Who the heck is CERN anyway?
In 1952, eleven European countries came together to form the European Council for Nuclear Research (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire in French, which gave it the acronym CERN). Two years later in 1954 it was renamed the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which would’ve given it the French name of Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire or the acronym OERN). Nobody liked “OERN”, so the acronym CERN stuck. If CERN sounds familiar to you even before this whole LHC business got started, that’s because the World Wide Web was started by CERN employees Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau (See: 10 Things You Should Know About the Internet) 6. How much does it cost, and who’s paying for it? The Large Hadron Collider is nearly 30 years in the making – and costs the member countries of CERN and other participating countries an estimated €4.6 billion (about US$ 6.4 billion). Like those late night infomercials, however, we can say “but that’s not all!” Extra thi
