CERN at 70: The cradle of the Higgs boson and World Wide Web looks to the future

The European Organization for Nuclear Research Centre in Geneva, or CERN as it is more commonly known, is celebrating its 70th anniversary.

From the World Wide Web to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN has overseen groundbreaking innovations in the field of science and technology over its seven decades.

For the most part, it carries out new experiments that aim to punch holes in the Standard Model - smashing up conventional understandings to move science forward - and explain a long list of lingering scientific unknowns.

"CERN is the biggest lab for fundamental research in physics in the world and was created 70 years ago, in 1954, just after World War II," Arnaud Marsollier, a spokesperson for CERN, said.

"Bringing together all the nations in Europe to rebuild a bit the physics landscape in Europe and push the boundaries of knowledge in the area of fundamental physics, which means what we look at is to understand the smallest bricks of nature and how it impacts the way the universe is working," Marsollier added.

70 years of achievements

In 2012, British physicist Peter Higgs confirmed the subatomic Higgs boson, an infinitesimal particle, which helped complete the Standard Model of particle physics.

Higgs, who died earlier this year aged 94, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work, alongside Francois Englert of Belgium, who independently came up with the same theory.

The Higgs boson was discovered with the help of the LHC, known as the world’s biggest machine.

"The glimpses it gives you into the fundamental nature of the universe, the fundamental structure. And that's really what CERN is all about, is finding ways to look more deeply into the structure of the universe, to look with more precision and in cleverer ways as well," Tara Shears, a professor of physics at Liverpool University, who has worked at CERN, said.

The LHC powers a network of magnets to accelerate particles through a 27 km underground loop in and around Geneva and slam them together at velocities approaching the speed of light.

CERN says collisions inside the LHC generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the core of the Sun, on small scales and in its controlled environment.

CERN is also where the World Wide Web was conceived the mind of British scientist Tim Berners-Lee 35 years ago. 

Berners-Lee was originally looking for a way to help universities and institutes share information.

In 1993, the software behind the web was put into the public domain.

"What changed mostly the world is the World Wide Web, which was invented at CERN to actually connect together scientists from all over the world," Marsollier said.

Future missions

Today, over 7,000 scientists representing 110 nationalities work for CERN, pushing the boundaries of technology in fields from medicine to energy. 

They are looking to solve riddles about dark energy, which makes up about 68 per cent of the universe and has a role in speeding up its expansion, and test hypotheses about dark matter, whose existence is only inferred and which appears to outweigh visible matter nearly six-to-one, making up slightly more than a quarter of the universe.

CERN has two big projects on its horizon. The first is the High-Luminosity LHC project that aims to ramp up the number of collisions looking for the potential for new discoveries, starting in 2029.

The so-called Future Circular Collider (FCC), which is estimated to cost about €16 billion, is planned to start operating by 2040.

CERN aims to foster scientific progress in the cause of peace and humanity. Its constitution says the organisation "shall have no concern with work for military requirements".

In 2022, CERN's governing council voted to pause ties with institutes in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. Some fear that applications from the centre’s research could make their way into Moscow's war machine.

On November 30, CERN will formally exclude Russia, depriving CERN of some 40 million Swiss francs (€42.7 million) in Russian financing for the high-luminosity LHC. 

It accounts for about 4.5 per cent of the budget for its experiment, which will now have to be shouldered by other CERN participants.

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