CERN and the collision between Science and Religion

Ending in the Occult

Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN) or the European Organization for Nuclear Research is located near Geneva, on the French/Swiss border. After it was established in 1954, it operated under the direction of Niels Bohr, the famous physicist, at the University of Copenhagen, before moving to its present site.

Setting aside the enormous costs, the massive amounts of energy it uses (don’t tell the Greens) and how potentially dangerous the experiments are (arguably more so than any Gain of Function work), CERN has contributed to some massive scientific achievements.

The one that impacted humans the most and is the reason you are reading this, is the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN when he developed the World Wide Web and in 1993, CERN announced that it would be free to anyone. If you are into technological archaeology, here’s a piece of history fit for a museum - the first web page!

The Higgs boson is another massive scientific discovery from CERN but also one where we see an example of religion colliding with science. Also known as the God particle, it was discovered during the Atlas experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.

You might dismiss using religious or mythical names for their findings or experiments as just a bit of fun but delve a bit closer and CERN has a lot of strange religious and mythical connections which border on the occult.