Finding the heavenly key

Cern was founded in 1954 by 12 states, including Switzerland, and now has 20 member states.The World Wide Web began as a project of the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, initiated by British expert Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. Cern is based in Geneva.

Around 6,500 scientists - roughly half the planet's particle physicists - from around 500 institutes and universities have access to Cern. Cern is currently building the Large Hadron Collider, to become operational in 2008. Costing SFr3 billion (1,9 billion EUR), it will be the world's most powerful particle accelerator and is likely to change our fundamental knowledge of the universe.

Researchers are trying to find some answers to the climate change at the moment. A new cutting-edge experiment aims to discover how exactly cosmic rays and the Sun may influence the formation of low-level clouds, and possibly climate change. «We want to reproduce what happens in the atmosphere,» said Jasper Kirkby, leader of the Cern Cloud team to swissinfo in November 2006. «We want to understand how you could get from a cosmic ray to a cloud droplet, and in which parts of the atmosphere this could be occurring.»
The Cloud project involves an interdisciplinary team from 18 institutes and 9 countries in Europe and the United States. These institutions include Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute, the California Institute of Technology and Germany's Max-Planck Institutes. The experiment brings together atmospheric physicists, solar physicists, and cosmic ray and particle physicists. It is also the first time a high energy physics accelerator has been used for atmospheric and climate science. (swissinfo, July 16, 2007)