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| From Planet X - kind of reminded me of "The Time Tunnel" (dating myself) |
CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory and the place famous most recently for the discovery of the Higgs boson, is celebrating its sixtieth birthday today (actually 29 September).
The name CERN originally was the French acronym for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research, and its convention officially came into force on 29 September 1954. In the wake of a war that had torn the continent apart, a small group of scientists and policy-makers created CERN in an attempt to use fundamental research to reunite Europe.
From 12 founding members, the organization has today grown to 21 states, with scientists at the lab hailing from almost 100 countries around the globe.
While CERN hosts a celebration at its home near Geneva, Switzerland, Nature looks back at some of the lab’s most significant moments from the past six decades.
Some excerpts from the timeline:
1983: CERN’s 6.9-kilometre-long Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) discovers the particle carriers of the weak force, the W and Z bosons.
1989: CERN computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee’s drafts a paper outlining plans for an information-management system, which at the time he termed “the mesh” but which later becomes known as the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee’s boss, Mike Sendall, famously replies that the proposal was “vague, but exciting”, giving Berners-Lee the green light for development. The world’s first web page address is born the following year (this copy is from 1992).
2012: On 4 July scientists at the LHC’s ATLAS and CMS experiments announce that they have found a clear signal of the Higgs boson, and reporter Geoff Brumfiel records the moment in a live blog (and later in an article). The announcement, made by the ATLAS and CMS experiments, causes waves around the world, and in 2013 earns theoretical physicists François Englert and Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize in Physics for their prediction of the mechanism.
Nature News Blog: CERN at 60: Biggest moments at flagship physics lab, Elizabeth Gibney
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