The story of this place
Founded in 1954 by twelve European states as a way to reunite a continent shattered by war through peaceful 'big science,' CERN became the world's largest particle-physics laboratory, straddling the Swiss–French border near Geneva. Here Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 to help scientists share data. In 2012 the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider confirmed the Higgs boson, the particle that gives matter its mass. CERN's collaborative ethos—thousands of physicists from rival nations working side by side—embodied the hope that science could bind Europe together after 1945.