CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics centre. It sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.

CERN is a laboratory where scientists unite to study the building blocks of matter and the forces that hold them together. CERN exists primarily to provide them with the necessary tools. These are accelerators, which accelerate particles to almost the speed of light and detectors to make the particles visible.

Founded in 1954, the laboratory was one of Europe's first joint ventures and includes now 20 Member States.

Scientists have found that everything in the Universe is made up from a small number of basic building blocks called elementary particles, governed by a few fundamental forces.

Some of these particles are stable and form the normal matter, the others live for fractions of a second and then decay to the stable ones. All of them coexisted for a few instants after the Big Bang.

Since then, only the enormous concentration of energy that can be reached in an accelerator at CERN can bring them back to life. Therefore, studying particle collisions is like "looking back in time", recreating the environment present at the origin of our Universe.

What for? To understand the formation of stars, earth, trees, everything you see around and, finally, us!