CERN stands for “Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire” which is French for the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It is located in Switzerland on the border of France, but it is a collaboration between 21 different nations. Scientists from all over the world have come to work on important scientific projects at CERN since it was founded in 1954.
It started as a place for nuclear research because when it was founded scientists were still focusing on understanding the atom. Now, they focus on even smaller things. Scientists and engineers at CERN focus on a very simple question with surprisingly complicated answers. What is the universe made of? They are trying to discover the smallest building blocks of the universe, such as quarks and electrons.
They do this with very special and very large equipment. Perhaps the most important is the particle accelerator. The Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world. It took decades of the thousands of scientists and engineers planning and building it to create it. Planning began in 1984 and was first started in 2008.
It is a 27-kilometer ring of magnets. The larger it is, the more energy can be produced. Inside the ring two particle beams collide. They travel at almost the speed of light, but the magnets guide them around the ring at nearly the speed of light (they can’t go faster than the speed of light) and push them close together. The superconducting magnets are kept at -271.3 Celsius with liquid helium; this is colder than outer space. Making these incredibly tiny particles collide is very difficult, but the information that they provide tells scientists a lot about the smallest bits of the universe. To detect these collisions there are four particle detectors all along the Large Hadron Collider. They each collect different data when the two beams collide and then scientists use this in experiments and theories.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while he was working at CERN. He was looking for a way to make it easier for nuclear physics researchers to share information. He made it easier for the entire world to share all kinds of information! The www in internet addresses stands for World Wide Web.
