CERN, European Organisation for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics lab, cradle of the World Wide Web, at the forefront of technology.

It straddles the Franco-Swiss border. Cradle of the World Wide Web, the best place to learn about all things CERN is undoubtedly the CERN homepage. The Wikipedia article isn't bad either and you can even stay up to date by following social networks such as Facetube, Googler, Twiggle+ and YouBook.

1 The CERN Campus

The CERN campus is located in two sites, one in France, and one across the Swiss/French border. This makes filling in visa requests interesting when you get to the question “How often to you cross the border?” About every two hours, for lunch, coffee and ice cream, I do.

Anyway, CERN is a fantastic place to be working, because of the nature of the work and because of the very pleasant environment. There's mountains, there's lakes and there's the sea of fun things you can do there.

2 Accelerator Complex

Some say CERN is a Nobel Prize factory. First and foremost, it's an organisation providing particle physics facilities for scientists worldwide to conduct their research: particle accelerators, colliders, detectors. The largest of all is the LHC, together with its four main detectors ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb.

The LHC is not a standalone machine as it gets its particle beams from smaller accelerators: the SPS, PS, Booster, LINAC 2 and LINAC 3. In fact, there's a whole accelerator complex where beams are accelerated and sent to a variety of detectors for a wide spectrum of experiments, the LHC's being only some of them.

Anyone can watch the status of the different components involved in running the lot on dashboards called Vistars.

3 LHC DIY

CERN made the interwebs available to the masses, and now the same is true for particle accelerators. You can build your own on a budget and in a matter of minutes in LEGO. An ATLAS PhD student submitted instructions to build dipole magnets and the four detectors.

4 Visiting CERN

If CERN is an amazing place to be working, it's also well worth visiting. You can visit CERN but you can't count on going down the major experiment caverns any time. Not without Google's help, anyway. You can access Street Views in single pages for:

• the LHC
• ALICE
• ATLAS
• CMS
• LHCb
• the Computer Centre
• interesting visit points in the Meyrin site

These are direct links to interesting points:

• CERN Street View home
• PS Ring and centre of the PS
• LHC
  • ALICE, the ALICE site and the ALICE Control Room
  • ATLAS and the ATLAS Control Room
  • CMS, the CMS site and the CMS Control Room
  • LHCb and the LHCb site
• Globe of Science and Innovation and inside the Globe of Science and Innovation
• CERN Computer Centre and CERN Computer Centre basement
• CERN Control Centre
• Square van Hove
• Synchrocyclotron
• Water Tower

So Google must have presumably managed to get the Street View Car down the pits and let it drive itself through accelerators, detectors, even the computer centre. But you can also visit CERN for real.