On 13 March 2009, Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee returned to the birthplace of his invention, 20 years after submitting his paper ‘Information Management: A Proposal’ to his boss Mike Sendall. By writing the words ‘Vague, but exciting’ on the document’s cover, and giving Berners-Lee the go-ahead to continue, Sendall was signing into existence the information revolution of our times: the World Wide Web. In September of the following year, Berners-Lee took delivery of a computer called a NeXT cube, and by December the Web was up and running, albeit between just a couple of computers at CERN.

A celebration was held in the Globe on the afternoon of the 13th March to bring together those who created the web at CERN.

Explore the resources prepared for press on the occasion of the WWW@20 event.

On 29 September 1954, the CERN Convention entered into force, officially establishing the European Organization for Nuclear Research with 12 European member states. CERN celebrated “60 years of science for peace” with an official ceremony on 29 September and numerous public events taking place throughout the year.

Check out the website that contains a record of the activities that marked the Organization’s 60th Anniversary.

CERN today hosted a visit from actors Tom Hanks and Ayelet Zurer and director Ron Howard as they unveiled exclusively some select footage from their new film adaptation of Dan Brown’s novel Angels & Demons, set for worldwide release by Sony Pictures on 15 May 2009.

Read the full Press Release.

In Angels & Demons Tom Hanks plays Harvard academic Robert Langdon, who discovers evidence of the resurgence of an ancient secret brotherhood called the Illuminati - the most powerful underground organization in history.

When Langdon finds evidence that the Illuminati have stolen antimatter from a secret laboratory at CERN, which they plan to use as a devastating weapon to destroy the Vatican, he and CERN scientist Vittoria Vetra begin a race against time to recover the antimatter and prevent catastrophe.

But what is antimatter? Is it real? Is it dangerous? What is CERN? Find the answers to those questions and much more here.

On 4 July 2012, as a curtain raiser to the year’s major particle physics conference, ICHEP 2012 in Melbourne, the ATLAS and CMS experiments present their latest preliminary results in the search for the long-sought Higgs particle. Both experiments have observed a new particle in the mass region around 125-126 GeV. 

The next step is to determine the precise nature of the particle and its significance for our understanding of the universe. Are its properties as expected for the long-sought Higgs boson, the final missing ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics? Or is it something more exotic? The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them. All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4% of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the universe that remains obscure.

Explore the resources prepared for press.

ATLAS records collisions at 7 TeV centre-of-mass energy for the first time.

Particle physicists around the world anticipate a rich harvest of new physics as the LHC begins its first long run at an energy three and a half times higher than previously achieved at a particle accelerator.

Explore the resources prepared for press.

CERN celebrated its 50th anniversary in style, with the inauguration of the Globe of Science and Innovation (pictured, under construction) on 19 October. A gift from the Swiss Confederation, the Globe is an iconic wooden structure first used for the Swiss national exhibition in 2002 as a pavilion dedicated to the theme of sustainable development. It was designed by architects Thomas Büchi and Hervé Dessimoz of Geneva. The Globe is being developed into a new visitor and networking centre for the Laboratory — a focal point for CERN’s interaction with society.

The inauguration of the Globe in 2004 coincided with the official celebration of CERN’s anniversary, attended by representatives of the Organization’s 20 member states including the heads of state of France, Spain and Switzerland.

Check out the website that contains a record of the activities that marked the Organization’s 50th Anniversary.

At 10.28am on 10 September 2008 a beam of protons is successfully steered around the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for the first time. The machine is ready to embark on a new era of discovery at the high-energy frontier.

LHC experiments address questions such as what gives matter its mass, what the invisible 96% of the universe is made of, why nature prefers matter to antimatter and how matter evolved from the first instants of the universe’s existence.

Explore the resources prepared for press.