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Geneva, Switzerland
72 years ago

On September 29, 1954, the convention establishing the European Organization for Nuclear Research entered into force, and CERN formally came into existence. Twelve founding states had signed the document in Paris the previous year under the auspices of UNESCO, and the ratifications of France and Germany completed the process. The laboratory was built at Meyrin, on the outskirts of Geneva, on land straddling the French and Swiss border.

The purpose was as much political as scientific. European physics had been shattered by the Second World War, and many of its best researchers had emigrated to the United States. No single European country could afford the accelerators that fundamental physics now required. The proposal, pushed by figures including Louis de Broglie, Raoul Dautry, Pierre Auger, Edoardo Amaldi, and Isidor Rabi, was to pool resources and, deliberately, to bring French and German scientists back into the same building less than a decade after the war. The founding convention committed the organization to work with no concern for military requirements and to publish its results openly.

CERN's scientific record is substantial. Its accelerators and detectors produced the discovery of neutral currents in 1973, the W and Z bosons in 1983, which earned Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer a Nobel Prize the following year, the creation of antihydrogen atoms in the 1990s, and the observation of the Higgs boson in 2012. Georges Charpak won a Nobel Prize in 1992 for detector technology developed there that was later adapted for medical imaging. The organization now has twenty-five member states and hosts researchers from around a hundred countries.

Its most consequential invention had nothing to do with particles. In 1989 a British software engineer at the laboratory, Tim Berners-Lee, wrote a proposal for a system to manage information across the many incompatible computers and formats used by physicists working on the same experiments. His supervisor's written comment on the proposal was that it was vague but exciting. Over the following two years he built the elements of what he called the World Wide Web: a markup language, an addressing scheme, a transfer protocol, the first browser, and the first server.

On April 30, 1993, CERN published a statement placing the web software in the public domain, free for anyone to use without royalties. That decision, more than any technical detail, is why the web became universal rather than one proprietary network among several. A laboratory created to give European physicists a shared instrument, funded to answer questions about the composition of matter, produced as a side effect the communication system that reorganized commerce, politics, and daily life for most of the planet.

CERN came into being on September 29, 1954, so that European countries that had recently been at war could afford to do physics together. It found the W and Z bosons and the Higgs. It also produced, almost incidentally, the World Wide Web, and then handed it to the world for nothing.

How much do you know about the founding of CERN, the reasons behind it, the particles discovered there, and the invention of the World Wide Web?