CERN, THE LARGEST PARTICLE PHYSICS LABORATORY IN THE WORLD 

Did you know that the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) is the birthplace of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the Internet technology in the early 1980s?

The acronym #CERN originally represented the French words for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire ('European Council for Nuclear Research'). Now known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. It is based in a northwestern suburb of Geneva, on the France–Switzerland border and comprises 23 member states, and Israel (admitted in 2013) is currently the only non-European country holding full membership. CERN is also an official United Nations General Assembly observer.

The convention establishing CERN was ratified on 29 September 1954 by 12 countries in Western Europe. Before then, a provisional council for building the laboratory was established by the 12 European governments in 1952. During these early years, the council worked at the University of Copenhagen under the direction of Niels Bohr before moving to its present site in Geneva. 

The acronym CERN was retained for the new laboratory after the provisional council was dissolved, even though the name changed to the current Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire ('European Organization for Nuclear Research') in 1954. According to Lew Kowarski, a former director of CERN, when the name was changed, the abbreviation could have become the awkward OERN, and Werner Heisenberg said that this could "still be CERN even if the name is [not]".

The CERN laboratory in 2019 had 2,660 scientific, technical, and administrative staff members, and hosted about 12,400 users from institutions in more than 70 countries. In 2016, CERN generated 49 petabytes of data. Its main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research — consequently, numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN through international collaborations. CERN is the site of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider.

The main site at Meyrin hosts a large computing facility, which is primarily used to store and analyze data from experiments, as well as simulate events. As researchers require remote access to these facilities, the lab has historically been a major wide area network hub.

CERN's first president was Sir Benjamin Lockspeiser. Edoardo Amaldi was the general secretary of CERN at its early stages when operations were still provisional, while the first Director-General (1954) was Felix Bloch.

The laboratory was originally devoted to the study of atomic nuclei, but was soon applied to higher-energy physics, concerned mainly with the study of interactions between subatomic particles. Therefore, the laboratory operated by CERN is commonly referred to as the European laboratory for particle physics (Laboratoire européen pour la physique des particules), which better describes the research being performed there.

CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web (WWW). The World Wide Web began as a CERN project named ENQUIRE, initiated by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 and Robert Cailliau in 1990. Berners-Lee and Cailliau were jointly honoured by the Association for Computing Machinery in 1995 for their contributions to the development of the World Wide Web.

Based on the concept of hypertext, the project was intended to facilitate the sharing of information between researchers. The first website was activated in 1991. On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone. A copy of the original first webpage, created by Berners-Lee, is still published on the World Wide Web Consortium's website as a historical document. Prior to the Web's development, CERN had pioneered the introduction of Internet technology, beginning in the early 1980s.

More recently, CERN has become a facility for the development of grid computing, hosting projects including the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) and LHC Computing Grid. It also hosts the CERN Internet Exchange Point (CIXP), one of the two main internet exchange points in Switzerland. As of 2022 CERN employs ten times more engineers and technicians than research physicists

Source:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN