1954: No big bang preceded the birth of CERN, on the French-Swiss border near Geneva. Rather, 12 original member states ratified its establishment and work got under way

1957: The 600 MeV Synchrocyclotron (known as SC to her friends) became CERN’s first accelerator. The groundbreaking machine then faithfully provided beams for the next 33 years

1971: Smashing protons is nothing new for CERN scientists. They switched on the world’s first proton-proton collider in January, racing particles around a 300m-diameter track

1973: Experiments in the Gargamelle bubble chamber revealed the existence of neutral currents for the first time. These helped to explain the ways in which particles interact

1976: The centre created its first giant ring: the Super Proton Synchrotron. This accelerated protons around 7km of tunnel. Particles crossing the French-Swiss border for the first time did not require passports

1984: The discovery of W and Z particles brought Carlo Rubbia and Simon Van der Meer a Nobel Prize for Physics. This was the first medal for CERN but not the last

1989: Tim Berners-Lee, a CERN scientist, came up with the germs of the world wide web in order to help his colleagues to share information. “Vague but exciting,” wrote his supervisor. By 1994, CERN had taken it public

1995: A CERN team produced nine atoms of antihydrogen. Each lasted only forty billionths of a second, but that was long enough to provide new insights into antimatter

2007: Hollywood came to call when Ron Howard visited the centre to research Angels and Demons. Tom Hanks and the Illuminati would pop up in later trips

2009: On September 10, 2008, we held our breath as the Large Hadron Collider hummed into life. Some flawed soldering brought it to a halt but now the world is watching and waiting again …

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