The organization wants to track down the origin of the universe. It celebrates its 70th birthday on September 29.

The name Cern is an abbreviation of the French name of the organization: Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research). Around 2,500 people work directly at Cern, while the collaborations with physicists around the world who analyze data comprise more than 17,000 people. Cern has 24 member countries, including Germany, which is by far the largest donor.

Some inventions developed at Cern:

Web and surfing

The founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, gives a speech during an event to mark 30 years of the World Wide Web at CERN. © Coffrini/AFP POOL/Keystone/dpa

In 1989, the British physicist and computer scientist Timothy John Berners-Lee presented an idea at Cern that would prove to be groundbreaking for Internet communication: a digital information network in which content is prepared as universal hypertext and networked with clickable links. Berners-Lee developed the necessary components within a few months: URLs such as info.cern.ch for web addresses, the page description language HTML for web pages, the technical protocol HTTP for links and the concept for a web browser.

In April 1993, Cern made the program code of the World Wide Web (WWW) available to the public, thus launching an unprecedented triumphant run for web technology.

Danish engineer Bent Stumpe developed the forerunners of two other applications commonly used today at Cern back in the 1970s: He presented the first transparent touchscreen, on which - as with any smartphone or tablet today - touching the screen is enough to move things around. Using bowling balls, he built a tracking ball that could be used to move a cursor on the screen - a forerunner of the computer mouse.

Medicine and diagnostics

Cern is researching what happened in the first few seconds after the Big Bang, the birth of the universe. Whether there are even smaller particles than quarks and what antimatter is all about. To simulate the state immediately after the Big Bang, Cern has built the LHC particle accelerator. Protons or ions are brought to collision at high energy in a 27-kilometre-long, ring-shaped tunnel 100 meters underground in the Swiss-French border region.

Detectors measure which particles are produced. This technology is also used in medicine. In a PET scan, photons are measured, as in Cern detectors, which visualize cells or tissue that consume a lot of energy, including inflamed or tumour tissue. It differs from other imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which images tissue, organs and bones. A PET scan (PET stands for positron emission tomography) uses very little and practically harmless contrast medium.

In addition to diagnoses, treatments have also emerged from Cern inventions: At the Heidelberg Ion Beam Therapy Centre (HIT), for example, tumors in cancer patients have been irradiated with heavy ions and protons since 2009, which can destroy tumors deep in the body while sparing surrounding healthy tissue. This is particularly important for tumors in sensitive areas such as the base of the skull or the optic nerve.