questions. Our mission is still the same as it was when we began: to bring people together to learn. By working as a team, people from all over the world can make discoveries that help everyone understand our amazing universe a little better.