The birthplace of the World Wide Web turns 50

This undated handout picture released by the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) shows a Large Iron Collider Experiment, dubbed ALICE, a 24-meter-high cavern which houses an enormous, tube-shaped magnet that weighs as much as the Eiffel tower and used to contain and monitor the man-made Big-Bang, at a underground laboratory under the French Swiss border, in Saint Genis. PHOTO: AFP

Spain's King Juan Carlos and France's President Jacques Chirac were among representatives of the 20 member nations attending ceremonies commemorating the founding of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, which goes by its original French initials, CERN.

"When the 12 founding member states ratified the CERN convention Sept. 29, 1954, they gave the new organisation a mission to provide first class facilities, to coordinate fundamental research in particle physics and to help reunite the countries of Europe after two world wars," said CERN's Director-General Robert Aymar.

After the U.S. Congress pulled the plug on the construction in Texas of the proposed Super-conducting Super Collider in 1993, CERN became the focus of much of the world's research into matter and into understanding the origins of the universe.

Many scientists from the United States, which still has major rival laboratories, are among the hundreds of physicists who take turns conducting experiments with the particle accelerators underground on the French-Swiss border in Geneva.

Other observer nations whose physicists work at CERN include India, Israel, Japan, Russia and Turkey.

CERN scientists won the Nobel physics prize in 1984 for the discovery of two subatomic particles and in 1992 for the development of a new way to track particles.

In 1990, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN when he proposed a way of linking related pieces of information across the Internet in what became the World Wide Web.

The CERN member states are Austria, Belgium, Britain, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.