1954: foundations for European science

At the end of the Second World War, European science was no longer the crème de la crème. Following the example of the now mushrooming international organizations, a handful of visionary scientists imagined creating a European atomic physics laboratory. Raoul Dautry, Pierre Auger and Lew Kowarski in France, Edoardo Amaldi in Italy and Niels Bohr in Denmark were among these pioneers. Such a laboratory would not only unite European scientists but also allow them to share the increasing costs of nuclear physics facilities.

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CERN Is Founded (1954)
Abbreviated as CERN after the original French name, the European Organization for Nuclear Research is the world's largest particle physics laboratory. CERN's activities are sponsored by 20 European countries. It was there that the World Wide Web—developed to promote scientific collaboration by facilitating information sharing—was invented in the 1990s. CERN's latest project, the Large Hadron Collider, is, among other things, being used to discover the hypothesized Higgs boson,